At the blink of an eye, we now enter Week 6 of what seems to be an interesting journey. Recently, I’ve been looking into the works of award winning cinematographers and DOPs such as Philip Bloom and Gordon Willis. And I’ve been imagining all the different scenarios a cinematographer would go through in terms of communicating with the director. So for the past week or so, I’ve been training and pushing myself to step out of my comfort zone as a DP.  And at this point in time, I had developed a set of questions regarding my presentation on friday.

We started off the class with Robin and Paul discussing what we had to do during our presentation and we had to include in the time frame provided. They both had a presentation prepared to demonstrate the best way to come about presenting in front of an audience. I’ll be honest, I sometimes get nervous whenever i’m the center of attention! I did realise that Robin’s hands were slightly trembling towards the end of his presentation which is weird because he seemed to be doing a great job at presenting! Anyways, Robin allowed us sometime to reflect on the things we wanted to present on, something us as ‘aspiring filmmakers’ want to work and improve on. My desire of being a professional cinematographer keeps increasing every time I watch a film. So why not work on my weaknesses in film to improve and this is a great time to work on it since I’m being surrounded with people in the same field. Moving on, Robin put up all the works of my colleagues and I must say I see that 20% percent improvement Robin mentioned not too long ago. A few things I noticed that had gradually improved were the camera pacing techniques used in these exercises, actors & actresses are slowly getting comfortable in front of the camera, cinematic jump cuts of scenes were visually exciting. Comparing the works of the same students a few weeks ago and the present is remarkable. Just shows that practice makes one a better filmmaker.

Friday’s class was an interesting challenge that we faced. Robin discussed the concept of “Cheating the system in Film”. How manipulating the production design can benefit the DOP without having to effect a scene, better yet, to improve the setup of the scene. Made me look back and think of whether the films I’ve recently watched included “manipulated” camera plots that I didn’t notice? It’s possibility! When we were sent off to film our scene, I was the cinematographer and found it very challenging to maintain the exposure of my scenes. Either it was too bright or too noticeable that it was set up in a different location. Hence, that was another thing I needed to work on which is good to know.

Epiphany time!! After this week of self reflecting and analysing everyone’s work, I’ve come to a conclusion that I have plenty of wiggle room for creativity and development. I see so many people in my friends circle who tend to give up on something they enjoy doing, in sports, film or any hobby they take up; because of the fact that there are people doing a much better job than they are. One thing I’ll tell myself from now on everytime I’m working on a project is “Always give it your best shot”. Every project is a learning process, be it a day from now or 30 years down the road.