The exercise we completed in week seven as two relatively bigger groups was definitely a challenge, the added element of using a boom mic in conjunction with lighting made it a bit tricky. We tried playing around with which window we could use but inevitably had to choose one that we didn’t all love but made more practical sense to the scene as you could actually see people walking outside. For this activity I acted as a camera operator for one of the first times, which was really cool because I go to look at things through the lens and have some sort of say in the construction of the shots and where we should film.

I hadn’t worked with at least half of the group before this exercise, and initially I didn’t feel as if this was an issue but there was definitely a communication barrier between a few of us. Initially we tried to establish roles and set up the room for the shoot without using a light, but we ended up needing one and having to wait on getting it from the tech desk. This really effected the amount of time we had to shoot the scene and inevitably where in the room we got the shots from. Having the communication barrier really hindered our groups time progress as well, I guess it’s just how things are sometimes but it definitely taught me the importance to have someone play, I guess the hard role of keeping people in line. Because without it, on a limited time schedule it’s even more difficult to complete the task at hand. This is something small and probably self-explanatory, but nonetheless an important thing I will take away from this exercise into future projects I am involved with.

We decided to do a bit of a tracking/over the shoulder shot to start, purely because we thought it would be a good way to set the scene as we got to see a POV shot but also established the relationship between the two characters in the scene. Also it was just something a little bit different that we thought we’d have a go at, James ended up having to film it as I didn’t have the height to match eyelines with the actor, so I acted as a grip instead which was also super necessary for safety reasons. Some good feedback we got when reviewing the footage is that the eyelines matched, and despite the noticeable difference the lighting is good each individual shot. This was really great to hear because when we shot the different angles I was really unconfident in the shots I had taken, and was really focused on the fact the lighting didn’t match in each shot. So hearing this positive feedback made me feel a lot better, and realise I should probably try and focus a bit more on the positives than the negatives, because there’s always going to be room for improvement. And this is just another one of those cases, and its entirely why we do the class activities – to learn. So I feel like this activity was really beneficial not only to my technical abilities but also to my perception of myself and the work I put out/create.