Week 8 Exercises – Exposure Differentials (Exercises 5&8)
The exercise that my group did this week was honestly one of the most difficult I’ve had to do as of yet, and not because of some technical difficulty or challenge inherent in the prompt – but because I was in front of the camera. I legitimately found it difficult to step back and let the behind-camera crew of my group work out how to shoot the scene and not try to be too insistent on my own ideas. I honestly got pretty frustrated with not being able to just do things myself, but honestly in the end I think the group did a decent job of tackling the challenge of dealing with the exposure differential of two very different locations in one scene. The shots themselves are somewhat well framed and they cut together mostly pretty fine – there’s nothing incredible here but the task has at least been accomplished – perhaps I shouldn’t have been so skeptical and then I could have comfortably sat in front of the camera and let everyone else deal with the technical component.
I also think the other groups video (exercise 8) turned out pretty well – with some great choices in camera operation, framing and coverage (mostly). However I’m not so convinced that the challenge set by this exercise was explicitly met, as the outside of the building is very clearly quite severely over exposed. As discussed in class this could have been amended by stopping down on the camera and doing more to light the exterior scene, but everything considered I think that again they’ve done a great job.
Both of these exercises were quite similar but had a slightly different approach which warranted unique challenges to both. In the case of exercise 5, the script warranted there being one character in direct sunlight, while the others would be in shade – making matching these exposures critical because without this the scene itself wouldn’t really work. Whereas with exercise 8 both characters existed in the same space at any given time, which in a way would have allowed more freedom in the approach as it wasn’t quite as important that both exposure areas be perfect – only one of the two (which is of course what happened). So for exercise 8 the challenge really was to just bring up the level of the interior so that the exterior wouldn’t be over, which the group who did this exercise haven’t quite managed to do unfortunately.
Both exercises were informative in different ways to me, and definitely will make me consider more closely how exactly to deal with this type of scenario when it inevitably presents itself to me in the future.