I have trouble with giving direction. This occurred to me during the class activity where we were asked to create a three shot sequence of a person doing an action. My actions were to walk down a hallway, stop to tie a shoelace and keep walking. I shot each of these three shots once and we all moved on. My other classmates shot one image up to 12 times. I wasn’t satisfied with what I had, but I accepted that it would be easier to try to edit it than to ask the actor to do the take again. This is a problem! I’m struggling to apply the “camera on, world off” mentality because my mind keeps wandering to what the rest of my group think of the shot, or if I’m taking up too much time or being bossy. Beyonce said “I’m not bossy, I’m the boss” and I need to remind myself that when it’s my turn behind the camera I need to make the most of it.

I wrote my last post on my fear of approaching other for collaboration and how I wanted to absolve that in this studio, but in retrospect, I think that there is something really exciting about designing, shooting and editing a sequence all on your own. I love the ‘collaborative nature of filmmaking’ (a sentence I stole from a media and comms alumni that I dropped during my interview to get into this course), but part of me thinks I need to make something I can be proud of on my own.
The last realisation I’ve had is that I have no idea what is good and what is bad in this class. The cat video felt sloppy to me; there was incontinuity because of the shadows, the rendering was low and after secretly watching other class submissions I felt uncreative in my approach. However it was met with praise and I was a bit stunned.
In the ‘making the bed’ assignment, I tried not to think about what I did or didn’t do in the cat video. There’s less structure to the action so it was harder to storyboard for me. After I had exported the final cut, I rewatched and found unconscious similarities between the video (aside from my outfit) which I found interesting.

Make the Bed

Feed The Cat