Today in class we watched back our edited videos for exercise 3. It was really interesting seeing how another group approached the same script and constraints we were given.

The first exercise our group completed required us to shoot a number of shots capturing a conversation between two characters, one of which is looking out of a window. We had a great amount of difficult with both our lighting and framing of the scene, mostly as a result of the window.

The script Robin provided us with required us to shoot an over the shoulder shot of Adele looking out on to the street and outlined that “we see what she sees”. Due to the height of the window, it was a bit tricky to get much more of the street scene than we did in this shot. Looking at now, if I were to re-do this shot, I might have positioned Adele to be in the bottom left hand corner, right at the edge of the frame, so we could see a bit more of the view outside. I’m happy with the lighting we were able to achieve, as we’ve managed to get an exposure which shows the detail on both Adele and the view outside the window.

I’m really impressed with how well our group did in setting up this shot. We knew we wanted to have a shot which showed both Adele and Quinlin’s faces, but obviously we weren’t going to be able to get a camera outside the window shooting up as the the room was on the third floor of the building. So instead we decide to cheat the angle and have Adele hold her arm as though she was still leaning on the window sill. The more I look at this shot, the more I like the way the shadows fall on Adele and Quinlan’s faces. It feels soft and natural, as we were using the windows as our key light and the 1k as our fill, and I particularly like the way which the shadow is on the off side of her face, and emphasises her characters concern about her niece.

In terms of lighting, this shot was probably our weakest. Clearly the left side of the window is over exposed, as the sky and buildings in that part of the frame are completely blown out. However the rest of the frame seems to have been lit fairly well. Perhaps one solution that might have fixed this problem would have been to set up the frame a little tighter and further to the right, cutting out the overexposed part of the image and also giving Quinlin a little less headroom.

The second exercise we did involved shooting a short scene outdoors where two characters had to be standing in the shade while another sits in the sun. This was a challenge as we were using available light at midday, meaning that the shadows were constantly moving, and every time we thought we were ready to start recording, the lighting had changed again ever so slightly.

Darcey and Louise played the two characters who were meant to be standing in the shade within earshot of “Mullins”, aka Quinlin. This shot was taken after we had already shot the wide shot, by which time the shade had moved so there wasn’t any left on the corner of the building where we had been shooting. Although this shot doesn’t meet up to the requirements set out for us in the instructions, I still am happy with it for what it is. We managed to light both Louise and Darcey relatively well seeing as we were using available light at a time where the conditions were constantly changing and the only tool we had was a reflector.

The exercise also asked us to establish the space between Darcey and Louise’s characters and Quinlin’s character to create ambiguity about whether or not Quinlin is able to hear them talking about him. I liked the idea of placing the characters in opposite corners of the frame. You can see that by the tie we finally got this shot, there is only a small amount of shade left on Louise’s legs, however five minutes earlier when we first set it up, there was considerably more shade. Possibly we could have made Louise and Darcey stand right on the corner of the building so we could as much shade as possible, but attempting this shot was a good reminder of how quickly conditions change when you’re shooting outdoors.

From this angle, it looks a little more like Louise is the shade than the other two shots that we took. For this shot we again had to cheat it a little, by getting Louise and Darcey to stand closer together than they had been in the previous shot in order make sure we could see both of them. I like the way it reinforces the ambiguity about whether or not Mullins can hear them speaking.