After a period of heavy delays, some other travellers and I were waiting at the tram stop. A fair pack of us had accumulated since no trams had come through for about half an hour. Among us was a group of about 3-4 men who looked around 40. I suspected these men of being undercover ticket inspectors. This concerned me as I currently had no money on my myki and there was nowhere to top up at this particular tram stop. Nonetheless, when the tram came, I, and all the other commuters, hopped aboard.

After we’d travelled one stop the group of men began to split up to different areas of the tram. I watched them intently. They began pulling badges out. This spurred myself, and about three or so others, to look around nervously and hop off at the next stop. This stop was about 400 metres past the one we were initially waiting at, and all of us who got off the first tram stood waiting there for the next one, so we’d all clearly left the tram to avoid having our tickets checked. It amused me that nobody really acknowledged that we’d all gotten off to fare evade, but we all must have knew it personally. I considered making a joke but I felt that it would have ruined the atmosphere.

I think there’s probably a french word for when things like this happen.

At about 3am on Friday night I was walking through the city to my tram stop to get home. It was cold and windy and I was in a hurry because I was very sleepy and I didn’t want to get sick. As I walked down Swanston Street, I passed a gay couple having a fight. I knew they were a couple because I’d seen them in a bar I was in earlier. The taller one was accusing the shorter one of doing drugs with someone else in the club they’d been at. The small one conceded that yes, he had, but was it really an issue? It was apparently an issue of trust.

I kept walking and I found out my tram wasn’t coming for 25 minutes, so I went to get some pizza while I waited. As I sat at the tram stop, shivering and eating my pizza, a homeless woman approached me and asked me for some change. I gave her some money because it was very cold. She didn’t say ‘thank you’, just ‘God bless.’ Initially this made me a cross and I considered her to be kind of rude, but then I realised that it wasn’t that she wasn’t grateful, she just used a different phrase to express it.

I fell asleep on the tram home and luckily someone woke me up a couple of stops before mine. He pointed to my Doc Martens.

‘Doc Martens.’
‘Yeah, they’re pretty comfy’
‘Whatcha wear them for?’
‘Huh? Oh, they’re just the only shoes I really have.’
‘Oh, so you just wear them as shoes?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Ah, that’s cool. Just that some people wear them for… Other reasons.’
‘What? Oh, I’m not a skinhead?’
‘Ah ok. I used to be a skinhead.’

I got off the tram and went home to bed.

For my second individual exercise, I chose to interview a group of skaters outside the State Library. This was in part because of its proximity to Uni, and in part because I was interested to work with a subject matter that typically ignored conventions and formal approaches.

I made my interview almost deliberately lo-fi. By this I don’t mean I sabotaged things like audio and visual quality, but rather made ‘mistakes’ which come across as amateur. Close to the end of the interview, I fiddled with the exposure ring on the side of the camera to make the image pitch black, and then slightly overexposed. This was a sort of homage to skate videos and non-professional production in general. I also shot the interview handheld, from a sitting position, and had the subjects stand in front of me. My framing of the three of them was lax and I jumped from one subject to another.

I zoomed in on several different aspects at seemingly random points in the video, but I wanted to gauge reactions up close. When I implied that city skaters were pretty untalented, I zoomed in on the main skater of the group I was talking to to get a facial expression. He didn’t look happy at the statement. This expression was only on his face for a second or two, and without the closeup it would have gone unnoticed by me, and presumably the viewer.

I don’t remember its name but the vox pop we watched in class regarding the elections in Cuba (?) was an inspiration for this approach – the way the camera went from one subject to another effortlessly and suddenly was unlike any interview I’d seen before. It had very little regard for convention, and as soon as it was satisfied with the answer it was given, it darted across to the next subject. My occasionally frenetic camera movements in this interview drew inspiration from this clip. I shot the whole interview in one take unintentionally – I originally planned to cut but the whole thing flowed very well so I kept the camera rolling and everything seemed to work out.

I’m very pleased with the final product. I think the fact that I was interviewing young street skaters allowed me slightly more freedom in my creativity. Things like quick pans and zooms, unfocused cameras, and choppy sound are all at home in this world of more lo-fi filmmaking.

I chose to take my 50 second shots in the nice green courtyard-esque area in between Buildings 9 and 13. I like this area because it’s quite picturesque – the patterns of the brick buildings and the symmetry and lines all make it quite a pretty area. I was also interested in shooting a quiet area; rather than a busy street or hallway I wanted to let the action in the frame be more scarce and secluded, because it makes it feel more important to me. A shot of dozens of people walking by each other has no clear focus, but when certain people or things are more isolated in a shot, it assigns them with greater value.

I shot my first take from about halfway down the courtyard, and aimed it at the large arch entrance. I started my 50 seconds when I did because 3 interesting pieces of action all occurred around then: two lights on the second floor turned on, a large horn sounded, and a man on the phone made his way into the arch, which he occupies for the remainder of the shot. The silhouette of the man in the arch is undeniably the focal point of the frame, and I think his character is very nice aesthetically in context of the rest of the shot.

For the second, I wanted a wider scope, to see more of the courtyard, while still focusing on the arch. I like my framing but in review could angle the camera down a bit more to remove the overexposed cloudy sky. One of the big small things about this shot I like is the motion of the traffic through the arch. I started the 50 seconds when I did because a bus moved through that space and I found it particularly eye catching. I like that the frame starts with one person in it, then two more move into it, and then finally one more, until eventually they all exit. I ended the 50 seconds after the frame was empty of people since it felt like the action we were viewing was their walk across and out of the courtyard.

PS – why do students at RMIT, the most media heavy Uni, still not know camera etiquette? if someone’s shooting, obviously don’t grin into the camera.

On the tram this morning I listened to a woman on the phone to an unknown person complaining about a streaming service she had recently tried out. It took her about 10 minutes to air all of her grievances about the app, which had reportedly stolen her money. I couldn’t hear the other end, but they must have made an inflammatory remark because after the initial rant, the woman delved back into her rage but this time directed it at technology in general. She lashed out at: the internet as a whole, smartphones, Facebook, video games, and video calls.  I wonder what made her so utterly disillusioned with all forms of modern technology. If she was older I could understand, but she only looked about 35-40. It turned out she was on her way home from an overnight shift at a hospital near me, so potentially her attitude was due to the fact that she was exhausted. After she hung up the phone she put in headphones and almost fell asleep, but came to with a start just at her stop. She looked more than slightly disoriented.

note – i have collected these observations on my phone as rough drafts over the last 2 weeks. i’m just typing them up properly now, all at once. in future i’ll try to update more regularly.

I was coming back from some late night grocery shopping around 11pm and saw my neighbour, an elderly lady, on her porch, crouching down. Her big black dog was standing beside her. As I watched, I noticed she was reading a magazine. She seemed invested in whatever it was that she was reading by the horrible light of a distant streetlamp, and I wondered what in a magazine could be such important information that she had to read it right away, out in the cold, when her warm house was steps away? I remembered that in the past I’ve seen her snooping around neighbours’ letterboxes after dark as well. Something is very odd about this lady.

As I walked past her house she sighed, stood up, and walked in. Her dog followed her. That set me at ease slightly, but it was still disconcerting that she went inside directly as I walked by.

I watched a busker for about half an hour. Not because he was good (he was quite bad) but because I was sitting in the only warm part of the cafe and that was all I really had to look at. He was wearing a big rasta-type beanie and had red hair. He was one of the buskers who tries to sell their homemade CDs which no one ever buys. He dedicated a song to a girl walking past who, unsurprisingly, continued walking. I think he was a bit hurt by that because after the song was done he had a little break and then started playing a slower, sadder song.

Someone came by after a while and bought on of his CDs. The busker looked as though he had just received news that he was going to be a father. He was blushing and beaming. Maybe he thought he wasn’t very good.

saw a man telling his dog charlie to shut up and stop being a dickhead. i did my shopping and charlie was barking as i walked out of the supermarket. the dude was not happy. he had on a big hat that was probably oversized and his jacket was also probably too big for him. he looked upset with charlie the dog and at the very end of his tether. when he told the dog to stop being a dickhead i wondered if this usually worked. perhaps he swore so much that the charlie now recognised the word dickhead as a command to stop. but charlie seemed more irate and continued barking, presumably out of spite.

the man gave up and looked close to tears and i wondered what specific investment he had in the dog’s barking. it was annoying, obviously, but it wouldn’t make me cry unless he did it for days on end. perhaps charlie had been barking for days on end. i would call a dog a dickhead if it was barking for days on end. i’d probably call a dog a dickhead if it was barking for about 10 minutes, but i don’t like dogs. presumably this guy liked dogs, because he had one. maybe it wasn’t his dog and that’s why he was so upset about the whole thing. it would be understandable to get mad if he was minding somebody else’s dog as a special favour and the dog was giving him nothing but grief. 

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B4n5E5A7Upf0bnBlZXBEeUw3Tms

So, after a long (but not long enough) thirteen weeks, The Scene In Cinema draws to a close. I’ve learnt a lot. But, five or so weeks ago I set out to discover what I could about the act of “re-framing” a shot. I wanted to know what possibilities it allowed access to in the coverage of a scene, what its strengths and drawbacks were, and how it could be most effectively utilised. I’ll start at the start, and try to answer all of those questions in this post.

Firstly: what is re-framing? Re-framing is the act of creating multiple distinct frames in a single shot by altering the position of the camera or subjects. As opposed to cutting in between these two frames (cut-framing), as a more orthodox coverage would tend towards, re-framing moves the actors or camera, and retains this movement as a part of the shot without cutting. The frames are the same, but the way they are achieved is incomparable. A re-framing coverage can be so precise and decisive in its movement between frames that it can be hard to tell that it has not in fact cut, or it can flow more slowly between frames. The former is often employed for a tighter coverage, a scene in a small room or with otherwise restricted space, for example the scene viewed from The Night Train. The latter tends to be in larger spaces with more room for both actors and camera to move, for example the scene viewed from Return of the Prodigal Son.

In my exploration, a main part of my focus was the creative possibilities that were allowed by re-framing which weren’t as natural or available with a cut-frame coverage. While I explored this question specifically in my second experiment, it was inherently underlying all three of my experiments, simply because filming a scene using re-framing is a conscious decision to avoid a cut-frame coverage. In my second exercise, I filmed the same scene with the same frames twice – once moving between the frames, and once cutting between them. I deliberately intended for the cut-frame coverage to be jarring and not technically well constructed, not to imply its inferiority, but to demonstrate that if a director has a certain set of frames in mind but they don’t necessarily flow well together by cutting them, a re-framing approach may allow him/her to include all of these frames in the scene’s coverage while not making the scene visually unappealing.

Naturally, the biggest different between re-framing and cut-framing is the time in between the frames. In cut-framing, the two shots follow each other instantaneously, but there is some slack in re-framing. So it therefore becomes necessary, when looking at the difference between these two, to look at what this ‘dead space’ as it were can contribute. I think my first and third exercises provide good answers to this query. In my first experiment, the hesitance of the camera mirrors the hesitance of Matt’s character, and it follows him as he moves unsurely around the space. These ‘microframes’, fleeting frames born out of reluctance, give a great depth to the scene. After he walks away, the camera assumes a frame with Matt on its left side, looking to the right, but it almost immediately reverses and places him on the right hand side as Luke steps in to occupy the left. In my third exercise, two moments I think are very representative of the strengths of re-framing occur in the second half. First, when Luke gets out of his chair to go to cry against the wall. When one character leaves the frame, a decision has to be made whether to follow that character or to linger on the remaining character/s. I followed Luke, and because it’s a re-framing coverage, the decision is felt and has more impact because the move is taken with the character. The second moment is when Luke walks to the back of the frame. This is a slow and subtle re-framing, and one example of the actual period of re-framing being as important as the frames themselves.

But re-framing is hard. And it’s dangerous. To shoot a scene in this way is to put all of your proverbial eggs in a single basket. If something goes wrong, it ruins not one shot but a whole scene, or at least what would be multiple shots in a cut-framing coverage. Look no further than my third exercise. For some reason, I wasn’t shooting with audio. Although Matt’s shots were all fine and sounded good, but my scene, my single one shot that I took, was mute. This represents my basket dropping and not only breaking the eggs, but it falls on the expensive camera I was borrowing from Uni. Thankfully it was only an experiment, but it’s just as likely to happen in the ‘real world’. 

Re-framing, as I now understand it, is a technique which, if used correctly, can enhance a scene both aesthetically and objectively – it can add elements which increase its depth, its intrigue, and its value as a scene. It offers a way to shoot the unshootable, a way to involve characters more, and countless more artistic opportunities. It does, however, need to be handled by a very skilled director who is aware of the challenges it presents. I think that’s me.

I’ve already written about how good it’s been having Matt and Luke around so we can all help each other out as we get to the pointy end of the semester. But I think it’s interesting to think about how I personally work with others. I think I’m a fairly friendly and outgoing person, so from that perspective I enjoy collaborative exercises. Especially when it’s for activities like learning about a certain feature of the camera, or shooting a certain type of scene so we all have the same goal; to learn one specific thing. I think I really flourish in that environment because I’m able to get along with people and discuss things with them.

I find that collaborating on a personal project is far different to collaborating on group project. By that I mean that if I have a scene that I need to shoot for myself, and I have people who I’m in charge with, the collaborative process is obviously much different to a group where everyone is trying to do the same thing. I think it’s easier shooting a personal scene. People are generally ready to listen to you and help you achieve what you set out to do, while in a group with no clear leader everyone’s ideas technically hold equal weight so people are more willing to share theirs. This goes for me not only as a director, but as a helper. I’m more comfortable helping someone with a specific goal in mind than working with a bunch of people who have as many half-thought out ideas as me and are all trying to get theirs made.

I may have been slightly too harsh on group work. For the record, I found that most of the time when we did it this semester, it was helpful. An insight into collaborative filmmaking probably does need to begin with that style of crew. But I’m also glad we were able to go beyond that point and have designated directors to boss everyone around, because in my experience that’s how a crew works most effectively.