This semester I chose The Small Things Studio as my third semester. During this semester, I learned a lot of very useful and professional knowledge, such as how to set up a camera tripod, how to reset the camera’s exposure, white balance and how to choose the shooting angle and record video and audio. These studies have made me more aware of how behind-the-scenes shooting, editing and how the overall program should work. Let me have a deeper understanding and understanding of professional equipment and software. Teamwork is also a very important part of it. This semester I also learned how to express my ideas and purpose in a more professional language and way. Storyboards, audio recordings, shooting angles, and lighting positions are all necessary. I have learned more deeply in the study of this semester. In the editorial section, I am also more familiar with and proficient with the Adobe Premiere software. Through color grading, video editing and audio, background music exercises. I am more proficient and profound about Adobe Premiere.

After the whole study this semester, I learned a lot about how to be a professional editor. While in the first two weeks, we learned some basic things about the equipment such as how to set up the tripod, formate the camera and how to pack up the cable of the equipment. Those are all great practice before we start shooting. Even though they look really simple and boring, it not just what it looks like. These things are also needed to spend time on and practice. Meanwhile, I learned how to use the recorder to record audio. That makes me feel how important the sound trucks in the movie, as well as I found the interesting side of sound. This semester in RMIT is my first time to actually had a chance to write the script and think about a story to shoot and edit. I was really excited about this at the beginning. However, to make a video is much harder than I thought. Although it was not that easy to make it, I still very proud of my team. We were having fun with this work which I also very appreciate that I got this chance to practice my film making skills and team working ability.

First of all, we need to write down the storyboard about what we are going to shoot. Actually, we came up with a lot of idea at first but the inspiration of each of uses chosen movies. But while the ideas keep coming up, we need to decide which one we will choose, so it is a little bit hard to decide. After that, Christian was mainly worked in casting and find the location which is his house. We’ve got two characters, one is Christian’s friend and another one is going through the casting. Christian and I mainly focused on shooting. At first, we were preparing to shoot at day time. But, we were having trouble with the exposure of the light, we adjusted several times but out is still doesn’t work. While we were trying to deal with the exposure, it was getting darker of the day, so that we decided to change the happening time tonight instead. This was the first time I directly take control of the camera, I was very worried about my shooting. How to find a better angle to shoot the scene. Personally, I mainly used Mid shoot to show the conversation between two characters or the action. I found it was better to show how the story goes on. Meanwhile, I also found it is great to use a low angle to show the character is frightened and helpless, cause our film is talking about a horror story which is revolved around a red bag. But I’m not only shooting but sometimes I also take a little bit control of the lighting. When we were shooting the scene of Sonya sleeping at the bed and heard the ring bell. I was standing back of her to light up her face. We took around over 10 times to shoot that scene until we found out that the tripod of my lights appears at every scene. That very bad mistake that we made during our shooting, as well as remind me next time need to have more conversation with my group members. The biggest problem, while we were shooting, was the overexposure of the background. We were trying to adjust the lighting lower, but everything couldn’t bee is seen after that. So this was very distressing for us. But we still need that scene so we have had to make it darker or delete it when we were editing our cuts.

Collaboration

Looking through the whole semester, I realized the corporation of a team is very important, and I’ve learned many skills from class. As a team, I think we need to talk with each other more for further work. From the class, I deeply learned more about Adobe premiere and get to use it better and practiced. Every week, Paul gives us homework to practice what we learned every week so that we can have a review of the whole week instead of forgetting it. Which helped me study better. Compare with the studio of last semester, this semester I practiced more and got more chance to open mind and creative things that I like. I’m very thankful for everything I’ve learned and Paul of course.