Small Things makes me truly understand that the film making is a rigorous process which needs multiple support, in this studio I learned a lot of professional knowledge which I’ve never learned before, I feel so so appreciate. In this studio I try to operate big and professional cameras in my first time, and fortunately I got the skill of operate them and setting the tripod, though these seemingly simple things took me a lot of time to get started. It’s also my very first time to try to do the work of audio, and I found it very interesting! As the sound is important for film making, the skill of recording is necessary for a film maker, I am glad to have this skill. Moreover I learned a basic light setting skill which is called 3 point light, this one is basic and useful for all the shooting scenes, I would like to use it for my future shooting work as well. I also learned a lot of skills of film editing in Small Things. Paul taught us a brand new way to order the footage and audio, which to create more bins to classify the sources, and this way really helped me to increase my efficiency. Moreover, the trick of “Merge” also makes my editing work, especially edit both video & audio more efficient. Those new skills are all precious for my developments. Lastly I am so appreciate that I have the experience of teamwork, It gives me the chance to learn how to negotiate with others and makes me truely understand the meaning of teamwork.
Reflection
For the final project, our team actually did a lot of preparation, in this stage I experienced many new things and it was my first time to do a film production in a very formal way. We did the actors casting online, discussed the budget for having actors, costume, make up & the small props we gonna use and even we tried to connect the circus for shooting permission. As its was my first time to participated in it, this brand new experience made me feel excited and nervous, however our team put all the effort on this preparation and we did it efficiently, which we did all the preparation in a right order — we firstly discussed the budget, then confirmed the actors, bought their costumes and props and finally negotiate the time to do the rehearsal. Thus for this brand new experience I realised that as a professional film maker or a film making team it is necessary to have a plan to tell you what things should be done before or what things could be done in the same time, this really helps to do the work efficiently and in my future I would willing to do my work in this way.
Then it’s my first time to practice my lighting skills and I really gained a lot from it. We chose a sunny afternoon to shoot so we didn’t think about to borrow a light panel, however while shooting I realised it was a big mistake — because the day light didn’t satisfy our requirements for lighting (we wanted a soft light), which the strong light always create a strong contrast on different side of face. In that case I tried to use the reflector to solve this problem. It’s my first time to play with reflector and compared to the LED light panels it’s much more difficult to control! As mentioned the strong light made a super dark shadow and big contrast on the face, so I used reflector to reflect sunlight to make the face brighter. The final effect looked as natural and soft as sunlight was drop on the face, which successfully made the dark side of face lit. However the reflector’s operation was very difficult, especially in outside — this completely required you to try different angles manually, and you need to face the sun to reflect, which is very glaring and making you difficult to check. Also when you needed to light to track people or change the reflecting object in the shooting, it would be much more harder to control, thus it required you to fully cooperate with the blocking of the object. Thus, after in class practices and practical operation I reflected a lot. Lighting is a super important and necessary part for shooting, even setting the position of the light is closely related to the final result. For example, in our work we wanna make the face looks soft, so we just strengthen the face side of the backlight. Also if we wanna make the atmosphere creepy and horrific, we can strengthen the shadow on face and the light of the lit side, which creates a big contrast. Moreover I think that we have to always try to set up three point lighting first in every future shooting work, and try not to break the lighting rule without special lighting requirements. I totally feel that every light is necessary from three point lighting and they indeed will make the footage look comfortable.
Additionally it’s my first time to play lights, the lighting work for this assignment is not as good as I thought, however I believe I could do it better with more practices in the future!
For this shooting, we unfortunately made same mistakes which I mentioned at my previous refection, however I still appreciate that I learned more new skills because of those mistakes. Our first mistake is found at the rough cut editing process, I found that a lot of footages are losing focus, overexposure and shoot some things we didn’t want in the frame, and the most disappointed thing is that we didn’t have more back up footages. Since the whole shooting work was done by Nelson, he was holding the camera all the time and didn’t ask us to check the footage, so we all had to trust him and then doing our own jobs, however I realised it’s totally wrong! When we finally can check the footage we found that Nelson didn’t do a good job at shooting, which caused the problem I mentioned above and we had to do more extra editing work to fix it. Also he did’t upload the footage on time seriously affected the progress of the editing. Due to this mistake, I learned a some new skills on editing, like tracking and masking, which is using part colour grading to fix the overexposure or darken some details, this new skill would make my future colour grading more detailed and make video looks closer to perfection. Also the most important thing I realised is never forget to copy, don’t just trust one person to do it, you should always have a copy in your hand!!! The second mistake is we don’t have the sound of clapping. The clapping job was supposed to be done by Melody, but she was late for over an hour, which caused we don’t have any clapping sound in both our footage & video in our previous footage. After Melody came we stated to clap, however we still misunderstood the function of clapping — we always kept rolling both sound and video after every take. Thus I couldn’t do the merge, I had to manually combine the audio and video, this increased the difficulty of editing. Now I totally realised how important the clap is, in my future I promise I will never ever forget to do clapping at every shot!
For collaboration
Looking through my whole semester, in the previous in class shooting practices, the group used to waste a lot of shooting time a few times because we didn’t arrange well each group members job, I think it was the problem caused by improper communication in collaboration. As a team, I realised that it’s necessary to listen others ideas or opinions, and it is better to negotiate with others than just sticking to your own opinions when there is divergence. A team with a harmonious atmosphere will always be efficient! Also, sometimes it is not a good idea to seek for a fully average division of work, as a team to achieve a good result it is totally fine to make a little sacrifice or work a little bit more! Thus a smart division of work is much more better, which can let people to do the part he/she feels most confident or best.
Compared with the last semester’s studio, small things required more homework and self research, thus to deal with those works I have to make adjust of my studying time, however I think I still did a good job at time arrangement. For example, sometimes Paul would leave us some homework at Monday or Wednesday, the I would finish them on that day, otherwise I may forget the knowledge which be taught on class over the time. Also, as every assignment includes the reflection, I will record my thoughts and reflections after every in class shooting practice, or directly finish the reflection for the practice. In this way to do my assignment will make my work more efficient and express my thoughts more intuitively.