On Friday, we didn’t have enough time to film everyone’s scene for our scene coverage exercise. We only managed to do four set ups. While enjoying the fresh approach of this new course, I feel like the lack of structure and routine within class times are preventing us from using our time efficiently for research and practical purposes.
It is now week 4 and we have not discussed the major assignments throughout the next few weeks. We need more information to begin planning whether we will choose to write an essay or research by practice.
And getting 40 minutes of practical exercise time out of a 3 hour class is not exactly efficient. Maybe we could have the 2 hour class time dedicated for reviews/lectures/theory/research tasks and the 3 hour classes mainly for practical group exercises. Or even setting group exercises outside of class times so that we actually have time to plan out something more sophisticated. I think if we just had a little more consistency and routine to the course, everyone will begin to find a good rhythm.
I mean it was very interesting and fascinating to see what we could achieve in 40 mins with 6 different scenes or shots, but we have been doing slightly different variations of the same exercise for 3 weeks now. And I feel like 5 mins each per exercise is just not enough time with the equipment or getting to know the roles properly. Those were excellent introductory exercises, but I am hoping for some more in depth explorations where we can actually investigate into the nature of the production roles and have enough opportunity to engage with them in practice as well as research, which seems to have not yet begun.
Epiphany:
The use of a black screen needs legitimate justifications. When we watch something, we tend to expect something visual to be happening every millisecond. As an audience, we are all very much conditioned by popular media to be constantly entertained, taken through an experience that we hardly do that work ourselves.
P.S. – I still do not know whether we are suppose to write 2 weekly reflections/epiphanies or 1 fortnightly one about both weeks…