Yesterday was our first Film 3 class, and we immediately jumped into using Sony EX3 cameras. I have used these cameras before in the Channel 31 studio, but the only operations I used were focus and zoom.
Important notes:
- Undo the bottom stage of the tripod first, so that if the height needs to be changed you don’t have to bend down and look uncool.
- Make a barrier between the camera and pedestrians, or set up near a pole or something big, so that you minimize pedestrians tripping over the tripod.
- Always set the frame hand-held and adjust the tripod accordingly.
- Always remember to format the card.
- On the focus ring, orange numbers are feet and white numbers are metres. These numbers correspond to how far away the subject that is in focus is.
- ND filter puts a filter on the sensor if it is too bright.
The exercise that we had to do was to film 50 seconds of some action or event, and making sure that we had the a good exposure and composition of frame. My group shot the trams on Swanston St. In our first take we shot the tram from behind, and we had trouble getting a good exposure because the tram and the foreground was in the shade of a building, and the background was the buildings across the street which had sunlight on them. We exposed so that the buildings in the background weren’t overexposed, so we put the ND filter on the highest setting (2). This meant that our tram was under exposed, and I think we should have exposed for the tram and reframed the shot so that the buildings weren’t in it, because the tram was the subject. On our second take our exposure was better, as we had reframed and moved across the street, but we set it all up quite hastily.
I enjoyed this exercise because we found it hard to time our shots right so that the tram would be in the majority of the shot, which made me think about shooting documentaries and how time consuming it must be to wait for the perfect moment. It would have been easier if we had control of the trams and could direct them to come in and out of shot, which I suppose is done in documentary anyway, as well as in drama. Probably a lot of paperwork, but I guess I will find out later this semester.
