One of last week’s exercise required us to shoot abstract footages that does not necessarily be representational and it could be completely 100% “out-of-this-world” abstract.

The exercise sheet encouraged us to experiment with various tools that goes behind composing a shot. Focal length, depth of field, image size, exposure, and so on, are all used to compose that “perfect” shot to represent your subject matter, and more often than not, when one aspect fails, the entire shot could possibly be ruined.

I decided to go about going through this exercise by doing something mundane, such as preparing dinner. I did not have any ideas in mind on how am I going to shoot the whole process as I do not have as much experience I would like to have being behind the camera. Therefore the shots turned out to be mostly point-of-view shots. However, there was one shot in particular I was pretty pleased with, and that was the shot of me slicing up the lettuce for the salad. For some reason that made me feel like I was right there with the lettuce, but being a safe distance away from the knife. If anyone has been watching the YouTube channel, “Annoying Orange”, we all know there’s no happy ending to that. However, for some reason, having the camera position at the same level as the lettuce gives a different perspective, something we don’t usually see while we’re the ones chopping up vegetables or fruits. I guess camera angles do affect storytelling and the angle of where the character is coming from (pun not intended).

What I thought I could have done better would be having the auto focus turned on instead of living it on manual. It is quite a challenge to do wrecking shots, especially if you have to watch not to burn your food. Also during the “salad dressing” scene, the auto focus would have help grab focus of the ingredients while I was showing what goes into the salad. Other things I thought worth exploring or maybe employing in my next exercise would be the use of lighting. Throughout this whole video, the lighting were just my house lights, which are not the best lights  for filming, also, maybe trying to get a proper white balance, as everything appeared too yellow when I have transferred the raw footage to my computer. I’ve did a little colour correcting on Premiere, but didn’t want to go overboard with it.

Overall, I thought this “Abstract” exercise turned out to be an instructional video on how to make yourself a quick meal from frozen food. As the exercise sheet states,  “As you work, think about the editing process.” And that was definitely what I had in mind majority of the time, coming from an editing background, I tend to worry if I have enough shots, or if I have recorded the right amount of duration, or if I might have missed a step, and matters along those lines. During the course of my internship as an assistant editor, I have witnessed cases where directors realised they might have missed out a shot or realised the whole scene needed some extra footage to elevate it and reveal more of the story it’s trying to tell, hence having to go back out to shoot some more.