This week, we headed back with Helen and Trong to the location where Reza and I scouted last Friday.

We wasted no time and started shooting for a good 2 hours or so. Each of us rotated roles being the cinematographer, camera operator, and director. Since there isn’t any dialogue as this scene was mainly chasing, we didn’t find the need to have a sound man as Reza would be doing most of the sound effects on foley and sound design.

Initially, I found it hard organising the shots that we want. Trying to do too many things at once always lead to nothing positive. Hence, we chiseled down our experiment to our main objective and that was just to have a chase. Don’t really care how many times we were going to shoot it, we were just prepared to shoot multiple takes, from multiple angles, multiple shots and just nailing down all possibilities of shooting a chase scene between a zombie and a human. We had a great location with very little distraction or people (the occasion office worker would walk by to their car and drive off), but other than that, we pretty much had the whole roof top of the multi-story carpark to ourselves. We came up with a short storyboard and just started rolling.

Trong and I brought our DSLR, and this gave us options to shoot 2 different shots at once. I began by shooting Reza as he was looking and searching for a girl, played by Helen, while Trong shot close ups of Helen, as well as shots of her running and hiding. I don’t know if it’s the norm, just because I’ve not been on many shoots as I would like, I’ve always been stuck behind the computer operating Premiere or something, even while on my internship, but it seems like we would start off slow, and then develop some sort of rhythm as the brain juices start to flow. Initially, we’re shooting and reviewing the shots, I’ll be condemning my camera work. “I should have done that, I should have done this…” “Why does it look so bad, why does it not turn out the way I pictured it to be…” Stuff like that… But the more we kept going, the lesser the harsh comments came, it soon turned to, “That’s so cool..how did I do that…” “I’m going to try that shot again on some other experiment/shoot/film”. There were moments where I was actually dumbfounded with myself, like, “Did I actually just did that?”.

In particular, there was a shot in particular where I was tracking Reza’s legs as he was walking like a zombie in search of the girl (Helen). I must stress that, I did not come up with this idea, I was just going through a bunch of tutorials on how to use your tripod as a steadicam, and one of the videos I found online suggested extending all the legs, and opening out 1/3 of the legs, while close the other 2/3. The camera mount should be twisted at a 90 degrees angle. The video below taken by me showing Trong operating his DSLR would illustrate better than me trying to explain it with my lack of vocabulary.

Though still not as steady as a steadicam with counter weights and balance, it still provides a very smooth tracking image. This customisable set up allows you to reach down to low angles, or if you invert the mount of the camera, high angles. And since you could adjust the length of the 1/3 leg that is opened up, you can get a good grip while maintaining stability.

These little moments of “I can’t believe that worked out so good” is what I mean by getting the juices flowing and then realised we actually did something like that. And it just keeps wetting the taste buds for more moments like this when u want to try that same set up on a different shot or a different scene and see how that pans out.

All in all, the group was really happy how the shoot turned out. Looking forward to going through the post-process where then I can actually start exploring more editing/colouring options, something more in my element.