Two Liner:

On the first homework, you seem to get off to a great start but seemed to stop in mid-sentence. I ‘d like to hear more – perhaps how you would approach that kind of exercise next time. Lenny and Van Similarly for this reflection. You didn’t really talk about shot construction or other technical issues.

While developing the ideas for how to film the script set inside a furniture store, we decided to film inside RMIT but getting an establishing shot from an actual furniture store. The first shot was shot on my iPhone, resulting in inconsistent colour temperature between the shots. This is why I initially used colour grading to match the look of the shots. In doing so, the video had a warm colour temperature throughout.

There was a myriad of issues that occurred during the filming process which we attempted to ameliorate in post-production. Due to the time constraint, we did not take the time to look through all the footage after recording. The biggest problem for me was the blocking of the shots, and lines were crossed often and continuity was broken between shots, resulting in characters being on the wrong side of each other and looking in the wrong direction. This occurred because the top-down view map was not utilised and was difficult for the first AD to understand.

This made it difficult while editing as many shots were nearly unusable, I made the decision to flip horizontally the reaction shots of Tom (John), and in doing so the direction he looks at is correct.

Another problem we encountered was the location, as other people walking past can be seen or people sitting on the couch can be seen. And in some extreme cases, the boom operator, the boom pole, the audio kit, and people passing by can be seen front and centre in the shot. I attempted to fix this shot by zooming in and cropping out the rest of the frame. Doing this did result in a quality loss but because this was the only shot we have of this scene, it was a compromise that I had to make.

Again, due to the time constraint, we did not have time to record wild lines, and without following the LOTAPOWFENGER, the internal audio for the camera was not turned on. Luckily, the audio recorded from the shotgun mic was usable, along with the atmos track made the audio component easier to arrange.

Making Bed:

I wanted to experiment with more facets of filmmaking after my previous homework, the 30-second video from assignment 1. Having my face in the video is an aspect I wanted to include, not just because Paul wanted everyone to show their face, but I wanted to see how eye lines can motivate editing. Therefore, while thinking of how the video will progress, I figured that by having a medium close up of me looking down leads to a more natural cut to the next shot of the mess on the floor. A technical issue I faced while filming was the camera and tripod placement inside my room which limits the range of shot constructions. In contrast to the stovetop, where there was really one direction where the camera is pointing towards, there were different places where the action occurs; such as me on the bed at the beginning, against the wall, next to the bed. In order to capture the different positions, the tripod had to be moved around a lot and there was not always space to place it. The result of this is that some shots had to be flipped horizontally for the placements of the bed and pillows to be the same. In the future, this issue can be solved by drawing out a top-down view map of the room and ensuring the consistency of item placement are the same. In addition, I wanted to explore the slow motion feature on my camera. By setting to a higher framerate in the camera and slowing it down in Premiere, I was able to achieve a slow-motion effect as seen at 0:11. This had the side effect of distorting the audio for that clip, I resolved this issue by replacing the distorted audio with the audio from another take without slowing it down and the inclusion of music. Overall I am quite happy with the way this video tuned out, but in the future, I would like to investigate lighting as most shots were poorly lit like 0:07.