In this week’s workshop we got to do another group exercise and this time I was assigned to 4 guys (Joshua, Joey, Matt and Tristan), which was great because I did not have to carry anything that’s heavy haha. The title is ‘misunderstanding’, which got us stuck for a while before we could work out a doable story. Another requirement was that it had to be told visually and not reliant on dialogues. For 10 solid minutes we just sat there tried to come up with a good catchy story to present ‘misunderstanding’. The thing was that at first we all wanted to come up with something smart. But smart ideas come to you. Not the other way around. Eventually we all agreed to just go and get it finished. With our storyboards blank and not much of an idea in our mind, we decided to go the the bar near the school. The guys actually ordered a jug of beer just for the shooting. As one who does not drink very often, grabbing a drink in the afternoon during class really made me feel a bit guilty. Finally, Tristan came up with the idea of pissing at a corner and not seeing someone’s there. And the person that’s peed on is not revealed until the end of the video. Maybe the concept of ‘misunderstanding’ is not so well presented in the video, but we really tried to come up with something special in half an hour.
The story starts with three guys who are heavily drunk at their table. One decides to take a leak outside and apparently he’s too drunk to even know that it’s illegal and he ends up pissing on someone. I decided to be the camera operator because there’s not really a role that I wanted to play.
It was easy to film a one shot. I simply followed Tristan and track his movement from behind. We filmed it twice to get an ideal one. In the first one we did, the water bottle that’s not supposed to appear in the video did in the end (the water is for fake pee) and the audience should not see it. And for a couple of times my the frame wobbled very obviously because I was wearing heeled boots and the ground was not so easy to walk on. We fixed the problems we found in the first one so the second one looks not so bad. And by the time we finished filming for the second time, it’s time for us to get back.
From this time’s experience, I concluded that we should work on the time management and try to visualize things using storyboards. Because you get really lost with no directions or ideas but have to come up with a video within a short time.
And here’s the video.
https://youtu.be/zvZWhuqtZ1I