Make The Bed
For this exercise I didn’t do any preproduction. I only had some images in my head before I started filming. I think the most obvious mistake is the lighting. When I was filming, it was around 4:30pm so the sun was going down very quickly which resulted in unstable lighting through out the filming session. I tried to fix the discontinuity in lighting by adjusting the exposure and highlights of the shots that were filmed later during the production. But it’s still obvious that the lighting changes dramatically as the video goes on.
Lenny
It’s kind of funny that we all tried to play with the zoom while filming. And it does not turn out to be so smooth and looks kind of funny haha. I guess we all wanted to track motions like how a dolly does but didn’t want the camera to be hand-held because it’d be too wobbly. Zooming in is the only way to accentuate the movements while the camera is limited to the tripod.
We almost ran out of time when we’re filming the conversation so we decided to make it a one shot from the front. If we had more time, we’d film it from over the shoulders like how we practiced in Thursdays’ studio.
The framing is generally ok since most of the shots follow the rule of thirds and have proper head space. The second last shot, which is the one shot for the conversation, probably has a bit too much head space. But apart from that one, the rest of the shots look fine to me.
Another obvious mistake is that the first shot ends in a mid shot but the second shot is a wide shot. It looks kind of weird because usually it starts with a wide shot to establish the general situation and cuts to a mid shot or an MCU for details. It would look much better if the first shot is a tracking shot that starts as a long shot and ends in a wide shot, then cuts to the second shot that starts as a wide shot and then cuts to a close up of Lenny untying the shoe laces.