In this week’s studio, we practiced on tracking shots. The scene is called ‘Late Menace’, in which a girl who’s late for the class for 25 mins and chats with everyone before she gets to her seat. That sounds really familiar to me except that when I rock up late, I just greet Robin with grace and quietly go to my seat, pretending it’s not a big deal while it really kind of is. I wouldn’t talk to people around me to make my mistake more obvious than it already is. That’d be very stupid. Had I been in a Chinese university, the teacher would have had my parents come to school at least 5 times to work on my attitude issues. And I vaguely remember that I was really tired that day so I was trying to do the bare minimum and hoping no one would notice (Robin did). But it doesn’t mean that I didn’t get much out of it (?).
During this exercise, I think the acting was the mot interesting part. I notice that the conversation gets very awkward and doesn’t really make the character (was there one?) look like the popular person that she is, more like someone who’e tryin too hard to look cool. From this I learned that it’s always important to have a solid script with solid lines in it, just in case the actors can’t improvise.
The exercise also helps me understand what a complex collaborative art filmmaking is. It seems to me that every role has to be done perfectly to make a descent looking film. it is enough hustle and bustle in this simple class exercise, imagine the amount of work needed and level of difficulty to make a big budget film with thousands of extras and several camera operators in it. If one person messes up his/her job, the whole team has to go again.
Everyone in the class seems a bit confused when first on board with their roles, but later after Robin explained the order and every role’s duty, they seemed to get on with it pretty well. Though I thought it would be great to have piece of paper with the description of every job on set and the industrialized process of what happens before “action!”.