This week, I helped Emma and Kate out with the last couple of exercises for their investigations and in turn they helped me out with mine.
On Tuesday afternoon, we filmed both Kate and Emma’s exercises. Kate had planned to shoot her scene from Gossip Girl on the steps but with close ups, and Emma was filming a scene investigating crossing the line where there were three main actors instead of two. I found both of their experiments interesting, but was particularly engaged by how Emma chose to shoot her scene. I thought that the way she shot ‘dirty’ over the shoulder shots of each person would be interesting when it came to editing, and would look especially jarring compared to crossing the line with a normal ‘clean’ shot. Despite some technical issues at the beginning, we were able to efficiently and steadily work our way through each of the shots, and even got everything done earlier than expected. It was good to consider what my peers have been investigating in their projects and see what they have learnt, given that most of the work regarding our investigations have been individual.
For my shoot on Wednesday, this was the only one I needed to have a bigger crew for, as it included three actors and audio as well as camera setups. It was nice that Kate, Emma, Bryan and Luke were able to help out as they understood the purpose of my exercise and I felt more comfortable explaining what I had planned to them. Brian saved the day by figuring out a way to hide the mic in the wide shot without a boom poll, and making sure all the audio levels were good. It was also good to have Kate and Emma acting as they already had an idea of what I wanted to achieve so I didn’t have to do a lot of directing.
Overall, I enjoyed these collaborative experiences, as it was useful to have backup support and opinions. When we came across technical difficulties or any confusion about a particular shot, it was good to be able to work together and solve the problem. If I had something I wasn’t sure about, I could always ask for clarification or even just an alternate point of view. They could also pick up little things that I hadn’t thought about or noticed, like if the framing was off or if I had forgotten to focus a shot. Having a group of people who are of similar wavelengths and thinking about the same things was really helpful and generally made the tasks much easier to get done.
