Week 7
This week class exercise seemed to be an expanded exercise from last week, at the same location but we experienced what we have learned from last week into an actual scene. From this class exercise, I have learned that it is very important to do as much preparation as possible before the shooting. Robin and us who are considered to be familiar with the classroom already which we stay in the room every week at the same time, although there are still variables occurred during shooting because the weather was different, so the amount of natural lighting we got would be different. On the way to RMIT, Robin positioned himself in the classroom with two students that he planned to cast for today’s scene, he got a picture that he has expected to be.
However, the actual shooting was very different to his expectations, there are always constants and variables will appear in any shootings. During the preparation stage, I believe is very important to take the actor’s facial feature into the plan especially the two actors’ face are different in colour and tone. For example, in this shooting, the two actors we cast were very different with the typical facial features of the two different races. Robin told us that he has never considered Ryan’s face can absorb the lights better than Aria’s because Asian’s facial features are often less sharpen, although in the actual shooting the lights did reflect on Aria’s face and Ryan absorbs the light very well. During shooting, I was wondering why did we use contained shot for Aria’s bubbling, energetic but annoying character, she always needed to move around a lot to better interpret her characteristic but in a contained shot, the chair swinging was distracting audience’s eyes at the right-hand corner which they might ignore what we are actually trying to show. However, we re-framed the camera with moving the camera over to the left-hand side, still contained but tried to cut out Aria’s chair and showing Ryan’s face bit more so the audience can focus on Ryan’s facial expression.
Another thing that I think we are building up our experiences every exercise was the time management issue, in the shootings I did whether is class exercises or assignments I had time management issues during every shooting, everyone is trying to figure out a good way to solve this issue even an experienced teacher like Robin who told me he always thinks we can talk through a lot in a class time, but we went overtime every class because the class exercise took longer than he expected. It is understandable why there is always a crew working together for a film production because people who are well-coordinated can actually save a lot of time than people who have just met. Even though we meet twice a week but we are still not familiar enough to each other which we resulted to be spending longer for every shooting exercises.
Moreover, so far in film lights, we usually do collaborations in a big group during the class exercises and I did enjoy the process. There are a lot of different style of directors, so directors who would like to shoot everything in perfect framing, timing, lightings, weather and etc. Although there are also directors sometimes they need to finish something nice and quick, I remembered once I participated in a studio who films short videos, what they needed is to finish work in time and get their pay in time, if I am working with these directors, what they need from a lighting person would be a functional way to finish the shooting.
“Cinematographers are not gods, nor can their achievements be construed as heroic. They are craftspeople whose work may be as admirable as any other craftsperson’s, or artist’s”. Robin.
Daily Observation
While I was in China, I had a similar experience. I had a project which was to interview 50 foreigners who chose to stay in Shenzhen. I didn’t worry too much beforehand because I am familiar with the location so I was quite confident with the shooting. I imagine myself being in the space at the hottest time of the day, I didn’t want anything from the outside of the location so I am expecting overexposure, I will just make sure I can see the interviewee well. However, when I arrived I did a test shooting with myself sitting in front of the camera(see below) which everything seemed to work pretty much like what I expected to be, but I have forgotten most of my interviewees are from western countries which means we have completely different facial features, the level of light absorbing was completely different either. Like Robin said, there is always something we may never expect to be there in every shooting, the reason why there are directors who would like to collaborate with the actors they are familiar with as they will spend a shorter amount of time to get everything set.
Myself doing camera testing:
