Shooting Day 1

I really enjoyed today’s shooting, I think I learned a lot from today. Remembering the cinematographer I studied for the research essay, Jung Jung Hoon said he would like to and he is also curious to meet and work with different crews that is one of the reasons he moved to Los Angles. The way we have planned to shoot this scene was something I rarely considered in my own creative productions, I know directors always have a little screen in their mind imagining how would each scene look like, so does our director Jialu and I am very curious about that.

We set up a phone on the side to record the shooting process, everyone found so interested in watching the process back because everyone was so busy running around for the one takes shot (video embedded below). For example, I was holding the cardboard in front of the light at the beginning, and then when the camera moves away I need to put down the cardboard and run to get the reflector for the character’s last position. This practice has reminded me of the other one take shots I have seen in different media productions, it’s already difficult when we are just working for a 1-minute scene, I can hardly imagine how to do that long one takes shot worked. I have seen lots of one takes in a lot of music videos especially they attract my eyes in just a few seconds because they are so smooth.

Time management, I believed its a huge problem for every group, for our group, we have used half of our time only for setting up and planning how to do the one takes shot. We ran through how to arrange the one takes shot for thousands of time until our cinematographer and director were satisfied with the result. When I think back to our process, I was wondering what if we are actually shooting something commercially we have very limited time which we haven’t got the shots that everyone feels happy with, what should we do? Should we just keep going until everyone satisfies or shall we just keep the ok one and move on? I am so curious what will a professional crew choose to do when they meet this situation.

I felt like I was the one who was pressing everyone to hurry up, our director was too ‘nice’ to impose everyone to follow her directions. Although I really think even the crew you work with is a friend of yours, once we start shooting everyone should only focus on our own roles, if I am the director I will make sure I am doing my job, or if I am the sound I will listen to whatever the director wants me to do. Based on our experiences and knowledge on film lights, we might have over-planned the shooting for a bit, there was five of us in the group but we were doing 8 people’s job like Robin said if you have 4 people then you just plan for 4 people’s job. In the end, even everyone took two jobs we still figured out how to run the whole thing at the end, and we enjoyed the progress.