So as I can now take a look at my shoot from a week ago, I am able to acknowledge that I had a variety of issues.

For reference, here is a table explaining the 24 different shots I was able to capture on the day.

Sadness	Shot 1: Front on close up shot	Shot 2: From the back, mid length symmetrical shot	Shot 3: Side on shot	Shot 4: Alternating close up dialogue shots
dialogue no music	1	2	3	4
without dialogue no music	5	6	7	8
with dialogue and diegetic music	9	10	11	12
with dialogue and non-diegetic music	13	14	15	16
without dialogue and non-diegetic music	17	18	19	20
without dialogue and diegetic music	21	22	23	24

Basically, when you match up a horizontal shot with a vertical shot type, it creates 1 of the 24 shots. Whilst I was happy that I was able to capture these, I was sadly disappointed by how some of the shots turned out.

I’m going to run through each of the 4 shot types/angles that I worked with, and explain what my problems were, as well as how this can be fixed and improved upon in the future.

Shot 1: Front on close up shot

Like the career of Lindsay Lohan, this shot is sadly beyond repair. I think my main issue is the grainy texture, which came from having the gain turned up too high without realising it. Gain is usually used for journalists doing night shoots, and here it was clearly unnecessary and detrimental. For my future shoots, I will now always check to see what level the gain is, and have it at the lowest setting possible. Furthermore, even using the reflector, the lighting was simply not strong enough to make the subjects inside the car visible. In the future, I will have to place some small lights into the vehicle so as to make whats happening inside a visible focus. This will be better achieved at night in my opinion, where the brightness of the lights will not need to be as high, and I can achieve a nice, visually pleasing contrast between the exterior and interior of the vehicle. If I was to reshoot this scene, which I am planning on doing, I will also frame up closer to the vehicle, as the exterior of my car takes up too much space in the frame. In fact, it is really only the window of the car that I should be able to see in the finished shot.

Finally, this shot is clearly heavily over-exposed. If you didn’t think so, you should know that my car that you’re probably thinking is white, is actually a dark silver. In the future, I will need to add a higher ND filter, which acts like sunglasses for the camera. Furthermore, the intensity of the sun made it difficult to see what was going on through the viewfinder, even with my left eye closed, as sun was still seeping through my eyelids and distracting my view.

Shot 2: From the back, mid length symmetrical shot

This is another shot that I was quite disappointed with for a number of reasons. First off, in order to be able to frame up the two subjects, I was forced to hold the camera over my shoulder. This meant that without any rigging equipment, I had no ability to properly see what was in the frame, hold the camera steady. Not only has this resulted in an unwanted wobble factor, it also means I was unable to see the microphone slowly popping into frame. Furthermore, the shot is simply too close, and I would prefer to have the camera much further away, however, I was using a falcon sedan at the time, so that was simply not possible.

Well, moving into fixing this practically in the future, I absolutely can fix all of the problems. This Tuesday I am doing another shoot, and this time instead of using the same Ford sedan, I will instead be switching to a Mazda station wagon. The added room in the back for me to set up a tripod will fix a large number of these problems. It will allow the camera to be steady, it means I will be able to see whats going on, and it also means I will be able to see whats happening in the frame. Being further back in the car also means I can capture more in the frame like I originally wanted to.

Shot 3: Side on shot

This was another one that I was quite disappointed with, yet not as much as the first two. In terms of the camera, I think the focal length is fine, as well as the framing. The slightly diagonal-t0-car angle I chose worked well to keep the two subjects in frame. This is a shot I have been attempting to create for sometime so I was overall quite happy with what I was able to practically achieve.

However, what brings the shot down is the use of the reflector. In the viewfinder, it looked quite normal, yet clearly the reflector was simply too strong. It seems to have given the whole frame this strange unwanted golden hue, which utterly ruins the shot for me. This can be fixed using Premiere’s three-way colour corrector, and I will be posting in the future about my attempts to fix the shot. In terms of being able to fix it on the day, I now know that I need to turn the exposure down to avoid the sunlight coming through Max’s arm. Another way to fix this would be to use the diffusing function of the reflector to reduce the intensity of the sunlight coming into frame. I have now also ordered a simple bounce board as opposed to a reflector for Tuesday, so hopefully this will change the results.

Shot 4: Alternating close up dialogue shots

My thoughts on how the alternating dialogue shots turned out are somewhat mixed. On the one hand, I am happy with the lighting in this shot, where I think the reflector allowed the subjects to be lit a little more clearly yet was not overpowering like in shot 3. However, I think it’s clear by the sunlight shining off the car locks that the shot was a little overexposed. Furthermore, in terms of the two cuts been matching, I think my camera work needs improvement here. Whilst Max is in the centre of the frame, Matt is situated left of screen. I think if the shots matched, either of these options would be fine, but because they don’t it makes the two edited together a little disorientating. This is something I will be able to fix practically in the future, by matching two shots that are actually matching.