We have finally reached the last week of classes.
This week in The Scene we had individual sessions with Robin to talk about how we’re going about our projects and also how we liked the unit. I really liked this unit because I was able to learn a lot – not only from the tutes, but also from my peers. I will leave the details for my final post.
In regards to my project, I wanted to film a new scene because I felt that I had not done enough. While all my peers had produced a lot of great work, I felt like I was lagging behind them so I wanted to do more. But it did not work out the way I wanted. Initially, I wanted to film a single scene in three different ways – 2 outdoors and 1 indoors – but since the weather wasn’t great, I could not do the outdoor shots. In the end, I just chose to shoot the scene inside. Ultimately, my final shoot ended up being more like a general weekly exercise than a contribution to my project. Nevertheless, I tried to link this exercise to my project by creating a few edits of this new scene which I hadn’t blocked out particularly thoroughly. Sad and Off are quite similar whereas the mood in Nothing is starkly different.
In ‘Nothing’ the conversation between the two actors seems more like an argument and this is purely to do with their performance – not my coverage or editing. I actually named it ‘Nothing’ because there is nothing much/nothing special about the way I blocked/filmed/edited the scene. When I showed my edit to Kai and Aki, they both said it was OK and that there was nothing wrong with it. But for me, while there is nothing wrong with it, I also think there is nothing to be remarked upon. As for ‘Sad’, the tempo of the cuts is a bit slower and the background music adds some gloom to it. The main purpose of having the pillar was to show them separated and also to conceal what Kai hands over to Lisha. I felt the last cut which returns to the CU of Lisha is a bit strange, but I wasn’t sure how to end the scene. In Off, I tried to put the focus more on Kai. I also did something weird with the sound where I isolate only the dialogue parts and cut out all the other ambient sounds. It’s a bit jarring, but I really wanted to try it out.
On another note, I used the Dolly for the first time yesterday and I can see what a difference it makes compared to hand-held tracking. It did get a little shaky at one point but I don’t think it was too obvious. I think it introduces the scene nicely compared to if I just used the static frame with the pillar in the middle. Actually, this was more of an incidental thing because I had not originally planned to dolly. On the day however, Kai who was filming after me had planned to used the dolly so we had it on hand. There was some extra time leftover to do some more shots for my scene while waiting for Kai’s cast to arrive so I filmed some dolly shots in the 5-10 minutes I had. Not only this time, but there are a lot of times where these ‘happy incidents’ happen for me and I get lucky.