Week 10 Reflection

First hour:

Went through the room, group by group, to discuss the process of our filming – how we found it, trials, challenges, accomplishments, clips that we were especially pleased with and how we were able to attain these particular shots.

We were then asked to divulge tips, tricks and hacks in alleviating the anxiety and stress that comes with doing on-location shooting. For our group, the challenges that we faced was the constant clashing schedules during our peak and most opportune time for filming. This meant that there was often two of us filming at a time, making it more difficult to maximise our shooting time as having more members would enable multiple perspectives and ergo, more clips to work with in creating and establishing the neighbourhood of Riverslide. One of the tips that I offered in terms of filming was doing your research in terms of which equipment caters to the specific needs of your shoot. As we’re filming skaters in action and they’re very much mobile subjects to film, it was essential that we had a lens that could capture these skaters in their entirety, from a distance, that didn’t compromise the quality of the shot. The range afforded by the 70-200mm lens gave us an impeccable scope to work with as we were able to film our subjects from both a distance and close-up when shooting portrait frames.

After a brief viewing of our work to Kim and to some members of our tutorial, we received feedback on our raw clips that were shot over the week. Here, we were able to hear from classmates who complimented us on the instant cinematic look of our footage despite them only being raw files; files untouched by colour grading or any kind of editing.

Second hour:

We used the later hours of the tutorial to do a screening of two documentaries that, although were significantly different in nature and content, were impeccably threaded together in terms of narrative and effective in eliciting emotions of empowerment, wonder and awe. One documentary that stood out to me almost immediately was Pussy Riot: A Punk Player, a Russian documentary exploring a female/feminist punk rock girl band who orchestrate public spectacles while decked out in balaclavas in order to create politically provocative stirs in public and religious spaces. I was especially taken by the stylistically edgy, albeit cinematic look and tone of the film while still maintaining that quintessential documentary look and feel through hand held shots and use of archival footage.