For assignment one, we had to create two short videos responding to the term “movement” and “light”. There were no limitations to what we can and can’t do, aside from the requirements of being less than 60 seconds each, and no dialogues.

All of the footage taken were shot with my smartphone’s camera, which was suggested by our tutor, James, but also because it is very accessible as I carry my phone with me all the time and I can easily take it out and record something I find interesting. Thus, many of the videos taken were the result of spontaneous findings, e.g while hanging around uni, passing the pier near my house, or while walking down the streets. The rest of the videos are a result of me trying to experiment with the “prompts” given.

In the video responding to “movement”, I tried to experiment with different sorts of movement. This includes moving the camera or playing with camera angles while shooting a still object, holding the camera still shooting moving objects or both moving the camera and shooting moving objects, or actually moving a still object. The footage has little to no connection from one another and I combined some of them into one clip, with adding a little tweaks here and there to make it enjoyable to watch. The sound in the final clip were merely form the sources itself, which results in a very raw video.

For the video with the prompt “light”, I wanted to capture both different kinds of light and shadows, as they are highly attached to each other. I especially love and prefer natural light, so a lot of my footage includes sunlight. I do want to experiment with artificial lighting as well, so I experiment a bit on that as well, how it looks and how it differs from natural light. Lastly, I wanted to capture shadows and how they interplay with light, and I personally find them really captivating and pleasing to look at. I combined all these videos into one, and it turned out pretty abstract as there were no specific concept from the start, and similar to the “movement” video, this turned out very raw as the sound came purely from the footage.

Through the process of making these videos I realised how camera sees things differently than the naked eye, how it adjust to lighting conditions and visualises them in the images, how stabilisation and features of a camera plays such a big role in portraying what we have in mind. At the same time, I learned that movement and light are very connected to each other, as movements create shadows and light is basically everywhere, it’s really hard to exclude one from the other.

Lastly, I’m pretty happy with how the two videos turned out to be, with the time that I had. I could’ve done more experiments with artificial lighting, especially those of colours. Nevertheless, the whole process of thinking, shooting and editing wast a fun experiment and learning experience.