Reflection – Week 8
It appears we have now finished writing our observations. I’ve had a love/hate relationship with these exercises so far this semester. While I love the idea of them, and they play directly into my preferred form of film making, when I actually sit down and write them I find myself struggling to come up with interesting enough ideas. And perhaps the real struggle is accepting that they don’t have to be interesting, there just has to be something there under the surface to an extent. I have found the process very rewarding though, and adapting one of them into an actual short (or an attempt at one) for my latest project (Advanced Video Piece) was a fun exercise, seeing what was just words based on an experience I had, come to life.
In reflection on the Advanced Video Piece, I wish I had more time and resources to complete it, but that is no ones fault but my own. Next time I will obviously give myself more time and more scope to complete it to a higher level, but all in all I am satisfied with the result.
I also completed my Individual Exercise 3 this week, which I am also satisfied with. It gave me more scope to create something weird and kind of non-sensical, which I like a lot. If you read my full reflection on it you can understand my point of view when creating it, but I like that without context it might leave a viewer confused and slightly cynical towards it. I like that result in cinema to an extent.
We also did another class exercise this week, this time a group of 5 of us shot Nathan opening his bag and telling us about it’s contents. I wasn’t camera operator so didn’t have much input into each shot, but I instructed our camera op to get some nice action of shots of Nathan highlighting each object to use as B-roll, as well as to not just have 1 angle the entire time, and to put more focus on the interesting items than the boring ones. As documentary makers, your job is to show the audience what they want to see, ask them the questions they want answered etc. I’ll have a go at editing together the footage and making something out of it.