Last year in TV-1 and TV-2 I learned and gained experience in a wide range of technical and production skills. I thoroughly enjoyed being able to create a short film and documentary, both of which were fantastic learning experiences. While we were able to try our hand at different production roles and construct our shots based on our script/documentary outline, variables such as time and the weather tended to alter our idea of how we would film a particular shot or scene.

This course excites me because we have the opportunity to really focus and practice our skills by working on one scene, rather than a complete film. Robin and Paul’s comments in the lecture really resonated with me as having the pressure of submitting a complete film to a deadline did mean that on our shooting days we had to cut certain shots for our coverage of our scene in order to finish filming.

Being able to think about scene construction and the many different ways a scene can be ‘covered’ is really interesting as there aren’t really any rules (as was pointed out in the lecture with the discussion about crossing the line). How creative, innovative, simple or complicated you want the camera coverage to be is completely up to the individual. Thinking and experimenting with camera coverage means that hopefully we will all as individual filmmakers be able to find our own ‘style’ or even possibly ‘authorship’ that we can continue to develop throughout our careers.

Another point that was raised in the lecture that intrigued me was the idea of researching the way different filmmakers and even films from different countries construct their scenes and exploring why this occurs as well as the effectiveness of their individual styles.

The constraints that were set for the first task forced us to think differently about a scene. Rather than relying on a shot-reverse-shot for a typical conversation between two characters, my group had to experiment and work out the most interesting way we could present our scene. After switching roles a few times and testing out different but yet still quite common shots (shots we have seen time and time again), we discussed what we thought the subtext of the scene we were assigned was. We decided that the characters had had a past relationship and the female was concerned about revealing her engagement to the male (also her boss). The majority of the action also comes from her, (walking into the office, talking to her boss, turning to leave but then stopping, etc) so we tried framing her action while keeping the boss’ identity a mystery and placing the camera behind him. This resulted in a construction of the scene that we were all very excited about as the choices we made were not something we had commonly seen. This exercise proved to us that focusing our energy on how to portray the relationship between the two characters and experimenting with abstract shots can create something quite unique and interesting.