Our first class of the semester dealt with brief introductions and Robin’s initiation to the idea of ‘coverage’ within a cinematic scene. Coverage can be described as the amount of footage shot combined with the array of different camera angles used within a scene. The term ‘coverage’ is exclusively used to describe the pre-productive endeavours of filmmakers.

Before this class I had absolutely no idea about what the term ‘coverage’ worked – considering myself to be quite apt with a camera terms, I was humbly deflated at this realisation that there was an entire plethora of technical terms that I had not stumbled across before.

After learning about the term ‘coverage’ we were then asked to split into groups and film a scene – we assumed, at first, that this would be an exercise to get us used to the cameras we had just been introduced to. However, it became an exercise to later explain to us how the use of coverage can convey different emotions and project different concepts and ideas.

This was revealed to us when Robin told us that the scenes we had acted out were actually scenes from actual films. We firstly watched our scenes, then watched the scenes within the film from which they had been taken, and I was amazed at the difference.

The second class of this week was to hone our filmcrafting skills. We acted out a scene and used the technical skills we had learnt from the prior lesson to assist in our filmmaking. These skills ranged fro as basic as setting up the tripod and camera settings correctly, to using the camera functions such as the ‘zebra’ function and histograms to measure the correct exposure. We were also explained the importance of using the manual settings of a camera as the automatic settings can cause inconsistent exposure and unwanted grain.