For my individual exercise I planned to experiment with panning and a larger shot list.I struggled a bit with planning as I found my thoughts were quite disorganised. Despite writing a shot list and drawing a story board that looked like a child’s work, I was still slightly confused. In my head I struggled to connect the shots with the blocking and could only imagine an edited version. This meant that I would often double up on shots. This disastrous planning did lead me to realise that perhaps I needed to approach this task in more of a visual and physical way. In some of the class readings and as Robin has told us time and time again, it is not uncommon for the director to only determine blocking and the shot list on the day. For the next class exercise I think I’ll attempt this and only have a lose plan as a guide. I think the most ideal way for me to work out my blocking and coverage would be to assess my shooting space, insert the actors, decide my blocking, watch it through a few times and finally configure my shot list.

Back to my exercise, I had very little time to shoot my scene despite being delegated half an hour for it. This was due to other students running over time with their exercises. As tough time constraints are frequent in the media industry, I took this as a challenge. I organised my actors, clarified their lines and blocking with them and started moving things along as quickly as I could. Most shots were complete within roughly two takes. The panning shots however, were slightly more tricky as it was difficult to track my actor. I’ve been told before with panning and tilting, that you should be slightly ahead of the movement. This is why I had to have three or four attempt at these shots. The majority of the time I would tilt up just before my actor stood and then not pan quickly enough to be ahead of him. Eventually I achieved close to what I wanted and wrapped things up about 10-15 minutes after starting. Whilst I would have liked to improve on certain aspects of my shoot, I’m pleased that I was able to complete the exercise within the time constraint.