My first initiative post was me researching and looking for inspirational ideas, that relate to what we are doing and going to be doing throughout the semester in film 3. It was the behind the scenes video from the film Gravity, where the director and crew developed the ‘light box’ during production to be able to fit the needs of the film for shots and effects. This time around I wanted to take my knowledge I gathered from the tutorials and put that into action in my own day to day life as an amateur filmmaker. The idea came from looking at the White balance in the cameras to get a better quality shot, and I realised that I have know idea how to work the White balance on my own camera I own, a canon 700D. So I started to research so I could learn how to properly set up my camera to get the best quality shots I possibly could with it.

So there is actually quite a big difference on a DSLR camera like I have to set your custom white balance. Instead of simply holding a white piece of paper up in front of the camera, taking up the whole shot, and simply hitting your white balance button to set it up, like on our University cameras, the Canon 700d requires a little more fiddling around. I found that you have to first go through your different white balance settings and set it to custom so that you can actually get it to work for the particular scene your shooting. Then from there you need to take and actually still image of the White piece of paper or screen in your scene to get the correct balance. From there going through your menu and choose ‘custom white balance’, then choose the particular image you shot just prior. That will then give you the correct white balance for your scene.

Not quite as simple as we were shown in our tutorial with the University’s cameras, however an extremely useful skill to know now. It didn’t take me very long to find a good tutorial video on YouTube to explain how to customise white balance for my particular camera. After about 2-3 minutes I had worked it out and improved quite impressively the image quality for the space in my room I was testing the camera in. This simple skill for customising and changing the White balance on my own camera, canon 700d, I can choose beater quality and consistent shots for a particular shoot or scene, whether it be a still image of an actually clip itself. It’s simple tips and skills like this I’ve enjoyed learning and progressing in so far for Film 3, to slowly but surely become a more well rounded filmmaker and director.