The first half of the week, we’ve been tasked to head out to shoot some ideas that we might have prepared over the weekend. Personally, I planned to shoot an action sequence such as a chase scene or a fight scene between two strong male. However, due to a twist of fate and how the universe and stars were aligned, I was grouped together with 3 other girls from the class. No offence or disrespect to the girls, we did a wonderful job shooting what we set out to do for the day, just that I could not realise my experiment or idea, not for this exercise at least. This grouping was just for this exercise and it was done in a random manner, and I don’t have any objections to it, I just thought how serendipity could play in this exercise.

Having the weather to pour just right before class started, the streets were wet and the skies were still gloomy by the time we were out shooting. We thought of taking this opportunity to capture movement of water and reflections off the puddles of water that we don’t normally see during dry weather. This shimmery effect on the grounds, trees, leaves, gave an extra challenge to get the right exposure, adding that with the gloomy weather, I can see what the camera operator was having a hard time adjusting the exposure. I assumed the role of the sound man, and I set off to record water dripping, footsteps on a wet ground, rushing water, and anything that I could think of that could relate to rain, or water.

Throughout this whole exercise, I was thinking to myself how am I going to compose a shot that could have a letterbox applied to it and something that looks cinematic. As we were shooting some footsteps walking down a flight of stairs, our director thought it would be a good idea to make use of the sun, while it was peering through the rain clouds. We did a quick roll of the sound and camera of our talent smoking, but instead of shooting her, I thought it’d be interesting to use her shadow that was made by the strong sun. That’s what I thought I might have something to experiment with in post. Applying a 2.35 : 1 letterbox, grading it, and applying some sounds that was recorded with it, and see how does that go.

At this point, we were contended with the shots we have taken, and we decided to just shoot whatever we can with the remaining amount of time… We thought nothing bad could come out of this, as long as we keep shooting something for us to work on in post. Of course, there must be some sort of direction and no just random rolling of the camera.

The group came across this water feature on campus and out talent did a little dance with her legs in the water. Again, ideas ran through my head thinking how am I going to make this shot cinematic under the given circumstances. And I thought the shot should be composed from the ground to focus on our talent’s legs with the running water flowing right at the camera.

At the end of the day, we transferred the footage and audio and went our own ways. I, personally, was looking forward to editing and seeing how the shots would turn out after having gone through some processing. Will update when I’m done with editing and grading in post.