Google drive folder for videos and camera sheet

 

Reflection

Overall, this exercise is meaningful and resultful for me, that I found some faults/disadvantages after taking the first shot, then I thought about solutions and did a better shot. 

Aria and I borrowed the camera together so we could help each other move these heavy equipment, and we filmed our own clips in turn. The campus was a suitable place that we could film a group of people or activities. I walked around Building 9 and coincidentally met a group of Islamic schoolboys and their teachers on the lawn near the old jail. The shooting process of the first take was quite difficult. They stood near the exit of the old jail so I thought they might leave soon. We placed the camera out of the door and planned to take a shot which was similar to Lumiere’s workers. However, after 10-minute waiting, the teacher started to organise boys for a game. We then quickly moved the camera in and adjusted all the settings again. It was a challenge that I couldn’t predict the movement of subjects, and the camera still took time to set up. This requests me to get more familiar with the settings to catch the right moment. Also, some technical problems appeared. First, that was a grey day which referred to a bad condition of light, and those boys wore black clothes and white hats that formed a strong contrast. These both made the exposure harder to judge. I decided to turn the Gain to medium and carefully checked the zebra line. When watching the video, I still felt it was a little bit under-exposed. For this term, I want to learn more skills about how to operate lights to avoid weather influence. Second, I find the first video very blurry when it is played on the computer. During the shooting, I adjusted the point of focus for many times because they were always moving and I couldn’t focus on a certain subject. I turned the focus ring but didn’t see big differences. This becomes another question I should keep in mind: how to set the point of focus when filming a group of people?

For the second take, I mainly changed the composition. Those boys started their lunch break, sitting and walking dispersedly. I came up with the idea to film from a higher angle so I could catch each of them in one frame. We raised the tripod to its greatest height and I stood on the chair to watch the viewfinder. In my opinion, it looks much better than the first one. This clip shows a feeling of the documentary, that the high angle could be seen as the objective point of view. By the way, the sky became brighter at that time so I changed the Gain back to low. I got a lot more time to operate the focal length, focus and aperture for this take, so the result was more satisfying.