Project Two Reflection

This project was much better than our first one. We tried not to rush anything this time. Since the majority of the shots are inside secluded locations (bathroom, hallway, etc.) we didn’t need to worry about filming all our material during the “golden hour,” and that eliminated our hasty filming we did in project one.

The shoot went really well, aside from not getting an actor. Using Marshall was a last minute necessity. Beth, on the other-hand, was fantastic. She is an acting major and it was really nice working with someone professional. She was prepared, had a good attitude, and was just all around fun to have. It wasn’t until later in the shoot that Beth said, “Why didn’t you tell me you needed an actor? I have access to the entire acting department.” I do not think that not having an actor will be a problem again.

During the shoot we had two different takes on every scene we did. We first shot for the look, then we shot for the audio. I unplugged the microphone from the camera when we did the “look” shots because I didn’t want the crappy audio interfering with the visual aspect of our piece. I think that next time I will record the sound just for the heck of it, and it will make placing spoken audio easier to place. A slate would help too.

Editing was a much better experience this time around. Instead of trying to fit the pieces together the way we intended, I took only the good shots and pieced together something different that was also more effective. There were several shots that were rearranged and scenes taken out because they weren’t necessary. I know that there could still be some cuts made, no picture is perfect, but the fact that I can’t think of any makes it a personal triumph. After I locked the picture Marshall came down and found all the sound effects and music. All of our sounds are from SoundTrack Pro so I think we don’t have any unlicensed material that we can get in trouble for. Austin did a great job directing. He was also there for virtually the entire editing process.

I’m proud of this piece and I wish that I could give me teammates more than 85 points.
Marshall: 85
Austin: 85
Myself: 85

Chapter 13 – Basic Lighting for Film and DV

Lighting is ridiculous. I can comprehend almost everything that has a current running through it, but lighting is a different monster. Variances between natural and artificial lighting is one example of lighting’s complexity with which I now know I know nothing of. The light properties (intensity, hard vs. soft, and color temperature) were things that I was aware of from being on previous shoots. I like how the inverse square laws also plays into effect when dealing with light as it did with sound. Using the same K for Kelvin and for thousand seems confusing, but after thinking about it it’s not really; when you’re at a shoot you just know. It’s like using the word production, you know given the context clues. I’m not all knowledgeable when it comes to optical physics but I don’t know why a specular reflector maintains intensity. According to my personal opinion it should not keep the same intensity but increase the spread of the light’s intensity. I liked how the author made the side note that neither hard light nor soft light is better, what matters most is how you want to convey your message for that particular scene.

Now the ND Filter makes sense! I’ve known what it accomplishes, but I never realized why it was called a filter. Filters are really cool. I never fathomed that so many existed. A polarizing filter would be really handy, but a graduated filter would be da’ bomb. This would seriously take care of all the exposure problems when filming outside. I don’t know whether to adjust the exposure to the sun or to the actors and make everything seem dark; a graduated ND filter could take care of all the hassle.

Gels aren’t as cool as filters. The ability to adjust the color temperature with a CTO or CTB gel is neat, but not as cool as a graduated ND filter.

Sure, I can read about lighting position, but this is something that’s going to take a long time to get right, let alone master it. Practicals and three-point lighting, backlight, fill light, angles of light… it’s insane how many forms of lighting exist. Unlike sound and video, lighting techniques have been fairly consistent for decades. No digital lighting here, thank you. To top it off it seems that for every light you have, you need a counter light to offset it’s intensity and give the light a motivated source, e.g. key + fill.

I basically know all of the lighting equipment. The gobo was something new.

The diagrams about light and how they enter the camera lens were excellent. It put almost everything into perspective. I wish I just looked at the pictures rather than reading the entire chapter. Just kidding!

Project One Reflection

Our first shoot went fairly seamless with the occasional hiccup. Originally we planned to film on Saturday, but our actor ended up going to a funeral, thankfully it wasn’t his funeral. Since we had no actor, Austin, Marshall, and I went out to our location – which was chosen Friday – and planned out all of our shots. We needed everything to be planned out ahead of time due to the lack of filming time we were going to have the next day; our plan was to film during the “Golden Hour.” We mapped out our shots, aperture and ND settings, frame-rate, and shutter-speed. All was good to go.

We found a new actor for the Sunday shoot. We got to the location roughly 30 minutes before the “talent” and setup the equipment. Our actor arrived on-time and everything was going smoothly. Filming during this time produced huge shadows that we had to work around. The tripod we obtained was missing a plate, this, in the grander scheme of things, was not a problem but still shows the incompetence of the prior people who did not remove the plate from the camera. Panning down to the actor’s foot while keeping everything in focus was a difficult feat; we could not get the shot to the extent that I wished. Every other shot that we had planned out came to fruition. We purposely planned many obscure and somewhat disorienting shots. We wanted the audience to feel uncomfortable because, as it turns out, the character we are following has died.

Post production sucked. For some reason we have the month, date, and time recorded on every single frame. There was no flippin’ way around it. We were stuck with this inconvenience. Instead of zooming in on an HD timeline and risk distortion, I edited the piece on an SD, anamorphic timeline. This way, since the image was scaled down, we could zoom in to the point where the time was no longer displayed and not risk distortion. My argument is that if this was going to be made into a DVD, DVD’s are SD so there shouldn’t be a quality difference using an SD timeline over an HD timeline.

After watching all of our captured footage and completed editing I must say that I am disappointed with the way it all turned out. Our hopes of grandeur may have been too big, or I may not be suited as a director. I’d make a kick-a$$ DP but maybe directing is something that I need to work on. We will find out with future projects. I do, however, know that Austin and Marshall worked just as hard as I did. They knew what I was looking for and we just didn’t get it. This project was more of a learning experience. Our next project with be more inline with our high caliber of work.

Austin: 86
Marshall: 85
Myself: 84

Chapter 1 – From Idea to Cinematic Stories

This chapter is essentially a rehash of screenwriting. You have you conflict, climax, protagonist, and obstacles all tied together by the plot. Real exciting stuff. I did enjoy the section “Ideas Within Limitations.” We had no limitation in screenwriting. Our creativity was our banana (whatever the saying is). Now that we are actually shooting, we need to be consciously aware of what we are physically capable of doing. We actually ran into this problem during our first shoot. Plans of grandeur clouded our physical ability to obtain those shots. A mistake we will not make again, we’ll be smart about the limitations that we have. I felt that Robert Rodriguez’ had some sound input from the excerpt at the end of the chapter, “How do you make a cheap movie? Look around you, what do you have around you? Take stock of what you have.” Instead of trying to make Avatar on a college student budget, make a movie involving things around you. I’ll end with a final quote from Rodriguez’, “On Mariachi I had two lights, regular light bulbs; they were balanced for indoor film, so [they] look fine. In fact everyone said the lighting looked moody because there was very little light. You mistakes, your shortcomings suddenly become artistic.”

Chapter 15 – Sound for Production

Good chapter. I, too, agree that sound is often overlooked by amateur filmmakers. Audio adds some much dimension to a film that it should be praised more often than it is. Some basic audio properties include: pitch, loudness, quality, and velocity. What I find ridiculous is that the average human can distinguish a relatively small amount considering the entire sound spectrum, and humans see even less from the light spectrum. There are a lot of audio terminology used in this chapter that I was not familiar with. Decibels, threshold of pain, and frequency response were all terms I remember from physics. Dynamic range and the inverse square law were two terms that were new to me. The inverse square law essentially says to be as close to your source as possible.

Wild sound is room tone and is non-sync as opposed to sync sound which is recoded at the time of shooting, e.i. spoken lines from the actors. Double- and Single-System recording is something that I was aware of, I just didn’t know the intricacies that went with them. I always considered using a boom with a V1U a double-system because I was using a microphone instead of the built-in mic. I now know this is plain wrong. I know in class we discussed recording audio and the general consensus was to use single-system. If Hollywood uses double-system, why not practice using that technique? I don’t know how compressed audio is when we use the V1U but I’d rather capture sound in a lossless format (WAV or AIFF). If we were to rig the audio so that it was captured lossless, it would also give us much more recording freedom. Recording lossless would also give better bit depth.

Chapter 9 – The Digital Video System

The CCD chip (charged coupled device) is the holy grail of the camera. It is with this chip that all is possible. NTSC is America’s video standard. This is changing in favor of HD because HD is beautiful. It’s only a matter of time before we start seeing 3D TV stations. NTSC aspect ratio is 4:3 compared to the 16:9 aspect ration of HD. Non-drop timecode clocks are completely pointless and should all be thrown out. Currently 1080 60p is not considered HD, I don’t even think that it’s possible. These were all things I knew.

Chapter 10 – The Lens

Really interesting stuff here. The different focal lengths was something that I was not aware of. Wide angle lens have shorter focal lengths. Telephoto lens have longer focal length. I like the section discussing prime lenses. Considering how Elon does not have any video cameras with adjustable lens made me realize how cheap our department is. We received a new 60-some inch TV in the lobby but can’t get a prime lens? Come on. The f-stop and aperture sections were neat. I always thought that the iris adjusted the brightness of the picture, which is what it does, but it does more than just that. The higher the f-stop the more depth of field you have, which is why on sunny days when the f-stop is cranked up it is nearly impossible to pull focus. Circle of Confusion is exactly that, I can’t really describe it. It’s confusing.

Chapter 3 – The Visual Language and Aesthetics of Cinema

Welcome readers. In this exciting chapter we learned the magic of aesthetics and terminology to boot. Shots, camera take, mise-en-scéne, sequence, and montage. This terminology makes way more sense than screenwriting lingo. Essentially a shot is the single moment between the camera starting and stopping recording. Something that I subconsciously knew but didn’t know there were specific terms for was having an open or closed frame. Open frame being that people walk in and out of the shot, making the audience aware that there is more going on than in just that 16:9 field that they see. Shots can go from open to closed on a whim. Breaking the fourth wall isn’t done nearly as much as it’s done on stage, except by Woody Allen; apparently, Martin Scorsese used every single type of aesthetic shot possible for Raging Bull.

Chapter 12 – Basics of Exposure

I know the vast majority of the terms and how they relate to film practice, what I don’t know is how to put these things into action and make a great looking scene. One thing that I’m starting to understand is that I don’t necessarily need to cast out all shadows from my shot, but rather give enough light that makes the frame look like lighting the eye would see.

I did find Ansel Adam’s Zone System for grayscale to be really neat. I never took studied grayscale to the extent that there are 11 shades of gray.

Always use manual exposure and adjust the color bars on your monitor to match the ones on your viewfinder so you aren’t looking at two totally different colored images.

Seriously, this chapter had nothing new. This is definitely more of a “practice” chapter since the concepts are easy to grasp but a way more difficult to do.

Chapter 8 – The Film System

Talk about the frames per second in film were things that I’m well aware of. I did like the chart that calculated the length of film footage needed for a given amount of time. The differences in slow motion and under-cranking makes more sense to me. I always had trouble figuring out how films with slow motion looked so seamless in theaters and yet when I’d try to do the same effect it’d be jittery. I realize now that they literally just change the crank speed, where as in video the computer digitally tries to recreate the missing details between frames, and more than often fails.

Talking about the parts of the camera (film magazine, aperture plate, pressure plate, etc.) was really cool. I wish that we had film cameras as a tangible demonstration, this would have been extremely helpful when it came to the proper technique for loading film into the camera. Details about the claw and sprocket holes just goes to show you that film is literally a still camera. I never realized the intricacies involved in making an image show up through the camera lens so the camera operator to view the scene while recording. Despite the flicker effect I think that the mirrored shutter is a better system. The mirror allows 100% exposure to the film, so there’s no compensating exposure like there is with the beam splitter system. Removing the exposed film from the camera was wicked involved. It’s like diffusing a bomb.

This was a content heavy chapter. This was the most helpful chapter in terms of film camera operation.

P.S. There is a typo on page 154. The author wrote “thar” instead of “that.”