Filming workshops

Tuesday 24th November 2020

On Tuesday we were using phone gimbals to make a short film.

The task:

Create a series of films from a first-person perspective, first person shot where everything is viewed subjectively from a character's perspective.

1. Imagine a child's perspective, how would they behave?

2. Imagine the perspective of someone frantically looking for someone within the building

3. Create your own character, how would they behave?

Use a range of camera angles: Tilt, Dutch angle, canted angle, or oblique angle, over-the-shoulder shots, panning and tracking

We worked in teams. I had forgotten how to use the gimbal but it was okay. The child and the frantic person was easy but I had to think bit for my own character. We each had a try on the gimbal so it was very fair.

The child videos worked very well and filming was very smooth. I believe we were able to capture the inquisitive child very accurately. The walking/searching videos were alright but if we had gotten to know the phone gimbal better that would have made the footage a lot better, for example, how to control the gimbal and keep it in the right position and how to angle the phone gimbal up and down. We considered tilts, over-the-shoulder and panning and tracking shots and angles. For the frantic searching we didn't use the dutch angle as we didn't want to purposely guide the audiences' opinion and wanted them to infer the persona's state of mind through the movement of the camera. The character that I made was a transforming character, there wasn't much substance to it but it was fun to film, however I did not hold the phone very steadily and my phone quality is not great so that is something to improve on, though in this case it added to it.

Sadly, Wix won't let me upload the videos so I can only give screen shots.

Not great quality but you can sort of feel the action, right?

The other workshop was where we were supposed to fully explore more tilts, work with the ideas from the previous mind mapping and work in groups again and also get to use the dolly which was interesting. I had two ideas, they were very obtuse but I still wanted to work with them. The first was a where someone is walking but puts recycling in the wrong bin and subsequently falls sort of like karma. I used to cameras to capture two angles but I don't have access to the videos from the camera that isn't mine so here is a random shot from the very short sequence.

The second idea was where I am walking with some stuff and drop them. It wasn't the initial idea but that is what it became. At first I had the idea to drop something breakable and then film that in slow motion but that would be hard to clean up and would be sort of a waste so then I thought about using clay instead but I couldn't find them so in the end I went with tape. There were a lot of takes because the camera man kept stopping the video right before the tapes fell but it wasn't like I had anything else to do. The final take wasn't exactly what i had wanted but I didn't want to continue doing it.