Studying Media: A Cinematographer's Blog

Our second day of filming went great! We finally came up with a cohesive plot, planned to shoot it and shot the plan! Everything worked out entirely well today! We started the day by sitting down for an hour or so and discussing out plot, with the input from outside sources we gathered. Our plot changed dramatically from what it was. Well, it wasn't really anything at all in the beginning, but you get my point. In the beginning, our two characters would meet at the bookstore, having not known each other prior to this day. But, we changed the plot so the two main characters - Adrian and Evelyn - were best friends. They would go to the bookstore together. We also developed a conflict! Adrian (our non-binary character) has a small obsession with Evelyn, and writes about them in their journal. Towards the end of our two minute film, Evelyn discovers the journal and reads Adrian's entries.  We also developed a conflict! Adrian (our non-binary character) has a small obsession with Ev...

Overall, our first film day was not what I expected. It was pretty underwhelming with the lack of progress we made. After filming, we came to the classroom to find that not only did we not have enough film to meet the 2-minute requirement, but our product was genuinely really bad. The plot was confusing and clips didn't come together in the way we thought they would. We were very underprepared through the entire process, and we all reflected on this when we met in the classroom again. And the sad thing is, when we tried immediately brainstorming for a new plot... none of us had any ideas. It was only when we all sat in shameful silence that we recognized the value of outside input, not just from our teacher but from our peers. I have friends who are also writers and creators of fiction, who I promptly asked for advice on our story. I gave them the premise of our film (two LGBTQ partners meet in a bookstore), and they gave me even more vague ideas for a story than even we had. The f...

There were a lot of clips we recorded that I was incredibly displeased with. Whether they were planned or not, a lot of them were very underwhelming. For example, the clips that were supposed to be at the very beginning of the film were both underwhelming, as we only filmed them in 1-3 takes and didn't take as much care as we had in other shots. Both scenes were incredibly slow, and not filmed the way I would've wanted them. Because we'd run out of time, we rushed these scenes which lead to their less than favorable quality. The first scene was supposed to be a tracking shot with a dolly effect, following our character into the store. Well, we didn't follow her into the store, and didn't bother to retake it because our parents were ready to pick us up at this point. The second scene was supposed to follow the first, where we see our character browsing through selections in the store. This shot was supposed to be a wide shot, establishing the location of the book sto...

Though we had many frustrating complications on the first day of filming, there were positives to the experience. I was focusing very harshly on the negatives, like how unprepared we were and how many times we had to repeat scenes, that I didn't focus on the wonderful shots we recorded.  This is one example of the clips I like to call my "favorites". This shot in particular is one I love simply because of the composition. The lighting is lackluster, and you can barely hear the character dialogue over the background noise in the store (the actor was also talking very quietly, which we pointed out several times, but the issue was never fixed). Regardless, this shot is beautifully framed just as we intended, as both characters align in their spaces on the rule of thirds grid. We wanted the poster for the "Rom-Com" book selections to be centered in between the characters, showing the genre to the audience and creating foreshadowing for the story later on. The charac...

As mentioned in a previous blog, there was discussion toward whether or not we wanted to use a tracking shot in our film, similar to a tracking shot we'd executed perfectly in our previous Chess Film. We eventually decided to use the shot at the beginning of the film, depicting one of our main characters walking into the store. The camera would be following behind her, giving the similar effect to that of a dolly shot. We filmed the shot only using one take, and this is how it turned out. Genuinely, I had a different plan for this shot, but we settled with this result, as at this point it was very late in the day and we were all ready to leave. My original plan was to follow in behind her, but my director liked the shot we got and we broke for the day. We also used another tracking shot, but instead of tracking a character moving, we tracked our character's hand tracing over books. This was meant to be the moment in the beginning of our film where our two characters met, as the...

While filming, we planned on using a type of transition cut we'd seen another classmate use in their previous film, called an "axial cut". It's a type of jump cut that brings the audience closer to or further away from the subject. In this case, we wanted to move the camera closer our character, who was being watched by the other.  This is a great example of what we wish to mimic. It's from the film Pawns in a Bigger Game , presented by our classmate previously in class.  Axial cuts occur when an object or person block the camera for a brief moment. When the camera is uncovered in the next shot, we appear to be closer to the character/object in focus. Our plan was to use this kind of shot to add atmosphere to the store, as the two characters obviously weren't the only two patrons in Barnes and Noble. We also used this shot to focus more on our character's appearance and the book they're reading ( which is   Heartstopper , an LGBTQ romance graphic novel...

Per our teacher's critiques, we revised our storyboard prior to meeting for recording. We took our revised version of the storyboard to our recording session. We had both a physical and digital copy of our storyboard to take notes on during our recording process.  This was the first storyboard, and compared to the revised one, this reads so much like a Barnes and Noble advertisement or a corny teen show. I feel our revised storyboard communicated our plot a lot better, but there were still many confusions. revised storyboard reordered shots from storyboard The revised storyboard is much more specific than our first draft, which helped us, but didn't prevent us from editing it.  The numbers (in the second image) represent the different shots, and the baffling order of the numbers made filming very hard to understand. We set aside a good 30 minutes before actually filming to clarify this order, and still we ran into several issues. The order of the shots and scenes made slating ...

Our first official day of filming went a lot worse than I anticipated. Not only had our original actors backed out last minute, but our editor was not present, so our director had to take on her role to fill in our shot logs. We were mostly figuring things out as we went along, as we never had a day to film test shots or truly finalize our plot and script. We didn't have a layout of the store to reference, and really didn't know what we were doing. As a result, the first hour or so at the location was mostly spent testing shots we'd written on our unfinished storyboard. Filming when I didn't know what I was filming was an uncomfortable experience. We spent around 3 or 4 hours at the location filming, and the results were generally underwhelming. We got shots that were beautiful (in terms of their angle, lighting, and composition), but had no general addition to the production. In fact, none of our clips came together in a way that expressed the story. This frame is the ...