For this week we needed to finish our research production task that we had previously started the week before. I enjoyed writing about what I would do if I was to carry out primary research as this gave me an insight into what someone working in a similar production would actually need to do in order to make the production run smoothly and check all the props, locations and actors are right for the show and are how the directors want them to be. I also worked in more depth on the locations part of my research and decided to try and find a street very similar to the one in my TV show opening to make the research more accurate to ‘Six Feet Under’ as the main scene in the clip is the car crash therefore finding the right street would be very relevant. One area of this task I found difficult was finding a balance on what I would and wouldn’t need to research, for example if I were to research every piece of equipment it would take a very long time as I’m sure there were a vast amount of different cameras used as part of the production. I therefore decided to only include the main pieces of equipment used in the scene such as a crane for the birds eye view part and a tripod which would have been used for the kitchen scene.
I enjoyed learning about slating as before this week I didn’t know much about clapperboards and their significance when it comes to syncing together sound and video. Because in week 5 we learnt the basics on editing with avid we therefore were able to edit our slating videos once we had filmed them. The part of the task I enjoyed the most was syncing the sound and overall looking back on my clips I think this went really well and my audio and visual were both completely in sync. One problem I did encounter however was that our clips had very low lighting as our camera setting had been set to manual instead of auto so this did effect how well we were able to read what was on the clapperboard, however as we had made a note on paper of each scene it worked out okay and I would know what to do differently to improve if I was to do this again.
The lighting task was the element I enjoyed the most this week as it gave us a chance to experiment with lighting through the use of photography. I enjoyed using the different gels and playing around with different lighting positions as each set up would create a completely different style of photo. This also allowed me to learn which of the three-point-lighting set ups would give the best lighting for a photo and how through changing the positions of the lights we could create a range of different shadows over our subject’s face. One problem I faced with this task was managing to keep effective notes of the different shots we had taken as we tried out so many different lighting set ups so when it came to overlooking them it was hard to match each photo with the notes we had taken. Therefore if I was to redo this task I would use a clapperboard before each shot with a short note of which lights we had used and which gels so it would be clearer to tell when looking back through the images. I also enjoyed learning about 3 point lighting in more depth and feel I would be more confident now in using it in my future projects.
Peer feedback from Rhiana:
The slating and lighting blog post was very clear, and well done. For the slating rask, the use of individual videos to visualise the different types of slating was extremely helpful, and the entire post was informative. It was easy to read because of the use of so many visual pictures, and the wide range of lighting techniques used shows that Zoe was very experimental with the task, and explored various ways to use the light, that we had not explored as a class previously.