Film Lesson 1

2nd, Febuary

Today, I had the first film lesson of the term. We basically had a recap lesson on what we learnt last year. We divided into groups of four, with Julien, Hannah and Jeffrey.

We recapped on the mood of colour, harshness of lighting, and something that the first termers didn't get to learn, creating a sound foley.

First, we were to film an old documentary style of a person scrunching up a piece of paper. To make it documentary like, we hand held the camera, with some shakiness to create the "oldness" of it. Then, it had to be sharp, so the tripod was used, and we changed the colour setting to a sharper one.

Secondly, we had to film two different mood colours of a person walking up the stairs and being surprised. One is angry surprise, another one is melancholy surprise. For the angry one, the colour setting was changed to more of an orange tint, and the camera was put in the sunlight. Melancholy, the colour setting was more of a blue tint, and the camera was shaded.

Third, we filmed an encounter between two people, one is a happy encouter, another is an angry conflicting encounter. For the happy one, we put the people in front of a background with warm colours. For the conflict, we put the characters under a harsher, less colourful lighting, and the people were fighting.

Fourth, we filmed the keyboard tying with a dream like sequence. Our concept was more like not real life, drifting, and shaky, instead of a dreamy, floating one. We filmed it from several angles, one of the hands and the keyboard bird's eye shot, one at the side, wide shot and the screen, point of view shot and the eyes (with a very scary expression) eye level shot. They were all hand held, shaky, to create the dream like feel.

Fifth, we filmed a conversation using the 180 degree rule. We had an imaginary line on the floor, so we filmed different shots of the people at our side of the line.

Last, there wasn't much time left, so we breifly filmed the sound foley of people laughing. Camera lens were covered, and after we tried several jokes, we all started to laugh into the camera's microphone.

This recap lesson was helpful in remembering all the different terms and to get me familiar with the camera again.