Film Studies - Entry 2 (Pre-Production)

In the past weeks we have been very busy planning and practicing for our interview. We did lighting and camera workshops in Term 1, and planned our interview setup. However, we have now completed filming our interview, but we still need footage for cutaways and complete the post-production and editing.

Workshops
The first work shop we did was the camera workshop. We learned how to properly set up the tripods and camera. More importantly, we learned how to perform different shots and techniques with them, such as the close up, midshot, long shot, zooming, panning, among others. In our own interview the shots we used are the two shot and body shot. We also got to use the school's own Sony camera, a somewhat professional grade production camera.

The second workshop we did was the lighting workshop. Here, we experimented with a simple lighting with 2 lights. We experimented using 2 lights, a key light and fill light, and tried using a reflector for the backlight, but that didn't make much of a difference. Because our interview was a two shot, we had to play around with the cameras to get the best lighting, since it needed to cover a wider area. In the end, We decided to use only 2 lights for our interview.

Interview Planning & Shooting
For our interview, we chose Pak Mark as our subject. For location, we looked around the third floor of Building A for a classroom. We originally considered using Pak Mark's own classroom, but instead chose A36, which is currently Bu Catherine's classroom because it had a sofa for our two shot. Initially, we planned to shoot afterschool on Monday, November 1, however, because of a variety of reasons including the absence of a group member, no equipment and Pak Mark being in a meeting we had to delay it to the Wednesday of that week.

During the interview. we were given a boom mic to record audio with. But, we had no experience with it and didn't quite know how to use it and ended up using the camera's mic instead. When we arrived during the day of shooting, the class was still being used for 20 minutes. Luckily, we still had enough time to set up and we just barely finished when Pak Mark arrived. The shooting went smoothly and we did it all in one take, totalling 12 minutes of footage.

Interview Analysis Presentation
For our interview inspiration, we used Smosh's interview of Chris Pratt.

We chose this interview because it mostly uses a two-shot midshot camera technique. We analyzed different aspects of it, such as the lighting setup using two lights, one above and one on the side, use of picture-in-picture in the editing, how the mise-en-scene is used to promote Pratt's upcoming movie Jurassic World use of multiple cameras to record from different angles and others. However, unlike the other groups, we presented in front of only the teacher rather than the whole class because of a time constraint. Fortunately, this gave us the benefit of removing social pressure when presenting, so we were more confident when speaking.

Overall, I was quite pleased with what we've done so far. Our shooting went well, the presentation went well and overall our group did well. However, one thing that we could change is to stop getting delayed all the time since both our interview and presentation got delayed/moved.

Kevin 10A