Saturday Shoot Experience

My experience with the shoot on Saturday turned out to be a quite pleasant one. Obviously, I was not ecstatic about having to be on campus on a Saturday, and I am sure that many others in the class felt the same way. However, once we began working on the projects, I became involved with the collaborative work and the time went by quite quickly.

At the start of the day, we were not entirely sure what we wanted to capture on film. We had not had a lot of time together to plan, and we were down a group member due to a obligation he had to fulfill with his job. One group member brought some jackets to the shoot, and I brought a couple of Halloween masks. My first inclination was to shoot something in which characters would be switched with other performers seamlessly in front of the viewer's eyes. Fortunately, Genna took one look at the masks and came up with a solid idea (this was, at first, fortunate because the other groups were also switching characters with other characters in their projects, though in the end, all of the projects were quite unique and very much not similar at all). Her idea consisted of having the main character of our film, wearing the pumpkin mask, be a bit of an outcast who is made fun of by others until he meets the character in the Scream mask and forms a connection. It was a good story to tell within the limitations that we had.

While Josh was in the black box readying the camera, Genna and I were blocking out the scene, and we were able to collaborate quite quickly on how we wanted to do it all. We also came up with the good idea of having the Scream mask character reading something that would block her face and leave a nice reveal of her to the audience once the pumpkin mask character sits on the bench (Genna wisely found a giant Beatles book in the library that worked perfectly for this). We then rehearsed it a few times and shot it quite smoothly. Everyone did a great job with their acting and performing, and I thank everyone who helped out.

The only real problem I had was the fact that it was so hot and, after rehearsing with the camera a few times, I started to have sweat drip into my eye, making it harder to actually see through the small eyepiece of the camera. It was a small problem at most, and one that was easily remedied. In fact, considering all the problems that can, and usually do, go wrong on a film shoot, this was barely even a problem, so one I would welcome in comparison.

I also helped as a performer in another group's film. It was a very interesting concept, and they did a good job of blocking it out and planning, so hopefully it turned out well. It is the only one of the four that I was not able to catch when it screened, but I did see the three others. The two other group's films that I did see were very good. The one showing a person as they go through the many stages of their life worked quite effectively and brought with it a nice emotion that I was not expecting from a one minute film. The other film with the magical tent that transformed people when they went through was very good, as well. It had a nice energy to it, including the performances and depth of field, that really gave it that feel of a silent picture from the 20's.

So, overall, it was a nice experience. I'm pretty happy with what we got on film and pleased with what I saw from the other goups, too. I'm anxious to see how they all look once the editing is complete and the image turned from a negative to a positive.