We Have Film School At Home

The assignment for today was to shoot a transition from outside to inside. I also wanted to include a basic match cut.

I haven’t shot film outside in a while, and wanted to get practice with that, since lighting is very different. Here, I ran into an easily-identifiable problem, because you can see the shadows of dust specks in the shot – something that doesn’t show up when you shoot inside. So, I basically need to clean the lens. Cleaning the lens will also, I suspect, cut down on the blooming glow that you see in the shots that include the sky – which while overcast, is nevertheless a significant source of light.

Because I didn’t want to stay outside for long, I also handheld the camera, and wanted to test the stabilization capabilities internal to DaVinci Resolve, which I’m sure are great, but which did not result in super smooth video, at least not without applying a more severe stabilization algorithm. Not the biggest issue, because I was really whipping the camera around, and I don’t plan to do much handheld video work in the future.

That said, the inside video I think looks really great compared to what I’m used to capturing. I think I also learned an exposure concept, which is something that is very different from the audio world. In the audio world, you don’t want the track to distort because that kind of distortion can easily distract from the general listening experience. But in the video world, distortion is not terrible – there is distortion (clipping) in the sky. You want to shoot so that the object of the viewer’s attention (as you intend) is exposed correctly. I think working in audio world for so long, I always tried to correct video work to avoid any kind of distortion (clipping) at all cost. But I’m less averse to that now, and that leads to better exposure and correction.

The match cut worked just fine I guess. In the “narrative” of the shot, I just used the fiction of an object being found outside, and then viewed inside, as a way to create an occasion for a match cut. The goal is really just for the viewer to connect the dots, which is not a big leap for the viewer, so I think it turned out fine. What was interesting to think about is how becoming comfortable with different types of cuts can themselves be occasions for building narrative. As one becomes comfortable with more kind of cuts, the director has more avenues for story-telling?

Of course, there is a cut-on-action also built into this clip, which also worked out reasonably well, and allows an occasion for the match-cut itself, to connect back to the more general assumed narrative of someone finding a watch outside, and bringing it inside to examine.