I participated in a filmmaking competition, the 72 Hour Shootout put on by Film-Lab, this year. I had intended to do it last year, but was caught up in other things that made it impossible. I had actually been aware of it for a number of years, but hadn’t really been interested in more formally trying to do film work outside of music videos. So I was happy to participate this year, even though it was still a time crunch.…

This was just practice showing a character move from one room to another, using a few different transitions. The first was a cut-on-action, and the second was really not a special type of cut, but was just trying to get an understanding for the effect of having the character not-on-screen for varying amounts of time during a walking sequence. I think, not surprisingly, that the viewer’s sense of distance is affected by how long the character is not on camera.…

In this pair of videos, I worked with shotgun mics (albeit smaller ones) and thought about mic placement, camera placement and some shortcuts for shot framing. The shotgun mics are an improvement over lapel mics – here I use the Rode Videomicro II, and the Sennheiser MKE 400. The Sennheiser I think is the winner (and is the most expensive of the two), though the quality of audio – especially when it comes to reducing reverb – is heavily based…

After some tests using clip-on microphones attached to field recorders, I switched things up by utilizing a shotgun microphone also attached to a field recorder. The sound was much improved, though I think I will be moving up from a Rode VideoMicro II to a Sennheiser MKE 400, just to get a more substantial vocal sound. The shotgun mics in general were better quality, and reduced some of the distortion in the mid-range, but also help deal with external noise.…

Here, I just did a basic attempt at recording vocal audio, and syncing it to film. I think the issue is mostly one of consistency, which means that I have to opt for a clip-on mic, because otherwise consistent mic placement becomes a problem. The audio in this case has some distortion issues, but I think that is just a matter of adjusting the sensitivity of the mic. I suppose this was also the first clip I’ve done in which…

Last time, I tried to shoot some basic camera shots in the style of an Ozu film, with the intention to “re-shoot” a scene from The End of Summer. There were a few issues I had, which in the end was an issue with blocking, and understanding the limitations of different lenses. Given the size of the space, I couldn’t shoot some of the “head-on” portrait shots that Ozu does, even using a 35mm lens, at least not without introducing…

The initial assignment I think was a little ambitious for me, so I’ve broken it down into learning subparts. I was going to shoot a dialogue scene from an Ozu film, The End of Summer. But unlike the previous assignment, I was really trying to get the spirit of the camera angles, which is so distinctive of Ozu’s films. So, for this first subpart project, I just wanted to shoot basically 3 angles – one with both characters in the…

It took me a while to get this put together because of other life events, but I had as a project to try and recreate a scene from a movie, shot-for-shot. In this case, I put together a scene from Bong Joon Ho’s movie, Memories of Murder. It was really a good learning experience, because it got me to really understand both the scene itself, as well as the “logic” of how the scene was put together. It also helped…

After the issues with outdoor shooting last week, I cleaned my lens – in this case a Takumar F1.2 50mm, and did some shooting outside. While the universal glow effect did disappear with a clean lens, there were still some dots that appeared in the image, which you can see below. Given this, I took a look inside my camera and saw that there were some spots. While they initially looked like spots on the sensor, they were in fact…

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…