Initial Filming Experience

In this weeks practical media workshop we had our first opportunity to actually use the cameras. Eventually in this lesson we would be constructing our own filmed scenes without dialogue but first we had to educated on a few more rules and customs of filming in a professional capacity.

First of all Matt (one of the schools filming practitioners) split us in to groups of four and then trusted us with the task of taking the cameras out of their cases and erecting them on to their tripods. Thankfully all of us managed to retain this information from last week and managed to do this without a need for query. Then Matt on his own demonstrated the kind of thing that we would be doing in our groups. He filmed a very short scene, in which he walked into shot, stoked a plastic bird, picked up a remote control and then left. He showed us the way that this should be filmed from various different zoom lengths and angles in order to have numerous options when editing and also make the scene more complex and interesting when finished. For example, when editing if you were to find out in post that one of the shots was unusable, then it would not be the end of the world as there would be others that you could use to construct the scene. As for the other reason, the scene would be quite numbing for the audience if it was all filmed from one shot. Using different shots makes it more diverse and all together more watchable. During this demonstration, Matt also told us about the terminology that is protocol when filming professionally. Some of these were;

‘Stand by’ – When the director of a production is ready to start shooting he will shout 'stand by'. This call must then be echoed by relevant members of the crew and those who don't make input to assume their positions and remain quite. People who should repeat this are the camera man to mark up the shot and prepare for filming and the sound man to put the boom into position and make sure the microphone is ready.

‘Roll Camera’ - This is obviously what the director will say to the camera man when he requires to him to cue rolling. The camera man will often reply with 'rolling' to affirm the command has been understood.

‘Cut’ – This is obviously an iconic part of film making and one that barley needs explaining. The director will shout this when he is happy that the scene has finished or something has happened which means the crew need to 'reset'. It is very important that the crew only stop what they are doing after the director shouts this do avoid mistakes that may later occur in post.

‘Continuity Person’ – A continuity person is script supervisor, who keeps track on parts of the film that has been filmed. This individual notes any deviations between what has been filmed and what appears on a script. Also, he or she keeps track of props and blockings, in addition to ensuring there is continuity from one shooting to another.

After picking up these little industry phrases we then took our group of in to a secluded area of the studio to shoot our small scene. We had a very quick brainstorm where we decided to shoot a scene in which I walk into shot, sit down on a sofa at which a girl is sat, I then attempt to woo her and she comically stands up and walks away. Of course this material is not exactly Oscar worthy but that was not the intention with this exercise. It was simply to familiarise the group with the most basic of techniques for film making. The story was practically irrelevant.

We then got under way with our filming. We assigned roles for each member of our four person group. We had a director, camera man and two actors. I volunteered to be one of the actors. We then started to shoot the scene. We started from a wide and filmed the whole scene first before going in for head and shoulder shots and even an extreme close up to emphasis the comical facial expressions at some point. For continuity reasons we laid down markers during the process. Here we could notice how we would put what we learnt last week into practice in terms of focusing and changing the white balance. We were also continuously reminded to use the terminology we had been told about. Despite feeling slightly silly doing this it will soon become second nature.

After being allowed around fifteen minutes do this Matt called the groups back so he could one by one plug our cameras into the television so everyone could watch their groups footage back. This gave us an opportunity to see what we did well and what we didn't. For the most part what our group produced was very promising with considered angles that were all filmed cleanly. This workshop was satisfying and provided another step in becoming experienced film makers.