Week 6: Concept and Production Skills Development (Cinematography)

This week in our workshop we continued to utilise the equipment that we had been learning the past few weeks which includes: The different types of lighting and set ups, as well as the jib, track and dolly. I also got my hands on the FS5 camera again this week and I learnt some more about its functionality, lenses to equip on and in particular the camera's focus.

Setting Up a Scene

Our objective in the workshop was to set up a scene utilising all the equipment that we have learnt to use the past few weeks. Our scene consisted of a total of two subjects one of which we tracked to meet the other subject, who was stationary awaiting to have a conversation, that followed with a panning shot of the stationary subject leaving the conversation.

Lighting

In this simple scene lighting wise, we used two L.E.D lights; one was used to act as our main source of key light, meanwhile the other acted as a fill light. We also used a tungsten light to light up our background (a simple black wall) and a small 'Dedolight' as a low powered backlight. We decided to create a dark moody scene, where something unexpected/doggy would unfold. We achieved this by moving the lights around a little and this was very easy to adjust with the L.E.D lights as they could be easily changed, with regards to lighting temperature. In this scene we went for a cool lighting temperature which worked out well supporting the atmosphere we were creating.

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/2efb7a_50890c28b16c4b87b91618eee7454ec0/720p/mp4/file.mp4

Camerawork and Set Up

With our camera set up we decided to set up the track, jib and dolly in order to execute a tracking shot on the subject (subject A) that would walk to the stationary subject (subject B) to meet and have a conversation. As soon as both subjects were stationary having a conversation, an over the shoulder shot of subject 'A' was used to capture this conversation, followed by subject 'A' leaving the frame and a panning/ tracking shot of subject 'B' leaving the conversation. We rehearsed this a few times to perfect the movement of the jib, track and dolly smoothly, as well as making sure that manually the focus was always kept sharp and clear. The lens we used was a 85m which didn't have the ability to zoom and this was something I practiced in the session as filming without the ability to zoom, on the equipment that the camera was set up on which took some time to get used to.

On top of this I used the opportunity to test out some more creative and ambitious shots using this simple scene to see the jib, track and dolly's potential slightly more, which helped provide me with some more creative opportunities/ ideas when using this kind of kit for my own future projects.