Seven Days of Challenge
This week was filled with a tremendous amount of work since we were being set out for a Seven Day Film Challenge which meant for us that we should try and incorporate everything we learned so far by shooting a short film. Furthermore, we should finally decide whether to take the Filmmaking Pathway or the Digital Production Pathway, which is still a pretty complicated decision for me to take. But I will come back to that later.
In Monday's morning session, our lecturer Andrew taught us about the importance of iconography and mise en scène for visual storytelling and how not only framing and camera movement but also any elements within a frame (actors, costumes, props, etc.) enhance the genre and the emotional depth of the fictional world in film by establishing themes through symbols. From what we learned so far, it is apparent that this is a highly intertwining and interrelating aspect of filmmaking, needing a lot of thought and pre-planning whilst touching on numerous elements and - hopefully - creating various degrees of meaning in a film. Welcome to the true meaning of the art of filmmaking!
Having said that, our challenge was now to produce a short film especially with mise en scène and iconography in mind, thereby catering to a certain genre we were dealt on Monday as well. While it was already then foreseeable to be an ambitious task, it was enhanced further by being only allowed to use 10 pounds worth of props in total and to shot with edit in camera. Hm… Sounds easy peasy, right?
As I mentioned in a previous post, it is really difficult to edit in camera since you do not have the luxury of any postproduction. So if you shoot a scene, it should better be immaculate. From acting to camera settings and camera movements to lighting. If, for example, the lighting is off - as my group experienced countless times - you need to rewind the DV (at least in our case) and rerecord the take. Which can easily turn the cuts into jumps if you don’t master that beast. Which is a got occasion to testify that I would make a poor beast master.
But well… I wanted to enter the business and learn how it’s done properly, so here I am! After our task was set for the week, my group immediately went off discussing possible stories and ideas, abandoning everything we could not use themewise due to the whole 'editing in camera issue'. After racking our brains for a day and doing an exercise on recognising the first 16 shots in one of our favourite films on Monday evening, we settled on a storyline and on the framing of the shots during lunch break the next day and took care of the props in the afternoon and evening. Lynley filled out the risk assessment, while Adam took care of the props we already had at our disposal and I jotted down the shot description as well as set-dressed our location on Tuesday evening and early Wednesday morning,
Regarding the fact that we temporarily were down on only one camera for four groups, we decided to schedule our shoot for Wednesday already, so we went and took out the film kit, monopod and lighting equipment from Lee at approx.10.30 and immediately headed back to our location where we shot, with minor breaks, until 18.00. And my, how exhausting that was!
Regarding our genre (which I will reveal at a later edit) and the tasks we were given, our group decided on settling with a minimalist set decoration and a mostly dimmed colour palette, juxtaposing that with tracking camera movements, tilted angles and distorted perspectives. We learned how ambitious that project was when we actually had to shoot it, for we not only needed to take care of acting, camera, lighting and sound AND the mise en scène, but also of matching and synchronising a lot of actions and that - naturally - turned out botched sometimes, and even more so in the climax. So we did a lot of retakes… Like, A LOT of them.
Personally, the greatest issue to me was the fact that we struggled with continuous lighting. While we were all making painstakingly sure that the light settings of the LEDgo itself did not change, you could easily tell even the slightest change of the surrounding natural light and how camera settings influenced it to the point of no return... Well, to make a very long story very, very short, we did not manage to adapt a lot of the lighting, even though we all tried really hard. To my mind, it watered down our mise en scène tremendously and devoured a lot of time we could have used better. Well, I shall definitely make a mental note to read more into lighting and camera settings to avoid that in the upcoming projects. And while I do know that it has only been three weeks of learning up until now, it is frustrating to me that the images I had visualised in my head turned out completely different in reality and could still not be remotely approximated by any attempt whatsoever. Cinematography is rightly considered an art form in and of itself.
However, we were able to finish shooting the film to the best of our current abilities and returned the equipment to Lee on the next day before the seminar with Mike. On Friday morning then, I decided to delve a bit deeper into sound recording and to reread what we learned up until now. And this weekend, I devoted my time on journaling, blogging, scholarship applications and revisits of the seminars we had so far. I am looking forward to the rather relaxed schedule of next week, since it allows me more time to delve into the additional literature I loaned from the library two weeks ago on mise en scène and cinematography. And to further repeat the various subject matters. This is surely demanding and fast paced, but that is exactly what I wanted from the course and what I hoped to receive from CCAD.
Regarding the adjourned question of pathways from the beginning of my entry, it would be a lie if I said I was 100% sure of which one to go. I thought about working as a freelance filmmaker after college or at least keeping that possibility accessible. Regarding the fact that I still feel unsafe with the camera and my camerawork can mostly be subsumed under ”furious experimentation”, the Digital Production Pathway might help me. But then again, I always have clear visions in my mind as soon as I come up with a story and I want to be versatile enough that I can express those images and pitch them successfully, which is what I would learn in the Filmmaking Pathway.
Sigh… it will most likely come down to a gut decision.