Storyboarding
Though there were a couple of shots I left out, I ended up storyboarding most of the sequence I wanted to shoot. I found this process very helpful, as it made me think a lot about the order I would put the tea-making process in, as well as the camera angles and shot types I would implement. I also tried to indicate the actions I would perform in the drawings themselves, which I did by adding arrows to show where I would move things and roughly sketching the actions.
At first I was quite slow in making decisions on what I would do, but I eventually got into the swing of things.
Filming
I was initially planning on using my Nikon D7200 to film, however after a bit of discussion with my Dad, we decided to use my phone instead. This was for several reasons:
- It was much smaller and easier to handle.
- It could pull off the angles I wanted to use better due to it being lighter and more maneuverable.
- I could use the rear facing camera, which would make filming a lot easier, as I could have the screen visible to me as I shoot, which would make it a lot easier to make sure I'm in the right place in the shot and what I wanted to show was properly in-frame.
I had a mini tripod at home already, so that is what I used to support my phone for most of the shots.
Since my Dad was around, he helped during the filming process as well, to give a second opinion and suggest better alternatives where applicable.
Editing
When I was beginning the editing process, my main concern was if the shots would end up reaching the 90 seconds length goal. Once I began putting the clips into the timeline though, I quickly felt a lot more confident that it would be long enough.
The assembling of the clips was quite simple, as all I really had to do was cut any unnecessary areas, such as the parts where I was going to the phone to either start or stop recording. Aside from that, there was also a few clips I had to cut up a bit more than the others, but that wasn't too hard. I also messed a little with some of their sizes and positions to make up for any shots I felt were too uneven.
Unfortunately, there were a couple of points in my clips where my Dad's voice could be heard in the background, so I had to cut up and re-arrange some of the audio to remove those areas. This was a bit of a challenge, but once I had done it, I was very proud of the results.
I'd say the most difficult and lengthy part was adjusting the clips to change their brightness, contrast, exposure, sharpness, etc. It was here where the disadvantages of using a phone instead of a DSLR camera really came into focus (no pun intended), as the lighting in some of the clips was less than optimal and there was quite a bit of visual noise.
The main problem area was the window, as a lot of light was coming from it, which was something that my phone camera didn't handle all too well. This often resulted in a lot of glare in some parts which didn't look all that nice.
The most obvious showcase of this problem was in the first establishing shot, which was directly facing the window, so it already didn't look great. This became even more obvious in the part where I had to enter the shot from the side and stand directly in front of the window, at which the camera automatically increased then decreased the brightness again, which made the shot look quite bad.
I tried to correct this as much as I could, but in the end it only slightly made things look better. I did try colour correcting my shots to be more warm, but I decided it didn't look as good and re-exported the project without the colour-correction.
Final Result:
Feedback
The feedback I got from the tutor was generally very good. Most of it consisted of suggestions for possible alternate shots. (e.g. for the first establishing shot, he suggested that it might have been nice to set the POV looking into the window from outside rather than from behind me, which is what I had done) and slight adjustments I could have made to existing shots (such as changing the angle of a couple of shots to make my face more visible). There were also a few slight continuity errors that he noticed, but aside from that I was very happy with the feedback I received. `
Comments
Post a Comment