One Shot

When we first went out there we couldn't figure out how to see out of the eyepiece and had to go back and have someone show us how to do it. Once we got that taken care of we just rehearsed it a few times. I felt like such a douche bag acting like a total idiot in front of the camera. Especially since tons of people will be seeing the video, or at least 16. During the rehearsals Kristen nailed me right in the face almost every time. But in the last rehearsal we decided to switch it up and have me stand in front of the camera and have her hit me in the side of the head. So when we shot it, instead of hitting me squarely in the head as had happened in all of the rehearsals, the ball just grazed my head. It looked like it turned out ok once we watched it but we were seeing it twice as fast as we actually will be. It probably won't look so good once we slow it down. I am glad you told us that we were actually shooting for 56 seconds rather than 28 or we would have really screwed up. Thanks, by the way, for taking those flattering pictures of me ass up on the ground. Now I'll never be able to live it down. Kristen already has it on her myspace so it will live on forever. We had a lot of fun shooting it. I am glad we got a good exposure, thats the most important thing. We got in the back of John's truck and rode around to dry the film. That was probably the most fun part, I know Kristen got a good laugh out of me rolling around in the back of a truck bed. Overall it was a good experience and I hope we can create a good enough soundscape to do it justice.

Editing the Animation

We ean into a ton of problems when editing project 2. Kristen and I tried to figure out how to brighten the image. We found the brightness but all it did was lighten the foreground, making the image worse than it was originally. We then tried adjusting the color saturation but it didn't help either. We eventually just left it alone. The audio also didn't work once we moved it into final cut but that had to do with the settings in final cut and we were able to fix that. We found some tracks that went well with the video. We thought we would be able to transfer songs off of our ipods onto the computer but I guess there is some limitation on the lab computers that disallows that. So we had to go to plan B and choose from a couple of CD's that Kristen brought. We slowed down some of the segments and copied a couple to make it longer. We sped up the first part where the cars were passing to make it seem like they were passing by more rapidly. We mostly left everything else as it was with the exception of cutting out some bad bits where our hands were still in frame or if the camera was bumed for a couple of frames and the image jumped. We had tried to shoot some coverage in class but the close-ups were way too dark to work with so they were just left out completely. I am not sure what exactly happened with the lighting. We had one light on either side including the Fresnel. I suppose we should have used some kind of reflective material on the floor under the glass to provide some backlighting. That was our main mistake in this project. It possibly could have had something to do with what stop we were shooting at. I honestly didn't notice what it was set at but it could have been too high to let the light in.

Bolex

The Bolex was a little more complicated than the super 8 cameras but not as complicated as the Arri S or the CP16. I like the self loading capabilities that it offers as it was much easier to load than 16mm cameras. I forgot to lock the pressure plate back in when I loaded it and I forgot to reopen the loop formers but I got the hang of it in the end. i am not sure what the practicalities of it are. If you can only shoot continuously for 28 seconds at 24 frames per second I can not imagine who would use it to make a narrative film. There is no capability for en extended take but I guess it could be used for stylistic purposes. I suppose you wouldn't be able to record synchronous sound with it since it doesn't have a crystal motor and the camera itself is very noisy when running.