I was really excited to jump into Monday’s activity! I had never used such high tech equipment before, and I could not wait to get my hands on it. At first, I didn’t think it would be difficult to get enough footage and cut it in the three or so hours we had for class. But, I would soon see how things can easily go wrong on a film set, and that 60 seconds is longer then it may seem.
Unfortunately, my group faced a lot of obstacles. The first being that we picked a difficult place to film. We thought filming outside would make us unique and make our interview more comfortable aesthetically pleasing. This combined with all of our technical issues would prove to be a somewhat bad idea.
It took us awhile to mount our camera on the tripod. Once it was all set, we realized our first battery was dead. We ran to get a new one, but unfortunately this one actually had a low batter too and half way through filming died. So we ended up filming the rest with a different camera. The batter in our microphone was also dying. And by the time we realized all this and positioned the tripod with the new camera perfectly it was to dark to film.
We decided to quickly abandon our mission to film outside and ran back to the room we began in. With a new camera and full batteries we began filming. We only had 20 or so minutes to shoot our interviews. The lighting wasn’t great since all natural light was gone. Things definitely didn’t go super smoothly, but everyone in my group kept a positive attitude. There are things we would all have liked to change about our film and the way it was shot. But for me, not being super experienced with this type of equipment I learned a lot from my team members and from all the technical issues we had. Everything that went wrong is something that I am now better prepared to face in the future. In regards to filming I learned to check batteries first, and film second. In regards to editing film, I learned to make sure your B-roll connects in some way to what the film is talking about, otherwise it might seem a little silly.