Photgraphy Part 1

A Silhouette of Trees: Taken on an evening around the Savannah, truly a beautiful scenery.

Of course part of getting to know how to film, is understanding the camera and how it functions. As an editor I still had that curiosity about the camera that made me conflicted between choosing either being an editor or camera person for my group. So on my own I went out and took a few pictures, choosing this as the best. I tried to understand framing of shot.

The picture shown above was later used as one of the backgrounds for the poster I created for the short film called "The Cut". I borrowed the Fujifilm Finepix S1000 and scouted various places beforehand. I could not resist this sunset.

I went scouting for a place to give our film a home when originally our class lecturer told us specifically that the editor, since we were such a small group, would also become the location/scout person. I wrote it down this was how it went originally.

Four Person Team
Producer
Director
Editor/ Location/Sound
Camera Person/ Lighting
Actors (2 outsider)
Grip / PA (1 outsider)

Originally our lecturer was led to believe that there were nineteen of us in class altogether, so she made us form into groups of six each. Group assignments allow you to understand the value of team work, as each responsibility is split and you cover a greater range of things together. In the process I allocated my fine teammates earlier on so we could get a head start, but something was not adding up because there were only four of us sourced and another group of seven, beyond the limit set out originally. So where were the other group members to give our group some "body"?

We later discovered that nineteen became a class of seventeen and there was one group of six, one group of seven and another of four. As much I saw the deliberate unfairness of this situation, I kept thinking we needed at least an additional member, to remove the burden of the assignment from four. I mean, this is a full scale film production, short but a lot of work. Surely I believed miss would see it our way as well.

This minor class dispute left us in the end with four people in one group agreed by our lecturer. I still kept thinking we needed more people. So she agreed that we sourced people outside for the group, but sometimes you require your members to do a little more than their share, especially being beginners, we needed all the help we can get. I still didn't see the point to arguing, we worked it out and later on one person came and made our group five, which became a relief.

Sometimes there are situations like this that really stress you out in the field, and I didn't want my job to suffer because we just didn't have enough people while other groups had a fair advantage. They really wanted to stick to it and that was that. My concern was making sure our group met regularly, as I was certain our already chosen producer believed that as well.

I end off just as I began, with as beautiful picture. In the end you still manage to pull off what you didn't think was possible. It all takes a little effort and sacrifice to get there and I admired how much my group members sacrificed to produce a beautiful product, I would share with you later on.

Cavielle