long take

I loved working on the long take last weekend, even though it was on a saturday. I got to operate the camera which was very exciting for me because i've never worked with a 16 mm camera before. I was pretty nervous about getting all of the setting correctly, but after carefully following instructions i think i got a hold of it. I still treat film as such a delicate substance, when in actuality its not as fragile as i like to think that it is. After loading the camera we spend the majority of our allowed time planning out the long take. Luckily we had already come up with a concept we were going to shoot the previous class, so all we had to do was block our actors and get the timing right. We used a wheelchair dolly to track our long take. Getting accustomed to sitting in it was a little bit of a challenge. I had some trouble finding a position that was comfortable, and practical. I had to sit in such a way where i could steady the camera from bouncing around, as well as be able to look through the view finder. Eventually i sat across the chair with my legs hanging from one side and held the camera steady against my knee. The dolly worked well, although there were problems with the uneven sidewalk and cracks. It was hard to keep the camera steady but I did the best I could. We blocked and rehearsed the shot five or six different times, with the actors doing their blocking and me following them along pretending to shoot. The timing worked out pretty well, although we didn't get the final shot in the end because we ran out of tape. I believe i might have set the fps a little too high on the camera, I will have to make sure to double and triple check this the next time i work on a similar project. The sun was on our side it seems, when we were ready to shoot the real thing the clouds gave way to a perfect window of opportunity. I had a good time watching the film being developed, someday i hope to be able to developed some of my personal work in this way, at least now i'll some idea of what to do if this happens. When i saw the developed film i was a little concerned because so much of it was dark, but then realized that it was because of the brick columns we used in our shot which stretched across the entire minute of footage. It actually came out looking great, and I can't wait to start working on the sound editing for this assignment. To be honest I was a little surprised that it came out looking that good, but i have low confidence in my abilities to operate camera, which is something i need to overcome ASAP because I hope to operate equipment and cameras as a profession some day, and confidence is something I will need to project to potential employers. I enjoyed looking at the negative image of our long take, and sort of wish we could leave it looking this way, but it’ll probably look even better after me and my partner take it into final cut. I’m not quite sure yet of what sort of sound track I want to add to this footage, but I’m sure we will come up with something great. So far it is reminiscent of some sort of skate board commercial, and I wish to steer the project away from that direction. Anyways, I had a great time working on this assignment, and hope to continue such work on my own in the future.