Week 6 - Production/Techniques

I had my camera collected for the beginning of the week and had planned a tight 1 day shooting schedule, with one day for pick-ups or overflow. In a perfect world I would have given myself more time but with commitment to other college projects and university applications, I was pushed for time.

The shoot started at a family friends house as I needed to shoot a Jukebox. Obviously as this was separate from the location of all of my other shots, my first thought was to make sure that there was no obvious visual landmark on the shot that would differentiate between this setting and the later. To do this, I made my shots tight and close, rarely if ever revealing any of the background. Things like this were planned into the initial pre-production documentation, but as well as being practical it suited my vision for a tighter piece then I had done yet (even though things like my Advert and the Documentary were full of close ups). Luckily, the sheer size of the Jukebox meant that it was pretty hard to get anything else in shot anyway, so this suited me well and I got plenty of shots of it trying to take in the detail.

For the main shots I thought more about lighting than I had before. Obviously, I didn't have access to any real lighting equipment, so instead I chose my shooting space on the way I could control the light. After playing around in a few locations of my house, I found one spot with controllable light and enough space in front of the small set to get the required shots. I used a makeshift technique to attempt to light the scene.

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In terms of use the camera, the first new technique I used was perfect focus. On the old standard def cameras, autofocus put everything into focus, giving it a flat kind of look. These new Canon HD cameras not only had much better picture quality, but manual focus could be used to create shallow focus with the adjustable depth of field. This gives shots more depth and visual pop and is a style very popular in adverts, music videos and films etc. I would try and pick a main subject for each shot to be focused on. Also you can achieve more diversity by making an even bigger contrast between focused and blurred imagery for instance by increasing the distance between the two objects.