Weekend Reflection

 Weekend Reflection: Week #1

Throughout the past week, I learned about multitasking. Most times, I have to film the interviews while actively participating in interviews. I have to make sure my camera is steady and has the proper settings and numbers dialed. These are basic photography skills, but combining them with my constant focus on the interviews makes it stressful. 

Though a challenging task, I do, however, enjoy what we are doing. It is a fascinating experience to capture a small snapshot of somebody's love story, which, perhaps, can be some of the most memorable moments of their lives. Doing our work, I feel as if we were collecting people’s stories like picking up seashells by the beach; however, differently from picking sea shells, we don’t get to choose which story we like. There is no way of knowing whether a person has a beautiful story or an ugly one; you can’t judge a book by its cover. Sometimes, a seemingly average person can produce a shocking and unusual response. Other times, a person with a distinct character and confident tone can have a vulnerable past. It is the collection of different sea shells and the surprise that comes with it that makes picking up sea shells fun. Likewise, the gathering of distinct stories and their unexpectedness makes this project exciting and worthwhile. 

Short-term speaking, I will benefit from this week’s progress by making next week a lot easier. We are on track with our work and, for some days, were able to push ourselves to stay ahead of the game so that we can have enough time to review and revise our project near the end of the final week. In long-term speaking, I have grown into a better cinematographer, including developing a sense of composition, both within a clip and of the documentary as a whole. By becoming such, I am also working towards my goal of developing videography skills. I am learning, both through watching online tutorials and through experimentation, with different camera settings, angles, compositions, and transitions. I am developing as a videographer/cinematographer in a way that, whenever I film, I have a plan/vision in mind of how I should take this shot and where this clip will best fit into the documentary. I acknowledge myself for the growth and am thrilled to see where the path of videography leads me to.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Day 12

 Day 12 Today is our final work day. We traveled back to campus and continued to make final adjustments to the documentary and finish up our reflection essays. I also went around the dorm to show my friends and dorm parents our documentary and asked about their opinions. After chatting with a few, we changed the ending quote from "make love, not war" to "all you need is love," a song written by the Beatles. This quote better relates to our topic and resonated with the audience more. All in all, I am very proud of our team and am super excited for the Express Fest tomorrow.  Total hours worked: 88.5 hours
Read more

Day 2

Image
 Day 2      Today is our first day of doing interviews. In the morning, we spent some time conducting interviews at Washington Square Park and were able to get some solid responses. At the start, we were a bit nervous about approaching strangers. We also spent longer than we expected searching for possible "targets." We were mainly looking for young adults of all gender and sexual orientations but were able to get a few clips of elders too.  The second interview of the day      After a brief lunch in Brooklyn, we headed out to a park in Dumbo under the Brooklyn Bridge. After making solid progress this afternoon, we headed back to our apartment and spent time discussing, reflecting, reviewing clips, and blogging about our work today. We gradually warmed up to the interview process and were able to develop a relatively efficient system. We figured out minor details throughout the process, such as who was holding the mic, where to stand, who was aski...
Read more

Day 9

 Day 9 The past two days were not very eventful. Because we were able to get most of the interviews and outdoor work completed in the first week, we spent time doing work indoors to get the tedious and detailed jobs done. This morning, we had a major debate on the rest of the storyline of our documentary. We each had different opinions, where some of us liked the initial interviews while others preferred the one from yesterday. It was hard to settle on one decision, so we decided to try out both. So, I made one version of the edit with the first couple of interviews, saved it, and made another edit where more recent interviews were used. To be honest, they are both excellent. And after a thorough review, we incorporated both and made a third edit that we all liked. Because of this change, Grace and Claire also had to adjust to the poster by taking out and adding some new characters. Though this occupied most of our time in the afternoon, we were satisfied with the change and are pr...
Read more