Digital Video – Week 04
Development
Unfortunately, the weather didn’t really turn it on for us, so lighting within the warehouse wasn’t quite what we had hoped. Whilst we had the Dedo lighting kit to help us, I think in retrospect, a bigger wash light would have been more helpful. It was hardly a deal breaker though, so we continued on with the shoot…
I have to say that the volunteers at the museum were, without exception, warm and helpful. Whilst they did look at us with a mixture of amusement and confusion, they were more than happy to have a chat to us – some of which we caught on film (some golden moments were missed, but that’s the way it goes). In the end, we shot for almost 6 hours continuously. Aside from one of our cameras refusing to let us change settings and therefore filming in a different format, everything went pretty smoothly.
If I had to make critical comment about our shoot, I would say that we could have used a bit more organisation as far as defined roles for the day. There were a few cases where we should have been more assertive with our own duty in the shoot and really had a clear leader overseeing the filming generally.
Back at uni, we ran into a few troubles due to the different formats of our tapes and the fact that FAT32 drives can’t deal with files larger than around 4GB. This means a 60min DV tape captured to disk, won’t back up on an external FAT32 drive. Which leads to students having a freak out. However, our talented computer tech guys let me in on a MacBook secret I’d never heard of before to get around our problem: if you boot up a MacBook whilst holding down “t”, the laptop becomes an external drive. And not a frustrating FAT32 one either. Plug in in and you can transfer to your black heart’s content. These are the little tricks that make Mac fanboys such a self-righteous pain in the arse. It is pretty cool though.
After sorting our initial problems and having a couple of false starts, we got there in the end. A quick look at the footage has shown a few potential problems…
- The lighting is not consistent across all subjects
- The subjects are framed differently in relation to the top and bottom of screen
- There are quite a few shots where the boom pole drops into frame
Our next step is to get a rough cut together, so that we can divide up the editing amongst the group. As we’re all going to be heading our separate ways during the break, we need a clear direction before we go to infinity and beyond. Or something.