I learned about a number of things today. We were taught about the best methods of recording people for documentaries. Have you ever watched a documentary where someone goes around a town asking questions to complete strangers? We were taught about the best methods to do this today. We were taught that using different camera positions on each person being recorded was an effective way to make it interesting. As well as this, to record in a different location for each recording. This effect helps the flow of the film and for every piece of footage to feel fresh and not boring. It can also be a good idea if you don’t always have the person being filmed in the centre of the screen. To show them in the corner of the screen can be a good method because it will also include some of the general background which can make it a nicer shot.

When using SLR cameras, there is also a high risk of the picture quality being out of focus and this can be hard to control at first. I am someone who does hate it when it’s out of focus! The cameras we used today were on the manual setting so you had to turn the wheel (at the end of the lens) to get the camera to focus. I did find that sometimes the background was more in focus than the person being recorded. This is a skill I hope I can develop.

We were also taught to think about the demographic we want to aim our films at. We learned that it’s important to research to ensure your idea hasn’t been done previously so that there isn’t too much competition. It’s important to aim for something unique that you don’t see too frequently.

Below you can see my attempt at using people at different angles that I used two years ago. As you’ll be able to see, I did use the same location for each shot, but the angles did change. I hope I can learn to make better films.

Today we spent some time in the college’s TV studio and I got to find about the necessary filming techniques that goes into a lot of TV recording. They had a number of lights. For example; there was a light called ‘the tim-light’ and others. There were also about five cameras we used to record students playing the musical instruments.

We also had a class where we learned just how important sound was in film. One might tend to think of the footage as being the most important part of film and this is probably true, but sound is most definitely up there. Music soundtracks really help get across the tone of the scene there in. If you watched a horror scene with ‘Old McDonald Had a Farm’ playing cheerfully in the background; it would be difficult for the audience to take it seriously. The scene would no longer be scary, but funny. However, if spooky music was played in a horror scene: then the scene may well serve it’s purpose which is to scare you. This just shows  try how important music is in film.

The use of sound effects is also very important in film. Noises in film tend to be much more exaggerated than they are in real life. I learned today just how much that is the case. The sound of a knife or someone panting will likely be much louder in film to help to get the point across and help us to put ourselves in the characters’ shoes.

I also learned about different positions used with a camera. This includes things like the shoulder angle, the wide angle, the close up angle and the extra close up angle. These are frequently used in films, but most of time: we don’t really think about it. This lesson definitely brought them more to my attention and I feel like in future: I may well pay more attention to them when watching films which will hopefully teach me some good filming techniques for myself. I watched a clip from the Lord of the Rings of Gollum struggling with conflict within himself. I watched the clip and analysed it. I looked at the camera angles used and the affect that they had in the scene.

Thank you for reading. Below you can see some links to film work I have already done on YouTube. Some of them are more recent and others are very old. Not all of them are that good when I look back at them now but I’ll let you have a watch anyway.

Thanks for joining me!

“Always remember, your focus determines your reality” – George Lucas