Monday the 2nd of February

Today was after months of waiting our first film class of this semester. Ms. Wong began with a PowerPoint presentation including all the rules of film class and a brief outline of what we will be doing this semester in film studies. The rules are more or less the same as last year's rules so nothing new was learned there other that we won't be using a DW anymore and a blog instead. I was a bit worried at first about using a blog because I wasn't sure whether you could do everything like in a DW like put pictures but it turns out that a blog is even better that a DW because you can also post videos.

After that Ms. Wong told us to get into groups (my group: Chris, Henry, Andy and myself) and work together to complete the "Scavenger Hunt" exercise sheet she gave us which included three pairs of identical shots with different meaning. The purpose of this exercise was to recap (or learn for the newcomers) the basic camera and shooting techniques.

The first part of the exercise was to have a pair of identical shots of someone looking at a piece of paper, scrunching it into a ball, and then throwing it away. In one case, the shot had to look sharp and detailed, and in the other it had to look gritty, with a documentary feel. Because we were not really focused, we simply took two shots one with good focus and the other one without without going any further into details like the position of the camera or for example in the first shot I think we could've maybe have more focus on the person and have the background more blurry. For the second shot we could've deliberatly moved the camera a bit to enhance the documentary feel, but like i said earlier we didn't really try hard.

The second part was to have two shots which involved the use of colour; we were to use it to show first a student walking up stairs and looking up in surprised anger, and second doing the same action but looking up in surprised sadness. We weren't quite sure on how to change the colors in the camera so it took us a bit of playing with it to find out. The shots we took were only half succesful. Using the blue color to show sadness really worked however the shot that was supposed to show anger wasn't as succesful. Well the shot did have a sort of dark side to it but i don't know if it really was anger.

The third part of the exercise which was probably our most succesful one was to use lighting to show a harsh, unforgiving encounter between two people, and an upbeat, happy encounter. We shot this in two locations, one in the sun out door and one in the shade (obviously). It is really interesting to see how the lightning can change the mood.

For the last part we had to film a student typing something but it had to be like a dream. We tried to put different transparent things in front of the camera so that it would give an unclear image to make the shot "dreamy" like but it didn't work. So in the end we just filmed Chris typing but we filmed it through the camera of my Iphone, meaning that the camera was filming in the camera. We thought it was quite cool even though it didn't look like a dream at all.