Yesterday we went to Truro to start vox popping people in cafes. Mike had arranged with the Bambu cafe that we were going to film some of their customers and maybe the owners if they weren't too busy, but after that we were just going to wing it.
We encountered a number of problems, one of the biggest being lighting. Most of the places we went into were tiny and it was not really viable to plug in dedos just to film them. Luckily I brought along an LED light that fits on the top of the 5D but it ran out of power during our first interviews! With the light not working we decided to go to the shop and buy some more batteries. There was a 3 for 2 offer on the batteries so I bought 3 backs of AAA batteries because I thought that was what we needed, but I was wrong so after paying £5 for batteries that were useless we used the AAs we already had! I felt like such an idiot!
Once we were armed with some AAs we set of for some other venues. We went to another couple of cafes and we managed to get this quirky burger van I really wanted to get in, I thought that it would look great on camera! :) I was so happy we managed to, when we had asked the ladies before neither of them wanted to be filmed, but we filmed a man buying a cup of tea instead. Below are some stills from the footage. They still need to be colour graded and Natasha is going to do a great job I'm sure. I think we are also going to go with the cinematic aspect ratio, I really like how it looks in the pieces by Philip Bloom that I have mentioned before.
Today I met up before lecture with Natasha to start logging. Looking through the footage was slightly disheartening, I could see quite a lot that was wrong and this really annoyed me. Quite a lot of the people moved out of focus, I had not realised as I had stepped away from behind the camera for Mike to stand to ask questions. I thought this would have been a good technique to get the contributor to look down the lens a bit more comfortably, but I had not taken into consideration the fact that I may have to change the focus. Never mind, there is still some great footage from interesting contributors and I can only learn from my mistakes. I am glad that I decided to watch the footage back because I may have continued making the same mistakes through the whole thing.
Another thing that seems to be a big problem with the down the lens vox pops in particular is that people seem to find it very hard to look straight into camera and keep looking there. In a lot of the shots the contributors eyes are darting all over the place and this makes them look really uncomfortable. I think I just need to not be shy at prompting them to look at the lens. This is actually something Mike is very good at doing and I am always very grateful when he does. When it works, the down the lens technique looks amazing. It makes you feel as though they are looking straight at you, I think this makes the viewer become more captured by the piece and drawn in.
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