Teenage Interview: 5 down, 1 to go.

This weekend we shot our footage for our teenage interview. Everything went smoothly during and after the 2 hour drive up to Raleigh.

I arrived first and immediately started readying all my camera and lighting equipment that I had laid out in my overheads. I set the ursa settings as I liked and needed them, and by the time all that was done Mariah and Kebba had arrived.

They met with the subjects first (I had been waiting outside like a creep) and soon Alex Matthews, who was our stand-in sound operator, and I had begun checking out the situation for sound and lighting in the room and started bringing in the equipment. There was a slight delay because of maids who were cleaning the house, but it really didn't take that long.

Soon we were ready to begin shooting. I set up cameras to have a low F stop so that we could focus on the subjects and blur out backgrounds as much as possible. This would keep the audience from being distracted by the bases of some C stands that were in my shots on one camera. We didn't have much space to work with, and as a result I did not have much choice but to get around them as efficiently as possible.

One of our cameras was set up on a Monfratto, but the other I was manually operating on a shoulder mount with no sticks. I had done this before, but for several reasons this interview made the setup a lot more difficult for me to keep a steady camera.

Regardless the interview came out well, and when combined with B roll I was able to capture before and after the shoot I'm sure the scene will be a success.

Weekend re-shoot. Switching cameras.

This weekend we went out and re-shot our narrative scene for the teenage section of our film. This time I switched from an A7sii to an Ursa Mini.


The Mini I am more familiar with overall than the A7sii, as a large part of my camera experience in general comes from working with the original Ursa, and and also is better designed for daylight narrative setups due to it's increased size over the a7sii. Nevertheless, the day before setup I looked over alot of ursa material to make sure I knew all of the key differences between the two models. I didn't have too many troubles with discerning the functions of the software, since the Ursa Mini didn't stray far from it's predecessor. The only factor that I had to look into heavily was format types, since I didn't have much experience with them at all. I'll be looking more into those as well as codecs later on since I want to get a grasp on different codec concepts anyways.

The key differences were mostly in the hardware. The size, weight, and design had all been adjusted of course. A lack of an AC panel through me for a loop, as there were some functions that could only be accessed from that panel on the original Ursa. It's ultimately convenient though, because I got to play around with the mounting area they left in its place and see what extensions I could add on. I had some difficulties figuring out the attachment mechanics behind the shoulder pads on set too, but I arrived so early that it was solved before the entire crew was on set.

Beyond that, a normal day of shooting, nothing going uncontrollably awry, and the large screen on the Ursa Mini helps me further confirm my image. I think I'm probably going to stick with it for the rest of the film. No offense to the A7sii fans, because it's a good camera, but for the vast majority of our purposes it's unnecessary.

The Weekend of the Success of the Filming of the Gossiping of the Moms

So this weekend was ridiculously progressive with our documentary. We managed to shoot a third of our footage this weekend for our whole film, as well as establish a poster for the movie itself.

We woke up on Saturday morning to get the poster done, shooting outside of Fischer Student Union and taking on the task of readying our actors and shooting the photos before it started raining, which we completed just in time.

Several hours later we were back on set, this time at the house of one of the mothers we were to interview. I had invited a younger film student to set to help me out with as well as to learn about the equipment. Along with the regular crew, we set up as quickly as we could, despite having several setbacks, including dust on the internal sensor of the camera, minor lighting troubles regarding mirrors, and an extremely poorly timed interruption by the neighbors to deal with parking issues.

Beyond these trifles the shoot was extremely successful. Our interviews went exceedingly well, and came out exactly as we envisioned. Our interviewees talked casually and everyone had a great time!

The next day we met in the black box to shoot our narrative mother's scene. We gathered there slowly between 1 and 2. With the help of Kebba and Mariah, I quickly set up lighting and camera, while later assisting them in setting up the background of the scene. The first couple of hours after we were ready to begin production were largely underwhelming on my part, only because our plan was largely revolving around sound and editing at that point. Later on I shot the scene itself one actor at a time, and Mariah had me take photos of each of our 4 crew members against a different one of our 4 backgrounds.

By the end of the day we were all extremely satisfied with the work we had gotten done, and Mariah put together our group photo mimicking the mom's narrative scene. Everything looks great, and maybe I'm a lot more enthusiastic this week because I got to put my lighting skills I had been learning from last semester to serious work, but I feel suddenly even more confident in our actions and our film as a whole than I did before.

Also a Storyboard. Just one. That's it.

An overview of the Narrative layout and frames for Act 2 Scene 1