Camera Techniques: Multistory Car Park

Establishing Shots From Car Park Roof


For this locations health and safety please see previous post or click link.

Screen Shot of Townscape

Screen Shot of Townscape from different angle

After our previous shoots we became aware of the fact that we had not experimented with different vantage points. The shots from the rooftop allowed us to experiment with filming townscapes, this is something that I had never done before and so provided some great experience and we produced some interesting footage. (clips to be put up soon) These are some shots that I feel would be worth considering for our final film as it does provide us with some brilliant establishing shots as well expanding the shot variety that can we could include.

We did however, run into one problem, that will need to be addressed into to avoid it happening again. This was that one of the cameras we took up to the rooftop, would not record any footage, I tried taking some still images to see if that would work and they did, though only a few would take before a warning message appeared informing me that the SD card was full. Therefore I double checked the card to see what was on there, and found there to be nothing, other than the few stills I had just taken. So after going through the settings I knew of that could affect this I could not come across the source of the problem, meaning we only had one camera that was able to capture any footage.

After taking the cameras back, the technician informed that it may be that SD card needing re-formatting, he showed me how to do this and it seem to rectify the problem. Though this hindered our shoot to some extent, as we could not get as much, footage as we'd like to have got, it has given us the knowledge and experience so that we are able to check this should the problem occur again.

Footage From The Car Park Roof:




MVI 3014 from Sammie Masters-Hopkins on Vimeo.

This is a short clip form the footage we manage to shoot at the top if the miltistory carpark, we choose this particular location as it offered us an interesting vantage point that we had not previously been able to capture. On top of this, we were able to capture a good establishing shot of the top, that we not otherwise have been able to shoot.
One problem with this piece off footage, which is quite noticeable, it that the pan is rather unsmooth, making the entire piece look unprofessional. This could have been rectified by perhaps loosing the screws to make the head of the tripod move with more ease. Alternatively we could have taken out the fluid head tripod, which in hindsight would have been more appropriate due the shots we wanted to get.
As you can see from the clip, we kept to a narrow aperture (f/22) in order to keep the entire shot in focus. Though this meant the image wasn't getting in enough light, but as we wanted this to be a panning we did not want to to slow the shutter speed to compensate for the narrow aperture, otherwise we may have risked blurring the image. Therefore, we upped the ISO (800) slightly so that the image didn't appear under-exposed, thankfully this didn't cause too much grain as the ISO didn't need to be at its highest.


This kind of shot maintains the points laid down in our brief as it is a low budget way of gaining good establishing shots, Neuvelle Vague directors always had a small budget to work with, this is the reason the became well known for the innovation and creation with camera angles and shots and they did have the budget to achieve them the way a Hollywood film crew might.