Queens Road Establishing Shots

Footage From Queens Road

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We choose Queens Road, a local street in the town centre, as a location as we felt it may give us the kind of style we are looking for for our film. When filming there, we took some simple tracking shots of our subject walking in front of some empty shops.

We decided upon this area as it will allow our film to comment on the contemporary problems such as economic crisis, particularly in towns such as this where several shops are closing down. In particular, small privately owned businesses. This concept of contemporary issues, is something that we can link in with the the new wave, as one of the 'conventions' that would define the new wave style is the idea of addressing contemporary issues. The footage below, also shows the location in high contrast monochrome, relating it further to the films of the new wave sticking to the out;one of our brief. 

Queens Rd panning blackandwhite from Sammie Masters-Hopkins on Vimeo.


Something that we can improve, when shooting footage like this again, would be the framing. This is something that is repeatedly coming up, so I feel on the next shoot we really needed to think about the composition of the shots. As you can see from the above clip and screen shot, the lines are not quite horizontal and sit on a slant, though only slight it appears throughout this footage and is noticeable. To solve this next time we must ensure that tripod is as straight as possible by looking at the balance measure on the side, therefore avoiding any similar issues again.
What is nice about this particular piece of footage is the way in which the camera just sits back and 'watches' as the subject passes through the shot, this is a filming method adopted by the new wave directors in order to represent the monotony of life. 'something' doesn't always have to happen. By using a long shot for this piece we can get this suggestion that the world is just going by, an average day.
The above footage uses a narrow aperture of f/22, maiming the focus across the entire frame, this is quite normal for such as shot. As usual, because of the movement within the frame, we did want a low shutter speed, so to balance out the light entering the lens we used a higher ISO (800), that way the light the did get through was sensed much more easily.


We also took some shots of the subject crossing the road at the traffic lights, when doing this we tried out one shot whereby the camera came out into the road too and didn't just watch as the subject crossed.  We thought by experimenting with such a shot we may find a more interesting vantage point. You can see this test below.


     
MVI 3035 from Sammie Masters-Hopkins on Vimeo.

The above piece of footage, maintains the focus of the subject in the foreground, but allows the background to blur and go out of focus. This tells us the piece was shot with a fairly wide aperture, (f/4 or f/5.6) giving us this shallow depth of field. due to this aperture setting we kept the ISO at a 'normal' 100, so as not to have an over-exposed image.
The hand held camera work is very much a new wave technique, allowing the film to feel very naturalistic and unpolished, clearly far more representative of real life than the perfected smooth camera work of Hollywood movies.