Evaluation

Edited version of some footage

I have selected a handful of the footage we have shot over the last couple of months in order to evaluate the experience, techniques and learning curve that has been achieved. Although it is only a small amount of what we shot, I have chosen much my personal favourite and also the footage that I feel reflects the New Wave techniques as close as possible. Additional, I have tried to include as many techniques as I could in order to present the range of techniques learnt.

A further edit of extra footage can be found in the 'Editing' Page on this blog. Please select link to be taken to it. 






Evaluation


In this edited sequence above, within the first few seconds I have adopted a technique that the new wave film makers are known for, and that is the jump cut. The jump cut was used often in the new wave films and  was very unusual as smooth editing and continuity are so so important for the film that come out of Hollywood. The surroundings of the location were shot in the local park, this is the same shoot in which we made good use of the reflector (please click link see to see related blog post).  These are also techniques that take into account conventions of french new wave movement. firstly, using a local park as a location for filming adds an element of realism that is vital when considering the nouvelle vague stylistics. The reflector optimises the natural lgihting that we had to work with while maintaining the low budget, this something that the new wave directors had to continuously consider as often extra lighting was not something they had money for. The subject within the footage is a non-professional actor, this again was common in the new wave films, adding further realism to the film and again keeping to a lower budget.
At around 0.47 you can see how the footage was shot with a hand-held camera due to the very unsteady finish, hand-held camera was often used in the new wave films, giving them an air of realism. Moving forward a couple of seconds we are taken into a close up shot of the subjects hand scratching a stone on the floor. By experimenting with cut away shots, we were able to gain a good idea of just how many different shots you should get of the same scene in order to give you plenty to work with when editing. For this particular footage we took around 7-10 shots from different angles and different distances. This was the same for the footage of the subject standing centre frame at the start of the short film.
You can see throughout this section of footage (40-50 secs aprox.) the shallow depth of field we shot in, this is due to the wide aperture. These camera setting worked well in combination with the natural light and reflector, giving the footage a nice sharp finish and focussing on a particular point within the frame.
At 1.21 we cut to a shot of the a new subject stood on a merry-go-round, this was one of our more effective experimentations with camera movement, by placing the camera and tripod onto the merry-go-round platform, we achieved a smooth a tracking shot following the subject as it spun. This combined with a relatively slow shutter speed kept the foreground subject in focus while the background blurred out of focus. As you can see, this particular shot is not as wide as the ret resulting in a black border around the image, this was a problem that we came across during editing. We had not realised at the time of filming that the camera settings had been different on this particular occasion, therefore only realised when the footage was uploaded. I choose to leave it this way and not try to alter the difference as this lack of continuity was often a feature of the nouvelle vague, film makers of the movement did not always have the money to reshoot and therefore had to deal with any problems and work with them the best they could. Again I used jump cuts, a major feature of the nouvelle vague as this broke up the otherwise very long take. I opted to keep the shot running for as long as it does as this is something the new wave film directors often did, so I tied out there technique. With regards to the choice of music, the length of this shot works fairly well especially in contrast to the jump cuts throughout the beginning of this piece.
As we move to a further shot, we can see see more jump shots as a gondola moves down a river. This change of scene is the beginning of the footage taken in Oxford, demonstrating a contrast between the grittier, earlier location and the new one. This shot actually has slight resemblance to a scene from Truffaut's Jules et Jim ( 1962). as you can seen from the screen shot below.

I, again, incorporated the jump cuts to break down the length the of the take. We then move to busier high street in which we can see people walking past, the fact these subjects are unaware that they are being filmed gives us a chance to gain an element of realism within our footage. The most obvious are the woman walking towards the camera lighting a cigarette and in the background of the shot you can see a man riding a bike waving as he passes by. Something that liked about this particular piece of footage was how the female subject remained ever so slightly out of focus while the background (buildings and street behind her) were crisp and in focus. This again adds some element of realism, I feel as it suggests that in everyday life we do not notice every single person we may cross paths with. This realist feel relates back to the the brief.
Obviously, it is clear to see that we have not stuck to brief exactly, the original brief said we would be filming conversations between people about contemporary issues and although we have not directly done this, as a group we had been researching other new wave movements. In my case, I was looking at the czechoslovak, for this reason, in the editing process we added elements of our own researched movement t incorporated and adapt the techniques of the french new wave but still remaining true to their most notable conventions. Through our footage we have also been able to explore contemporary social issues without having the blatantly discussed in front of the camera, this in my opinion is more closely resemblant of the new wave than the idea stated in the original brief.
All of the footage in this edit has been changed into a high contrast mono-chrome to reflected a large amount of the new wave films, I come back again to Godard's Breathless and Truffaut's 400 Blows. Although reality is of course not seen in black and white, it has come to be a format which is related to realism. This is due to the fact the in the late 1920's to early 30's when technicolor was becoming more popular, it was often used in musicals or Classic Disney features, hence, it became related to fantasy.
At around 3mins 53secs in the sequence, we come to shot from within the Oxford Sweet shop, here you can see how the foreground begins out of focus and slowly the focus shifts as the background becomes more blurred. When filming this piece we opted to experiment with focus shifts to see what effect it would have on the footage. This shot as well as the following one allowed us to experiment a little more with close ups and shot composition as there is lots of lines and angles with these frames.
One of the shots that follow a little further on (at around 5.03) is one of my favourites. This is due to the natural lighting, particularly when in mono-chrome and the composition of the image within the frame. I feel that the viewers attention is drawn towards the end of the road and to the top of the cathedral seen in the background. During the shot we also have many subjects passing by the camera, one of which looks towards the camera, this breaks the barrier between film and viewer adding the realist style of the new wave that we were aiming to achieve.

Overall, although we clearly did not maintain a link with the brief with regards to the narrative of the final edited sequence, the footage we got stays in line with the themes and conventions that were outlined. The whole process we carried out with a low budget which caused us to have to think more like a new wave director as we had to over come obstacles by thinking creatively. I.e. how we could make use of footage that had not turned out exactly the way we hoped and how to gain different vantage points etc which only what we had around us. One big learning curve that personally I took from the whole experience was how much had to be throughout about before shooting anything. I feel that health and safety considerations are much more at the fore front of my mind when thinking about filming, adapting these depending on what kind of location/situation filming is carried out in. Another point to mention would be how much more confident I feel about handling a camera, my knowledge of settings, composition and lighting has definitely improved and hopefully shows in later work.



Screen Shots from the editing process:

These three screen shots show the choosing of the footage for the sequence and also renaming the clips for when they are imported into the editing software, Adobe Premier Pro. 

These three are the actual process of editing, putting the footage into an order adding effects and music to complete the sequence. 

Night Footage

Shooting at Night

When thinking about filming at night we had to plan where about's we going to go that would give us some good footage. We thought that a petrol station would we allow us to experiment well with night footage as well as having the bright neon light which would lead us to other to try out different camera settings.

This is a screen shot of an e-mail that was sent to group when planning this shoot.

After using google maps we found that we had several options in our local area.

As all the footage we have previously shot have been during day time, we needed to experiment with shooting during the night. This gave me the opportunity to experiment more with camera settings and also consider more health and safety issues that may otherwise not have come up.

We of course had to consider any health and safety issues that might arise when filming during the night. The safety of crew members and equipment must always be considered. We must be sure to be aware of our surroundings, to enable us to notice any risks that may be posed whilst out on the shoot. We were filming road side, which meant we had to take precautions and be especially careful of any passing traffic. Reflectors and additional lighting were mandatory to make sure others, drivers in particular, knew that we were there to avoid any unnecessary accidents. We also had to consider the weather, temperatures may drop during the evening this meant we had to consider warm clothing, and also waterproof wear and covering for the equipment. On top of this, we had to be very wary of other people being around, ensure crew members stayed safe and the equipment was in a safe place at all times.

On top of this, we had to ensure the areas we chose to work in were safe, ensuring no broken glass on the floor extra would cause any issues, again this is made more dangerous by the lack of light, which meant we all had to be extra cautious.

Fig.1

Fig.2

Obviously, as it was night time, I had no natural light to work with. This meant the camera settings had to be adjusted in order to make the most of what little light was available to me. We began by experimenting with still images, to see which settings need to be changed. As you can see from the still images above, Fig.2 is brighter than Fig.1, this is due to differing ISO settings. Fig.1 was set to a low ISO of 100. This meant the image sensitivity was low, making the image too dark. Though Fig.2 is still fairly  dark, particularly in the bottom corners, the image is still brighter due the light sensitivity being increased with an ISO of 6400. 

However, when coming to shoot the moving image, we came across a problem. When the settings had been altered, the camera was still auto-focussing, so the settings we not having much effect on the images. Although this meant the footage was coming out well lit, it meant we were not able to test different settings in order to see the difference. You can see how the light and focus automatically changing in the footage below.



MVI 1692 from Sammie Masters-Hopkins on Vimeo.

Although, these pieces of footage do not necessarily adapt techniques from the New Wave, the still include elements that can link them into our brief.  We are of course working with a low budget, which is a convention that has been with us from the start. Another point to make, might be the level at which the camera is from, appearing as though (particularly with the footage from below) it is just gazing, not focussing on any event or action in particular. This may be linked with the New Wave as the films of this particular movement often commented on the reality of life, as opposed to the glamourised life presented in many Hollywood movie and by using the camera to appear as though we are just gazing at nothingness, we are incorporating the new wave ideas.



MVI 1699 from Sammie Masters-Hopkins on Vimeo.

Filming In Colour

Filming In Colour

For health and safety issues from this shoot please click link. 

As we have been looking closely at the French New Wave during this project, we have focussed a lot of our footage on being black and white, for this reason we neglected filming anything with particularly strong colour. So whilst in Oxford, we moved slightly away from our brief in order to try and achieve some footage that included some saturated colour. Although, this may not reflect the majority of the French New Wave, other new wave movements, such as that of  Czechoslovakia do make strong use of colour in their films.

Sweet Shop

The sweet shop that I have written a previous post about provided us with some excellent opportunities to capture plenty of footage that involved much high saturated colour, due to the sweet packets and shop signage etc.

This clip below, is off the shops display window, as you can see the multicolour lollipops are what drew us to this place. In this particular piece of footage, you can see how there is several reflections through the window, including that of ourselves and the camera. In a typical Hollywood movie this would be regard unacceptable, however, lack of continuity and minor errors in filming such as this is actually quite common for the Nouvelle Vague movement (and in fact several other new wave movement too). This is often due to the incredibly low budget the film makers had to work with and did have the funds to re-shoot material when things like this happened. We therefore decided that this wasn't as much of problem as we initially thought when we first realised it had happened, it allows us to  refer our work once more the context of new wave that we are looking at.

Though the composition of the piece, isn't awful, it could definitely have been improved. In particular reference to the photography rule of 'leading lines'. You can see from this clip how the window frame is slightly angled and makes the whole shot look off centre. In filming, we should have altered the legs or the angle of the camera on the tripod, to compensate for the steady slope of the pavement we were on, this would have improved the angle of the shot making it come out straighter. Because of the reflection, we are getting a lot of light reflecting into the lens, making the shot look brighter than necessary. To solve this problem we should have looked at the camera tech settings, and altered perhaps, the ISO, lowering it, to 100, so the camera was less sensitive to the light. Though, narrowing the aperture (an f/11 or f/6) may have had a better effect, not only would less light have got into the camera due to the small lens opening, but we would also have achieved a shallower depth of field, focussing more on the lollipops in shop window, meaning the reflection would be less obvious as it would become out of focus, this may have caused us to need to slow the shutter speed slightly to prevent the shot becoming under-exposed.



MVI 0628 from Sammie Masters-Hopkins on Vimeo.


Rainbow Bench

This particular shot was not one that we had planned to take, nor was it in one of the areas we intended to shoot. However, as we passed it, the colours captured our eye and so we took a short piece of footage of it to see how well the colours came out in the footage. The entire shot is in focus, therefore we had shot the piece with a small aperture, f/22. You can see at the very beginning of the piece of film that it was much darker initially, this was because of the small aperture, there was not enough light getting through the lens, so to avoid any unnecessary grain, we slowed the shutter speed (1/40) instead of upping the ISO. The fact the shot was static meant there was no risk of blurring the image due to the slow shutter speed.  The composition of the shot generally adheres to the standard rules, the coloured lines of of the bench all direct to the same point, though I feel the is slightly more space to the right of the bench suggesting it is not quite central and so the show balance is slightly off, to resolve this we merely needed to concentrate a little more on the subject placement.


MVI 0630 from Sammie Masters-Hopkins on Vimeo.


This clip below, though incredibly short, capture some lovely colour of the trees that surrounded the area we were filming in. The sun makes the greens and yellows come across very vivid. Particularly right at the end where you can see the light shining between the gap of the trees. This piece, could definitely have been shot a little better, though we are only filming the tops of trees, half way through you can see the top of the wall creeping into the shot, though this gives the effect of the camera simply gazing, which is something of new wave technique, it doesn't look as professional as it could have done had we thought about it more. The image i quite shaky, using a steady cam or putting the camera onto the tripod would have given a smoother and more even shot.
Though this footage could have done with being filmed a little slower, as it never really focusses properly. Though this of course could be slowed down in the editing process, slowing the motion of the camera would have allowed it to focus more.
I think we should have thought about the settings more before being to film this, the focus would have been much better had we lowered the aperture to perhaps an f/8 (by using this aperture we can adjust the focus without losing the background of the shot due an incredibly shallow depth of field), though this would have effected the light, we have, therefore had to up the ISO (to an 800 for example) to make the image bright, as slowing the shutter speed would have only made the image blurry again.
An alternative may have been upping the shutter speed to 1/80 or 1/100, to begin with, the would prevent the blurring, though again, this would effect the light entering the camera, causing the image to become under exposed, so ISO would have had to be set higher (800/1600), which could have caused grain.



trees from Sammie Masters-Hopkins on Vimeo.


I chose to put this piece of footage up (below), as it uses a lot of colour. The colour in this almost mirrors that of the colour in the above piece of footage, I felt this demonstrated how natural colour can be just as effective as man made colour. This over the shoulder shot, links in the graffiti on the wall with the design of the back of the subjects jacket. The grittiness of the area, noticeable through the mise-en-scene in the background of the image, is reflective of the new wave as these films tend to show a more realistic and less glamourous side of life, maintaining links with our brief. This type of shot also added to the variety of shots we have taken.

As you can see here, we have used a fairly wide aperture (f/5.6), creating a shallow depth of field, the subject is more in focus than the background, though not so wide that the graffiti on the wall next to the subject is out of focus too. To ensure that the wide lens opening did not cause over exposure we lowered the ISO (100), particularly as we were shooting outside in bright daylight, the light sensitivity needed to be low.



graffiti wall from Sammie Masters-Hopkins on Vimeo.


Soup Bowl

For health and safety on this shoot please click link. 

This particular piece of footage (below), was shot during our low key lighting shoot. You can see here that there is only one light source, coming from behind the camera angled slightly to right. Because of this lighting technique, we are getting a great image, the saturated colour is coming out bold and vivid, even the colour of the soup in bold looks bright, contrasting greatly with the perfectly blacked out background.
This is helped along by the fairly shallow depth of field, (the aperture was set to f/4), bringing the bowl into focus, you can see where the edge of the table begins to be out of focus. Because there was so little light in the room, having a fairly wide aperture was mandatory to ensure the image was not under-exposed. This also meant we didn't have to risk making the image grainy by having the ISO at its highest setting. As nothing in the frame was moving, this made it possible to slow the shutter speed, again allowing more light into the camera. However, we did want to maintain this hard lighting effect and so we used and average shutter speed of 1/60.
During this shoot we were using just a single light source (as previously mentioned), this light source came from a portable spot light that included barn doors. Using light sources such as this, and as limited as this, reflect the low budget, bare necessity style filming of the new wave. Using barn doors on your lights is an easy, cheap and effective way of creating low key light, the doors allow you to direct the light beam in the direct of your choice without any extra equipment. They fact that they are easily moved is another aspect of the new wave style, this reflects the outline of our brief. 

To see more of the footage taken during this shoot please see 'Editing' page on blog or click link. 

Interview Using Boom Mic and Internal Mic

Interview Using Boom Mic

For health and safety issues for this shoot please click link. 

A boom microphone is a directional microphone, most often used in film and television production. Allowing speech to be picked up clearly, without having to have a microphone in the shot, boom mics, are microphones attached to a long pole, enabling the operator to capture sound from many angles. They can not only pick up one voice, but are also useful for group conversation as they can pick up multiple voices. However, due to the microphones being so sensitive, they are also liable to pick up background sounds and even motion from shaky hands, this is why most commonly they will come with some kind sound isolation attachment, usually this is a foam padding.

When we went out to oxford to film, we filmed in a record store, making the most of our time there we asked if the shop assistant would like to take part in a short interview for us, he agreed (permission slip in 'Oxford Shoot' post) on  to this an so we began setting up the equipment. As this was the first time we had actually used the boom mic in a serious situation, it was vital we set it up right. We had a short tutorial in how to set it up before we went.

 Setting Up In Oxford:

Below is the footage from our interview with the record store assistant, as you'll be able to here the sound didn't turn out as well as we'd hoped it would. We found the boom mic must have been to close to the speaker that was above our interviewee, therefore it picked up far too much background noise and almost completely drowned out the interviewee's speech. This was quite disappointing as the rest of the shoot went well. The composition of this piece works quite well, we managed to keep to the rule of thirds, though the subjects eye level could be a little lower, which we could have achieved silly by lowering the legs of the tripod.
The aperture in this shot is around f/16, the majority of the shot is in focus, however you can see outside the window the focus is slightly off. I would say that due to the brightness through the window, we may have needed to lower the ISO number so that the image wouldn't have looked quite so over exposed, despite the small lens opening due to small aperture.



Interview in oxford 1 from Sammie Masters-Hopkins on Vimeo.


The clip below was taken from the same interview shoot, however in the editing process, I tested out lowering the background noise in the audio settings, this has intact helped to make the speech slightly clearer. This could mean that the interview can still be used. If we relate this back to the new wave, with particular reference to Godard's A Bout de Souffle, there is a scene in which an interview is taking place near an airport and the noise of planes taking off makes it difficult to understand the speech. (This scene is in a clip below) We could also add subtitles to footage to make it more understandable if needs be, or in true new wave fashion, we could simply have a very short clip of the interview and then cut to a new scene. Actively finding ways to fix problems or work with footage we have keeps in line with our original brief as these are conventional of new wave film makers. Often there would not have been enough money left in the budget to reshoot imperfect footage, so they found creative ways of working with what they had.



Record Store Interview 2 from Sammie Masters-Hopkins on Vimeo.


Interview scene from Jean Luc Godard's, A Bout de Souffle





Using The Internal Mic

At the same time as filming the interview, using the boom mic, we had another camera taking some cut away shots of the interview, this camera had an internal mic. The clip below is footage from the interview that is making use of the internal mic. This has in fact come out clearer than than the footage using the boom mic as it is not as sensitive and therefore less background noise has been picked up. This use of internal mic, is a feature of the new wave movement as it is a cheap, portable way of recording sound, maintaining a link with our brief. 
The way in which this piece of footage has been shot, focuses on the subject in an interesting way, by filming through the mirror reflection we are avoiding conventional methods, again relating this piece to the work of the new wave directors.
The quality of this image is not quite as crisp as we would have liked, we perhaps should have checked that the ISO was set at around 100, to insure the best possible quality, which may have meant we would have had to set the aperture to an f/2 or f/4 in order to make sure the light sensitivity is counteracted by a small lens opening so that the image isn't over exposed. Also, the smudging on the mirror has not helped, the unfocussed image.



interview cut away from Sammie Masters-Hopkins on Vimeo.

Filming In 'Mr Simms' Sweet Shop

'Mr Simms' Sweet Shop

For the health and safety issues from this shoot please click link. 

This particular part of that days shoot was not part of the plan that we had initially come come with, however as a group we thought it provide some nice footage. because we had not thought in advance of shooting here we had to adapt our plan to fit around this location, also considering health and safety.

So, as mentioned in the previous post, the first thing we had to do before thinking about anything else, was ensuring we had permission to film inside, otherwise any planning would have been useless.
After this, we had a quick look around the store to see what shots would best to get and how we could make the most of the time we had in here. We noticed that the lighting was quite interesting, so thought that for one set of shots, experimenting with the white balance, aperture, shutter speed etc would be worth doing.

Here is a short clip showing how different the lighting looked after we had changed these setting.


oxford sweet shop 1 from Sammie Masters-Hopkins on Vimeo.


I put the two clips of each setting, capturing the same footage next to each other in this clip, in order to show the difference in lighting. The first half of this clip, a had a noticeable orange tint to the lighting. (the settings on that particular piece of footage were, Aperture: f/22.5, Shutter Speed: 1/500, ISO: 3200 and White Balance: 8000k). To amend this, we left the aperture and shutter speed as they were but changed the ISO setting to 64 and the White Balance to 2500. These were the settings for the second half of the above clip (changes at 0.04seconds). These differences in settings made a drastic change as you can see, making the lighting look much better.

The footage below is some further experimentation with angles and settings. Immediately below we have a short clip of zooming into the centre of the candy canes, we thought this could potentially create an interesting effect. As you can see from the fact the footage is not very steady, we used a hand-held technique and used a zoom lens. The hand-held technique is conventional of the new wave so in this regard we can link it to our brief.  As you can see, the effect got from this test, was a focus shift, the begging of the shot began with the entire area being in focus and as we zoom closer the aperture settings automatically changed, giving us focus in the centre and out of focus around the edge suggesting we changed to around an f/22.



MVI 6396 from Sammie Masters-Hopkins on Vimeo.



This piece of footage below has some link to the new wave as we are getting a reflection of ourselves in the shop window. Although this was not initially intentional, we kept hold of and made use of the footage to show a slight lack in continuity, which is often found in the films of the new wave movement. This could be due to limited budget meaning that reshooting was not possible or it could have been an intended technique to show a strong difference between the films if the new wave directors and mainstream Hollywood movies.
Overall, this is not the best shot we could have achieved, the framing appears to be off balance and the reflect means that it is hard to focus on the main foreground image.


MVI 0628 from Sammie Masters-Hopkins on Vimeo.

Oxford Shoot (Includes scans of signed permission forms)

Oxford Shoot
Tuesday 24th October 2012

For the health and safety for this shoot please click link. 

As we had thought about what it was we wanted to do with our time in oxford in advance of being here, we started by heading towards the first location we intended to shoot, Cowley Road. This took longer than anticipated as we stopped on more than one occasion to shoot footage of places we came across on the way to the location. although this did interrupt our schedule, meaning we didn't get to final destination we had planned to go to, it also did provide us with interesting, useful footage we hadn't intended on shooting.
We walked down one of the streets in inner oxford and decided to shoot a small amount of footage, giving us some establishing shots of our area, which will have a brilliant contrast to some of the grittier locations in our previous shoots.

Another stop along the way to Cowley Road was an old-fashioned style sweet shop that caught our eye. Opting again to stop and shoot some footage here as we felt the inside of the store would have a great effect and also provided a vast array of colour and interesting lighting for us to shoot, allowing us to experiment with white balance/shutter speed etc. The only problem with shooting was the fact to go inside the store we would of course need permission from the store owner/manager. Thankfully we had release forms with us that could be signed. (When we first arrived, it was soon relies that the release forms that were ready in advance had been forgotten, however after a short discussion on how to handle the problem, we found that there was a pubic library very close by and so we could easily go and get some new copies printed, without wasting too much of out time).So we headed into the shop and approached one of the staff members, explaining our project and what we would like to shoot inside the shop. After having gained permission and had the release form signed, we began setting up some equipment, the shop was fairly small so we had to be careful of where were placing our equipment so as not to damage anything. We were kindly asked not to film any of the customers that came int the store, which we were happy to oblige to, the shop was fairly quiet anyway which made the task slightly easier. 

This part of the shoot was particularly enjoyable as it was something and somewhere different for us to shoot, as i said before, we had a different kind of lighting to work with etc. Another thing that i had noticed about this shop was how perfectly it was laid out for filming in, the shelves we all stacked in almost perfect symmetry, which made it a pleasure to film in. We got some lovely shots, in particular, close ups of the brightly coloured packaging.

We eventually made it to Cowley Road after multiple stops and shot a small amount of footage in 'grittier' street and got some lovely shots of a large wall of graffiti, providing brilliant contrast to the earlier footage of the day. 

After this we headed straight for the record store that we had intended to go to in the first place, on coming across it, we again had to seek permission to film inside the shop, which was given almost immediately, so after a short explanation of what we were here to do the manager signed the release form and we began setting up. We also took this opportunity to ask the manager if would like to take part in a short interview which gave us chance to set up and make use of the boom mic. (more detail on this to come in later post).

From here, we went on to find The Turf Tavern, a small famous pub situation off an alleyway in the heart of Oxford, and again got permission from a member of staff to film there and proceeded to get some beautiful shots of the very picturesque location.

Overall, the day turned out to be fairly successful, despite going slightly off schedule and not making it to Jericho (which would have been our final location of the day), the footage we did achieve turned out well, with limited issues thanks to some careful planning in advance of setting out.




Oxford 1 from Sammie Masters-Hopkins on Vimeo.

The footage above was the first piece of footage we shot during our time in Oxford. This panning, offers us something of an establishing shot of one of the main high streets in Oxford. we were also also able to capture some nice colour from the painted buildings in this shot.
As you can see, the whole image is in focus, suggesting a small aperture, an f/22. This meant that little light was getting into the camera, so we had to alter other settings in order to counteract this problem, otherwise our footage would have ended up under-exposed. Due to the fact that there was a lot of movement in our shot, we did want to be slowing down the shutter speed to let in more light, this would have caused a lot of blurring, so instead it was the ISO that had to of up slightly, thankfully the natural daylight want the image began fairly bright so we didn't need to up the ISO to the point where we had a lot of grain in the image.


Permission Forms

Here is scans (hard copies are also available) of the permission forms we had to get signed in order to film in some of the locations we chose during our shoot in Oxford. These were filled out in order to gain permission to film in the sweet shop and in the record store.