Today I was fortunate enough to spend the day in one-on-one training with Christina Fox of Urban Fox. Christina has an extensive career as a camera woman for the BBC, working on projects as diverse as the news and playschool and so many other genres in between.
It was a treat to have her all to myself for the day. Christina had viewed some of my work before I arrived for training and had devised a programme to move me on. It was amazing. I didn't know how little I knew until I worked with her. I had been doing an okay job as a self taught videographer, but I now needed to step up to the next level.
Firstly we started with the bare bones essentials - the techie bits. We explored my camera and I am now confident to shoot video with the camera fully in manual mode. This answered a lot of my questions about how to get the image crisper, clearer and with the right tones and colours. I apologise to those I have shot who have turned out an orangy colour because I didn't know how to set the white balance!!
Once the techie bits were mastered Christina offered me some suggestions on what she considered as my next steps in editing based on the work I had previously shot. We talked about the effective way to shoot interviews and some of the techniques for shooting sequences to cover editing points. The video above is just a quick exercise at using different shots to portray the same story - master shot, over the shoulder, close up, and face shots. To get these shots the actor (in this case Christina) has to act out the scene four times over. This gives you four different angles to use to make the sequence more interesting.
I'm a little annoyed that I didn't do this training before I shot the video at Sawyers Hall as I can see so many places to use my new knowledge, but luckily, tomorrow I am shooting video at Leigh Academy, so I can try out my new skills then.
2 comments:
Yes very good- it looked like you had a couple of camera in action but of curse you were just very clever. My problem is that I have only ever tried to do movie making with kids and at my level they don't have a patience or me the release to really get into it other than the stand a shoot method. About five years ago I did some release to work with eight kids for ten afternoons and we did some, what I thought, was good stuff but it was pretty much all lost apart from one one minute advert that we were quite fond of- I podcasted it when I was on leave so that something could go up on our podcast page.
Champions
Thank you very much for this great video. I will show it to my students tomorrow
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