camera work reflection

• Camera Movements Project

    The process for learning camera movements was very visual, rather than any textbook readings I've done in other classes. We started with simple definitions, but I didn't really understand what the weirder definitions looked like until we started watching videos and seeing it in media that I understood what the movements meant. Me and my partner chose to rewatch The Hunger Games for a specific "scavenger hunt assignment", and all I could do the whole time was notice the specifically chosen movements. It completely changed my understanding of even the tiniest of scenes and gave the story more meaning to me. 

    At the end of our learning, me and my table had to create our own story and bring it to life through specific camera movements in a short video. Storyboarding this was super fun, just because we wanted to make it as silly as possible. We had some "insider knowledge" with our bread costume since we all use the same classroom for Yearbook and we use it sometimes as a sort of mascot, so we tried to incorporate it through a story of a girl walking into a surprise party. 

    Honestly, it was kind of hard to decide shots since it was such a simple story, and we are definitely not artists, so storyboarding was a challenge for all of us. It made it kind of hard to all, as a group, understand what we were trying to convey with the shots, but after a lot of discussion we figured it out. But, in my opinion, we did do the actual shots pretty well, and they ended up looking pretty good and having decent meaning. 

    During the project, I learned a lot about camera movements and how different movements can change mood and tone of a scene. Especially during the beginning, we really tried to give a sense of suspense with the random movement and tracking the girl into the room where she got surprised, but shifted the mood with the bread costume push in. I learned a bunch about mood and tone shifts in media and their importance. Even in a silent video, the story was conveyed through just the camera and actor expressions. 

    If I were to do another project like this one, I would probably change how we did the storyboarding. We compacted a lot of the scenes to fit the minimum of 5 scenes, and we could've honestly extended the scenes into more shots and explained each choice more in depth. 

This is what ended up being our final submissions! (storyboard + powerpoint)

Presentation2 (2).

 

• Camera Shots Project

    The process for learning camera shots was a little different, but definitely shorter than it took to fully learn camera movements. It felt simpler, since I already knew a few from working cameras in Yearbook, so it came a little more naturally. We did centers to learn about camera shots, and did cutout pictures of different types of shots. It was definitely still visual, but definitions came more in handy when we connected the cutouts to definitions. I tried to make my notes as clean as aesthetically pleasing as possible, and it came out really easy to read and helped my understanding a ton.

    For this project, we had to create another story. But this time, we had to do it with an inanimate object and create a story through pictures. It took us a while to come up with a story, and we weren't super happy with what came out of it, but we ended up with a story of a backpack throughout a school day. It was still fun to go around the school taking pictures with different shots, especially close-ups and high angles, since we were trying to emulate a true "full-day"

    We found some challenges especially with our storyboarding. When first drawing it up, just like the first one, we found difficulty finding meaning with each shot and what they meant to the story. We couldn't fully find meanings, so it ended up less than what we wanted. At the end of storyboarding, we found another issue that the story didn't really have a climax or problem to begin with. Since we were working on deadline, we settled to erase just a few middle scenes and begin a problem of the girl falling

 over and the bag spilling. It felt rushed, but I think at least the look of the pictures looked good.

    I learned a lot more about angles, and the new definitions really opened me to new angles I had never thought of not even just for Media Studies, but my photography in general. If I had to do this project again, I would definitely have chosen a different story to follow rather than the backpack, since it made it hard to create a "problem" the backpack would've faced. The storyboarding seems to always be a problem for my group, but I think the concept being hard to use made it worse.

This is what our storyboard looked like and the link to our submitted presentation!

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1ry1NJBTvicRhTlJ91-jIGOspoPI1No49qMuGeh0wYbI/edit?usp=sharing