Saturday in the Park -- Bolex Longtake Experience

Saturday was quite an experience indeed. We had to be on task and execute in a timely manner, even more so while not having our instructor to lead us by the hand. Luckily I had worked with the Bolex camera before, so the filming part was not the most nerve-racking part of the day. I was at first a little wary of the fact that we had to develop our own film, as I have only a marginal familiarity with the subject. I don't know how well the development actually worked, (we might have overexposed by a decent amount) but I'm still holding out hope that our film will look fine. I really enjoyed helping the first group with shooting their project. It was less nerve racking knowing we didn't have to worry about the outcome, but we still wanted to do the best we could as extras. We had a lot of fun working with the other group and filtering our ideas through them as we saw their ideas come to life.


When it was our turn to film we started blocking our idea right away. We roughly set the camera position at first, then adjusted it to get the maximum effect that we wanted from the staging of the characters in our composition. Though after all the rehearsals I'm not sure if we ended up filming the best one, I am still very happy with the result. Our idea may be a little ridiculous, but it was a ton of fun. It's amazing all the things you need to take into account when filming a long take. But once we worked through the kinks and got our film shot, it was very nice developing it and being able to project it right away. It really was a fun time. Especially with the help of Matt and Matt's beautiful masks.

48-Hour Video Race Contemplation

I really like the idea of a “Video Race”, not only because it is exciting to see what we can do in a restricted amount of time, but also because it will be very interesting to see which mediums of film people will use to accomplish the prompt. The mystery prop is probably the most intriguing thing to me. I find myself wondering what it could be. Will it be something trivial such as a pen or pencil? Or will it be something we have to work much harder on to integrate into our film? Whatever it turns out being, I know it will be fun and interesting with only two days to figure it out.

When thinking of what the prop could be, I am going over ways in my head that I might be able to capture the essence of the prop in the medium we choose to use. For instance using a webcam to record parts of our film may result in a rustic, yet realistic feeling that might be quite good for the mood we want to convey. Maybe even use the ichat webcam to pull off a variation of the shot-reverse-shot style.

It might be interesting to keep the image in lower resolution if the webcam idea decides to be used. This way, instead of low resolution seeming like a burden to our project, it will instead just be a stylistic choice for the feel of our film. For instance we can use camera phones and other lower resolution video recorders to give that type of handheld, non-professional format. If however, this idea doesn’t pan out, the webcam could still be of great use to our film, especially one that needs to be done quickly. We could capture as we record on the webcam, which would hopefully result in less editing time and a more realistic, gritty feel. Doing things in a time efficient manner will be the most important aspect for this project.