STRUGGLES!!

Today after school around 1:30pm one member of my project group and I (we had senior privilege) had to retake some shots for our film opening. We had to retake the shot of when the antagonist places the heart in the jar in the garage fridge. This shot was most likely the most difficult shot that we had to capture throughout the entire project because the camera WOULD NOT FOCUS! Not only are we capturing this shot partly in the dark, our antagonist is also wearing a mask which ultimately made it more difficult to allow the camera to focus on our actor's face.

I knew beforehand that this shot would be difficult to capture, but I did not anticipate how long it would take. Might I say the garage fridge is quite small; bigger than a mini fridge but definitely smaller than an average sized kitchen fridge. The fridge part of the refrigerator was lower than expected that the shot had to captured only to have our actor sit on the garage floor and perform the movements that we had instructed. To capture this shot, I had to place my camera in the fridge on the top shelf and focus on our subject just by holding down the shutter button on my camera halfway and wait for it to finishing doing its thing. It took multiple tries to get the right focus. This was quite hard to do because the camera that I own (Canon Rebel T5) does not have a flip-out screen, so I just had to take a guess and hope that the focus was right. I eventually got the right focus and took a couple more shots so I have a small variety to experiment with.

My group member and I then had a struggle with the lighting in retaking the shot of the daytime scene that would indicate that the film had flashed back to two months earlier. The lighting was slightly difficult because it was raining today so it was cloudy but still a little bright outside to convey the fact that it was daytime. We tried turning on the kitchen lights but after taking a few tests shots and playing them back we saw that the setting was too bright. We ended up just using the natural lighting that was shining through the kitchen window.

We had to retake these scenes because in the playback of the video we had already composed it was noticeable that in the garage fridge scene the person placing the jar in the fridge was a different person compared to the previous shots. As for the daytime scene, the scene seemed short and a little fast-paced. We retook the shot and slowed everything down to utilize more time.

Overall, I think these were the most difficult shots we had to capture in result of the focusing problems and pacing, but after retaking those shots I feel more confident that they would work better in the end.