Echo's - Another look
- Giovanni Peresson
- Nov 4, 2023
- 4 min read
By Giovanni Peresson 04/11/2023
This week I have finished gathering the footage I plan to use for the final production. I will be going over the various shots I have taken and how I wish to use them in the final edit, and some of the inspirations that have led to where I am now. My setup for the shoot was quite rudimentary as I wasn't planning on getting any crazy footage, I wanted to keep it simple as the raw video is not where I want to put my main focus on.
The shoot preparation:
The set I used consisted of a table with a white backdrop and a large C-shaped lamp to use as practical lighting as well as add depth to the image. Originally I was going to have nothing on the table and use a black sheet over top, but once I looked at my monitor and saw the frame with the stuff on the table such as the box and flowers I decided to leave them in the background as I quite liked the aesthetic, and it added a bit of colour. I had run into some issues with the set which I had to improve in the end, I was going to use a proper green screen frame which I was going to put white cloth over instead of the green but on the day of equipment booking I wasn't able to find the collection point due to it being moved to a different location due to ongoing renovations to the Foyle Arts building. What I ended up doing instead was using some old soft box stands I had from old lights, which were quite flimsy but managed to do the trick. Another change that was made before the shoot was decided during my test run where I had the sheets up unironed and still had creases throughout, which I ended up leaving because I did take some pictures and showed a few friends, and they actually quite liked the creased look in the backdrop, and it grew onto me, so I decided to leave it that way.
As for equipment used my camera of choice was the Lumix gh5 with a 50mm f1.7 prime lens as two things I wanted was the ability to have brighter and softer focus on the background in my footage and I also wanted to limit myself, having to put more thought into my composition by having to physically move the camera rather than just adjusting a zoom lens which is something I haven't done before and this concept of forcing yourself to give more attention to framing and composition worked well in my favour as camera has never been my strong suit.
I also used a fluid head Tripod alongside 3 soft boxes as well as my tried and true ND filter was truly the star of the show. When it came to my lighting set up, the Nd filter was a game changer. For exposing my shots, I used the lamp in the background as my point to focus on. My exposure was always set so that the lamp in the background using the nd filters only ( I never touched shutter speed, aperture or ISO) so that it was nice and dark and I used 3 250 watt led lights to illuminate the subjects in Frame. The "Exposure Triangle" was completely thrown out in this project. Everything I was taught about exposure was simply not taken into account.
The Shoot:
I used various techniques throughout the shoot. I used a variety of different lighting, positions, shot sizes and camera angles. I won't be adding clips to the blog, but I will be discussing a few of my favourite shots and the reasons I will be including them in the edit, as well as the techniques I used to achieve them. There was a mix of good and bad footage throughout the shoot, After reviewing my footage I noticed that I didn't have my ibis( in built image stabilisation) enabled on my camera which is truly a godsend for moving shots as there were some tight and awkward shots I took which I wasn't able to use my gimbal for. But nonetheless there was still a very nice usable bank of shots I could use!
One of my favourite subjects was this egyptian stye cat statue which on camera had this really beautiful green-blue colour mix all over it. I took this particular shot handheld with a canted upwards angle. The camera I was using has the worst autofocus of any camera I have ever used it can take quite a while for it to focus onto your subject which so I decided to use this autofocus to create a focus pull which stood out as being pretty unique.
With this statue of a woman sitting down looking into a mirror I took two shots which I really liked, my goal for these was to make them really unsettling. with this particular one I decided to do a camera roll combined with a slight dolly in to her face.
The other shot I took of this statue was a reverse focus pull from her face going to the mirror. with my f1.7 lens for thi shot even though the distance was just a couple centimeters I was able to still achieve a very soft background and her face. To help with this I set the camera quite far back as that is a technique commonly used with high apature zoom lesnses where you place the camera further back and zoom in to achieve soft focus.
The last two shots I want to discuss I will talk about them together as I plan using a double exposure where I combined the two shots into one using opacity hence the left and right thirds framing on the two shots.
This Blog has been written for educational purposes as part of CIN506 Experimental Film Week 5 Blog.
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