Shooting the Orientation

Hi everyone, after today’s experience in shooting the orientation (singing & OG games), I decided to make an urgent post to remind everyone of some things to keep in mind with shooting:

Quality, not quantity. We have very limited time for editing. Try to shoot as little as possible (to help the editor), and focus on taking good shots. Shoot sufficiently to provide decent coverage over all the activities.

Have a variety of angles. Don’t just shoot everything from eye level. Be creative! Do close-ups on their faces, crawl along with them on the ground. You want to put the audience inside the action, where the fun is. (and you would have more fun too!)

Try to capture facial expressions. Actors are paid for their faces! This may be difficult to do because your camera does not have a magnet to suck people’s faces to you. But make the effort to run around them to get their faces!

Interviews. Some students may be camera shy and will hate you if you point the camera at them. But many students are really enthusiastic and supportive. Get them to shout things like, “I love Hwa Chong”, “This is the best day of my life”, “Mr Ang is great!” or even “Join Sensorium Vale!”.

Please capture the footage and charge the batteries after you finish shooting. This is extremely important to ensure that the next session can be conducted successfully.

Record a footage log when capturing. Record the clip names and time of the interesting shots that you want to see in the final video. Without this records, the editor would go crazy browsing through 20 hrs of footage. If you do not know what is a footage log, refer to the papers on the left of our SV computer, and you will find a good model done by Tianyu this afternoon.

Label your tapes and files meaningfully. Something simple but useful for organization, and to avoid confusion. After shooting, label your tapes’ covers, like “OG Games 1″. Before capturing, be sure to select the output settings to a drive with sufficient hard disk space, and name it properly, instead of “Untitled Clip 01″.

Today’s shooting sessions done by Ji Nan, Wu Dan, Wang Ye and me was fruitful (except that some of the footage have not been captured!). I hope that my above suggestions would help all of you obtain better footage over the next week, have a lot more fun, and allow this project to progress smoothly.

Jia you!

Leon