Equipment for Filming
When we are at College, not in coronavirus pandemic lockdown, I am able to use the College equipment for filming. However, I have no access to any College equipment until we return to College, and no one knows when that will be. So I decided to check out in a bit more detail what equipment I have that I can use. Also, my parents have very kindly said that I can have some filming equipment for my 18th Birthday, as long as I research it and tell them what would be useful, with model numbers.
My Dad said he would order it to try to get it here in time that I can use it for my film, but there are no guarantees that any of it will actually arrive in time, so I also need to figure out what I will use if it doesn't.
I started by thinking about the equipment that I usually use at College. Then I considered if I had anything at home that I could do the same job.
For example, I usually borrow a boom mic and boom pole. Well I don't have a boom mic but I do have a small Rode VideoMicro directional microphone, it's phantom powered i.e. it doesn’t need batteries it draws power from whatever it is plugged into. I also have a small Sony Voice recorder, and I came up with the idea of plugging the mic (with deadcat on) into the recorder, also plugging my pioneer headphones into the recorder, attaching the mic and recorder to a pole of some kind and thus having a homemade boom mic.
Since I've never used this equipment to record this way, I did some Primary Research too, i.e. testing it out. It worked well. I found an old broom handle in the garage, so this became my "broom" mic. I also used it to establish the best position for it to be held relative to my mouth when I am speaking. It is best slightly above my mouth as close as possible but not in shot.
I am also fine for cameras. I want to film 3 types of camera movement to compare the effect they each have on the same 4 shots, and I want to film myself doing this, effectively behind the scenes footage. So I need 2 cameras. I have one Canon and my Dad has a Canon too which he said I can use, so I am happy with that.
Animation Research
I also did some research into Animations in informative type videos. I had originally thought that it might be another way of explaining things but after doing research I changed my mind. Why? Well, as I did more research, I was becoming aware that there was so much that I would like to include in this video that, if I wasn't careful, I was going to need a whole series. Or, it was going to end up disjointed with lots of different presentation methods just because they were fun. I came to the conclusion that I needed to be selective in what I was going to include. I had already realised that, contrary to what I had been concerned about, there were loads and loads of creative decisions to be made, and not including animation was one of them.
[Added Note – when I came to editing, I did actually change my mind slightly and added a short animation to show how a pan and tilt move. I placed the 2 animations side by side on the screen. I think it worked well, and was creatively appropriate there. This shows that you should never think you can’t change your mind, if it is justified creatively.]
Raspberry Pi mini camera footage
In the same spirit of trying to streamline my video, I have decided to drop the idea of including footage shot using a small camera connected into a Raspberry Pi Robot that a team and I built some years ago. I had considered it because it is moving a camera. But it looks amateur, and I was finding that my research was directing me more to the use and effect of camera movement in professional films. I feel this is a good decision, because again it is informed by my research, and it is helping me to home in more on just what I do want in my video and what I don’t want too.
Creative Process
I am finding it is a different process in some ways to writing a script for a fiction film but similar in others. In a fiction film, you still have to think about what dialogue and action you do and don’t want. However, I have tended to find that writing a fiction script tends to flow more, and there is less tendency for it to become disjointed. I will see if this is true for the rest of my planning. However, I am certainly finding it involves just as many creative decisions, more than I expected earlier on, for example I have started thinking about mise-en-scene i.e. what will be in frame for my filming. Because there are almost more possibilities it actually feels even more important to make the right choice for the right reasons.
Comments