Camera Workshop Evaluations


The Camera Workshops have been a huge help to me, to our group as a whole. It’s helped build trust, team spirit and helped us decide who is really good at which roles. Specifically, Director, Director of Photography and Editor, as well as actor of course but in the actual circumstance of doing a shoot one of us will probably not be acting.

The Sitting Game:

The first workshop we were tasked with doing was for a scene where a person sat down in a chair, the brief was as simple as that, it was up to us to make the story as visually interesting as possible. For our first bit of work as a team, I think it’s not that bad, rough around the edges for sure, there are parts where the footage is a bit over exposed but this was the second time any of us had used the camera so there was bound to be some technical inconsistencies. We made use of our limited set which had a large number of chairs which we used to comic affect implying that the person in the video is a “chair tester” and is sick of their job and has done this many times. The edit I did here I think is a fine pretty simple edit with some fitting comedic license free music over the top of it.

A moment from Atonement:

In this workshop we were given a scene from a film I’m quite fond of myself called, Atonement. We were tasked with blocking it around the 180-degree rule and capturing the tense emotional feel of the scene. As we did not have a set that looked very similar to what was described in the scene, we found various props such as a table, a cake display and chairs which were around the room and fashioned them into a set, similar to what we did in the sitting game. Our filming techniques had gotten a lot better by this one and as a result the footage is a lot more consistently well shot, due to COVID-restrictions the actors are somewhat further away from the camera and that made shooting slightly more difficult to get a high quality close up. The sound is also very quiet because of this which could have also been better if not for the COVID-restrictions. Still a very good piece of work from us, I think.

Tell me No Test Shoot:

Before shooting our 2-minute script to screen project, Tell Me No, we had to do a test shoot of the scene we planned on shooting from it with all of us working in our selected roles for the project. It was a helpful chance for us to try out blocking the sequence of events and it almost acted as a rough visual storyboard to what we did. We had a few troubles specifically with keeping the 180-degree rule consistent on this one, partly since we went back a few times to shoot scenes we had already recorded, however in the edit I don’t think this shows. The scene has a good pace to it I think and captures the intensity of the situation the characters are in, it does not slog in any way. It’s well directed, well shot and well-acted, probably our most successful camera workshop to date.


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