Monday, 8 May 2006
2:00pm

T

ime for what I guess is now Bryan's monthly update, haha. Welp, the midterm projects I was talking about in the last entry came and went. It was pretty gruelling as I ended up being at school 7 days a week (including Easter!) for about 14 hours a day, for about 12 or 13 days in a row. I was very tired by the end of it, but I think as a whole, our class put out some pretty decent work. Most of the projects I worked on I was the gaffer (aka chief lighting technician) while I acted as the director of photography on a few of them, and I also was the camera operator on a couple. All in all, I really felt like I learned a whole hell of a lot about film lighting in a really short amount of time.
I was given the opportunity to light many different types of scenes and situations, and of course, I was able to see what the results were. Consequently, I learned from what I felt were pretty major mistakes in my earlier projects and after seeing the footage and seeing how bad certain things looked, I was able to say to myself "well, I won't be making that mistake again". By the end I felt that my lighting had improved considerably, though what I did learn from the couple of projects I was the DP on, was that I still have a lot to learn about camera placement and movements.
All this time I'd been concentrating on lighting so much I really neglected the whole camera side of things. On set, once I saw the camera crew trying to execute the camera moves that I had designed, I realized just how absolutely ridiculous and useless they were, and I know that on at least one of the projects I DP'd it resulted in a very difficult to edit result. So yeah. I definitely need improvement in that area. Not that there isn't a million other new things for me to learn about lighting, haha.
Once all of the final edits are completed, I'll be putting the videos of at least the three projects I DP'd up on my site, and maybe some lighlights from some of the ones I gaffed. In the mean time, check out the photo gallery at the Giant Repository of Pics. Also at the Giant Repository are some pics from a green screen shoot of some sports stuff for promos for a national network that I worked on as Key Grip. That was pretty cool, and of course, it was nice to get paid.

And so now here I am at the start of my 3rd term at LAFS. In a short 8 weeks my class will begin production on our thesis projects... tension is already running high as people are trying to finalize their concepts and put their crews together. It's definitely going to be exciting and I can't wait to see what we turn out! Now that we're back on a normal-type class schedule I've got a little bit of time for sleeping... and I'll also be trying to shoot some film on my own outside of school. I've been kind of enjoying the fact that my bank balance has been slowly but steadily climbing thanks to living at home for free, but it's pretty crazy how expensive the negatives are and I'm already hitting a point where every time I get paid to do some work I'm thinking of my pay check in terms of cans of film, rather than dollars, haha.
One of the things I didn't know would be happening this term was that I'd be taking a class called "Camera Operation" which isn't actually about being a camera operator. What it turned out to be is every week we will be looking at a different 35mm camera and learning the specifics of each particular camera as far as how to put it together, load the film, and operate the camera is concerned. This is pretty awesome because we will be looking at all of the popular cameras that are out there right now, so pretty much whatever set I show up on, I will at least have some sort of familiarity with the camera being used. Very good stuff to know!
So yeah, things are getting pretty exciting, and I'm pretty stoked... and I'm half way through the program, yeeeha!!