Reading and Writing
At the close of The Bare Bones Camera Course for Film and Video, Tom Schroeppel encourages future filmmakers to break the rules, but to also understand the reason why it works. You have to learn the rules before you break them, and you will have a better chance of success if you know what you’re doing than just setting out to shoot and hoping for the best.
Reflections
When I started this class, I hadn’t touched my DSLR in months. I had forgotten that I do actually enjoy filming when I get over my ego and allow myself to make mistakes. I work in Premiere often but I don’t usually shoot a lot of the stuff I edit.
My biggest take away from this class is to better invasion what I want to create. A couple times I thought I could get away with just suggesting a vibe, but there were a few times when editing where I had to go out and get more footage because I found things missing from my composition. I think after this class I’m going to challenge myself to pick up the camera more often. Even if it’s just to snap a few photos, using a camera again feels good.
Research and Inform
This week, we were tasked with filming and editing a mini-documentary. The main focus were J-cuts and L-cuts as editing techniques. A J-cut is when you hear audio from a video clip before you see the video and an L-cut is when you see a video clip before you hear the audio for that clip. These names come from the way the cuts look in the editing timeline. These kinds of cuts help add context and create more interesting transitions.
L cuts are used a lot in conversational scenes and are a great way to transition from the dialogue or monologue of a character into a montage. The dialogue carries over when we cut to another character or actions, making the scene more dynamic than just cutting back and forth between who is speaking.
Christopher Nolan uses L cuts throughout the Dark Knight to make superhero monologuing more natural and engaging.
Both J-cuts and L-cuts are used by Stanley Kubrick in 2001: A Space Odyssey. HAL 9000 is a disembodied voice with no emotional tells. To give the scene more emotion, Kubrick utilizes Dave to provide the emotional turmoil of the scene. These cuts help transition between Dave deactivating HAL and HAL 9000 begging him to stop.
Create
For my mini-doc, I sat down with my roommate and best friend to interview her about her career as an independent artist. Because of her hectic work schedule, our interview opportunities were limited but I think we captured enough information to tell her story. I don’t full think my narration fits with the style of this video, but I wanted to fill in spots of information that may not have been clear to the audience.
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