Film Persons Journal

W hen filming our documentary, Minoli , the director, and I, the

primary cameraperson, worked very well as a team. In terms of
communication, we would meet up regularly to discuss ideas of
shots and narrative, send emails via Gmail, and use social media
websites such as Facebook and Twitter to keep in contact. W hen
it came to days where we were filming our cutaways, Minoli would
tell me the kind of shots that she wanted and in what locations,
and I would do those shots, occasionally using my own creative
flare to come up with some of my own ide as of what to film. Minoli
was very easy to get along with, as she would allow me to film
the types of cutaways she wanted, as well as what I wanted.
In the first series of shoots, both interviews and cutaways, we
used the Sony HVR -A1E HD Camera. I had not used this camera
before but I felt I understood how to use it fairly quickly. As we
travelled from Lond on to Hastings, carrying this small camera
was very easy as it was light. However, the camera was, in my
opinion, only good when it came to interior s hots. For the
interviews, the lighting it picked up was average, if slightly too
warm in terms of saturation, but when it came to filming a lot of
the exterior cutaways, it picked up too much sunlight and the
contrast of the overall image was too high. Ano ther weakness of
the camera came from the viewfinder. The viewf inder, when at an
angle that was convenient for me to look through during
interviews, was so dark that nothing could be seen. It was only
when it was flipped 180 and placed so it laid flat aga inst the
camera that it would be bright enough to look at. However, this
meant that I was looking at the camera from side on, and in turn
it meant that the framing of the shots was really out.
W e decided, once looking at the interviews and cutaways in Fi nal
Cut Pro, that we would re -film the interview with our inspiration
for the documentary, Aaron. W e knew that we could edit the
lighting for the cutaways in post -production, but the angle in
which his interview was sho t could not be edited to make it look
better. W e also decided, on multiple occasions, to re -film the
cutaways as we noticed that a lot of what we had filmed had no
relevance to our topic of autism and the education system.
There were a lot less problems with the re -shoots as we changed
our camera to the Song XHA1, a camera I had used before, but it
did make filming cutaways a lot harder as the camera was much
bigger than the previous one , and therefore didnt feel as smooth
to film by hand, causing a lot of shaking in tracking shots.
Despite this, I had the experience of filming interviews from the
previous filming days so I felt that I now knew how to frame the
interviews by using the rule of thirds, and having the subject at a

slight angle, not facing directly towards the camera, but making
sure that you could almost see their other ear.
W hen it came to working with our interviewees, it turned out to be
fairly easy, as once we told them they should focus on Minoli who
sat out of frame either to the left or the right of the camera , and
to not look directly in or to the camera, they followed these
instructions without problem and they gave us sufficiently long,
instead of what we expected to be short one worded, answers.
It was hard to get a variety of shots during the interviews as we
only had one camera, so that meant I had to be creative when it
came to the cutaways, and used a variety of shots such as
tracking, extreme close ups, long shots and establishing shots,
which varied from the array of mid shots used during the
interviews.