My goodness, these past few weeks have been so hectic I can’t even begin to explain it. Among all the problems I’ve come across, I don’t think anything could be a bigger obstacle than my constant role interactions and crossovers. I’ll explain.
I find myself to be primarily a cinematographer, someone who uses a camera to paint a certain portrait to evoke a certain emotion from a certain audience. Unfortunately, as everyone knows by now I’m sure, you can only go so far with simple photographic appeal. I wish I could say that my skills as a writer and director have flourished this quarter, but I find myself making stupid decisions as both. I’m not thinking as carefully about it as I would about the shots. I keep having to change my story because I didn’t anticipate how much time a certain aspect would take, or a specific part of the story conflicts with another… it’s been a struggle to keep everything in line. It’s completely my fault, too, because when I was developing the idea for this film I should have been looking at the entire work as a whole and not focus on specific sections. I used the Freytag pyramid to create a general story arch and creatively locked myself inside it. After I had accomplished this, I proceeded to think about the shots I wanted to make and how I could feasibly pull them off.
Unfortunately, this meant two things. One, I was no longer putting any more time into my story, dialogue nor characters. Two, I spent way too much of my shooting time trying to perfect certain movements — and in the end I barely used any of them due to general shoddiness. I never wanted to show something that looked unnecessarily shaky or blurry, and I’m sticking to that.
I’ve also been struggling as a director, as I find myself constantly forgetting to direct along with my other jobs as the writer, cinematographer, and audio man. This became too much early on in the project and I decided to ditch most of my dialogue. Unfortunately, it’s been the same way in all my videos. Definitely an improvement this time, but since I’ll be using voiceovers for pretty much every piece of footage with talking… it makes me cringe to think about the hours I have spent/am still spending on audio imperfections. It’s sad and it made me sacrifice my love for cinematography for those scenes as well. After a while and a few days of trying, I needed to get the shot no matter what I needed to do to make it work.
This film has taken a much different direction than when I first started out the quarter. I kinda wish I had stuck with a documentary-style movie as that really would have fit better/been easier to shoot and conceptualize. This project definitely has strained my creative veins in a way I have not experienced before. It has been worthwhile just for the fact that I’ve been doing something completely new and something I am not used to dealing with all myself. It’s an interesting burden and it has been a frustrating quarter, but I’m excited to show everyone the final product.
Posted In: Journal Entries