Week Seven: Double Time

Week seven of class brought about a double dose of 6x1 action. Not only did we meet in class on Monday morning, but we had a film shoot on Saturday that was fairly educational as well. The focus of the week was the one shot that we would be filming on Saturday using the Bolex film cameras provided for us by the school. With only one complete wind worth of film at our disposal, the class was broken up into groups and instructed to come up with a complete idea or action that could take place in front of the lens for one minute while the camera filmed at twelve frames per second before the film was developed, projected and recorded onto a mini DV, and then taken into Final Cut to be slowed down and have a soundtrack added.

While trying to come up with an action to take place in one minute in front of a camera when no dialogue is required sounds like an easy enough task, it actually proved to be quite difficult. Half of Monday’s class was devoted to our groups having time to get together to come up with a concept that would give us some kind of starting point when we showed up to film on Saturday afternoon. My group came up with an initial idea fairly quickly: we would follow one object around as it is passed amongst a group of random people. The next task was coming up with an object and a group of people doing distinct actions that would show up on film without the use of dialogue or actual sound recorded from the shoot.

Our object turned out to be a book. On shooting day, we decided to use On the Road by Jack Kerouac, which seemed oddly appropriate given the journey that the book itself was about to embark upon. Shooting day turned out to be the most interesting day, though. No amount of planning can completely prepare you for what lies ahead. Even though we were broken up into groups, we were teamed with one other group so that we could act as production assistants and actors during their shoots.

It was probably the first and only time that I will have to help remove and replace a balloon head on an actor in the middle of the film, but it was definitely a lot of fun and incredibly creative. After about forty minutes of trying to get the choreography down, since this was to be one seamless take in one shot, we finally got the shot done and it ended up looking really great when it was projected on screen. The balloon head popping was probably my favorite part, and I cannot wait to see what it looks like when it is actually slowed down.

The shoot for my group went by without many problems. It turned out to be a fairly simple concept, once we found the perfect spot to shoot in beneath the clock tower in front of Randall Library. With a path blocked out from one bench to another, then to a picnic table, and back to the original bench, we wound the crank on the Bolex camera and started filming… only to have the camera stop filming at fifty seconds when we needed fifty-six seconds of footage to work with. So, we re-cranked the camera and filmed the last shot over again. When our one shot was projected onto the screen, I was really pleased with the final result, even in the negative form it looked great. I cannot wait to see it edited with a soundtrack, as well as everyone else’s. They should be very entertaining.