Stills and Audio

For this week's assignment I decided to document an everyday occurrence that I felt would provide me with both interesting photos and audio clips. I went back and forth as to whether I should film a bus ride along campus, or somebody preparing dinner; I went with the latter. Dinner preparation would provide me with the chance to shoot both people and inanimate objects, and it provided me with the opportunity to shoot indoors. Up until this I have mostly been shooting all of my video and still outdoors and I wanted to try my hand at extensive photography indoors. This would give me some practice at dealing with reflection, artificial light, etc. The biggest problem for me during the shoot (which was shot at a friend's house during a family gathering) was that the kitchen was relatively empty of people, and the way the room is set up there is only one way to shoot the preparation area. That made it incredibly difficult to experiment with the zoom, and try different angles.

The sound component of the assignment was by far the most challenging because I was trying to decide on-the-fly what adjustments should be made to the various sound filters and controls. I was constantly trying to switch between low-cut filter and the noise cancel function. I found that the sound from the cutting board was not as crisp and precise as I would have liked, and it ended up sounding piercing and "clunky". The various noises being made throughout the kitchen made it difficult to focus the microphone on one area and I'm not sure whether the sound came out as good as it should have. The other problem I encountered was trying to juggle the recorder and the camera at once! It created a few problems for me during the process.

The visitor we had last week proved to be informative as it pertains to shooting video but I wish he would have tried to break things down into simpler components. I felt as though we got a broad overview of the process instead of a detailed, precise procedure for shooting video. I think that going through the process step-by-step would have been a great way to learn more and get a better understanding of shooting- video and all it entails.