saturday shoot!

We had our Saturday shoot this past Saturday. it involved using the bolex camera to get a single long take. The long take lasted for 56 seconds and we had one chance in which to film it. it was a really neat and unique experience and I really enjoyed learning about a new camera. This was especially unique because we got to shoot on film, something not very common in todays world and something that as a film student is even more rare just because filming on film today typically means more expensive (especially for the narrative film projects that I am more accustomed to working on) and well, we’re just students. The bolex camera is a type of camera in which I have never worked with anything like it before. You don’t have to worry about battery or anything and don’t have to spend all kinds of time in the menu, changing all the settings and everything. It has very little set-up time (like you have to check a few settings, making sure you’re at the right f-stop and making sure the frames are right and a few little things like that and then load the film in the camera) and then you just crank it and you’re good to go for the 56 seconds that the crank lasts for. After we shot we got to take our film into the black box and actually develop it. this was really cool too because we got to see it appear on the film and then go in the other room and watch it right then. We didn’t have to send it off and have to wait to get back the footage, we got to do it ourselves. I feel like I learned so much with this project and it was really interesting too.

For our actual project, we utilized the arches outside the library and had the actors walk through them, switching actors behind each brick column. The final project looked really good and I think that the fact that it plays faster than what we filmed it only adds to the look of it and makes it even more interesting and entertaining because the people are changing so quickly. It plays faster because we shot it at 12 frames per second instead of the typical 24 frames per second, in which case we would have only gotten 28 seconds of roll time. However the film is projected at 24 frames per second, which is the reason that the film projects at double the normal speed. The exposure adds to it too. The image is almost blown out, its has such a contrast and parts of it are so bright. It looks like an old time movie or something!

but I do think that its really cool that we still get to learn about all these types of filmmaking, even the older ones that aren’t commonly used anymore just because there is so much available today. We have already learned about so much in this class and Im really interested to see what else we end up doing in this class.