Taste Of London - Carole and Isabelle (Directors Cut. The experience)
Being the first shoot of the documentary, I was quite nervous but anxious as to how it would turn out.
I had never until this project worked on any media productions before apart from a few home videos so my knowledge and the vision I had for the documentaries were solely based on my creativity, my vivid imagination and research of current and existing documentaries to understand the foundation and logic behind making a documentary.
The first thing I noticed upon meeting Carole and Isabelle something that I realised I would be facing a lot through this project is nerves. The volunteers in these documentaries are not actors so it is very understanding as to the levels of nerves when in front of the camera.
To my surprise though where I thought it would be difficult to shoot them as they were very awkward to shoot, after about 30minutes into shooting they both soon relaxed and found their comfort and confidence in front of the camera.
My tactic was to get them to tell as much of their story as possible without having too much control as this would interrupt the fluidity and validity of the volunteers words thus making their words too rehearsed and unnatural.
This motivated me to look into film shooting techniques to which I stumbled upon a technique called “Stop Frame Shooting” or as designers and those in the industry of media and graphics communication would better refer to this technique as “Stop From Motion/Animation”
For this documentary I will only be working with a Panasonic HDC-TM300, in a form of english you can understand for you non ‘techno-freaks’ is a Panasonic HD Camcorder.
Now where as with major television productions, documentaries made are shot with numerous of camera with at least a minimum of 2 ranging up to 20 or more (depending on the sizer of production) to be able to get the best ranges of angles in a footage, but with this stop frame shooting it gives me the freedom and allowance to move around in between scenes trying to capture as best possible angles that capture the essence of each experience.
Angles shots of a single sequence:
Screen shot from video footage for ‘Taste of London Documentary’
Screen shot from video footage for ‘Taste of London Documentary’
Screen shot from video footage for ‘Taste of London Documentary’
Screen shot from video footage for ‘Taste of London Documentary’
This technique also helped in being able to calm and prepare Isabelle and Carole before their next scene so they knew what to say and stay composed at the same time, it also created an opportunity to get any photo coverage in and out of the whole cooking process. As they were my first victims on the shoot, the use of this technique proved successful.
My biggest difficulty on this shoot was daylight. As the day progressed we were bound to make mistakes as it was the first shoot so I spent a bit of time experimenting with styles of video footage. The cooking also took a long time and all of these elements accumulated in time which meant by the time we had got to Isabelle’s desert we had lost daylight and I had to rely on artificial light to get me through that footage which wasn’t too great.
Day Footage vs Night Footage:
Day Footage: Bright natural background light
Screen shot from video footage for ‘Taste of London Documentary’
Screen shot from video footage for ‘Taste of London Documentary’
Night Footage: Artificial kitchen background light
Screen shot from video footage for ‘Taste of London Documentary’
Screen shot from video footage for ‘Taste of London Documentary’
So a note to self for next time would be to make sure to try to get through as much filming as possible in the day except the location has great lighting for the evening.
