Week 3, Korneliusz

So this week was interesting, I feel like this time we actually started thinking like filmmakers, we dressed our set as we wanted and made the environment reflect our story and characters

I was the cinematographer and I did my best to capture the weirdness and mysticism of the place. I tried thinking outside of the box and experimented with angles and ways to show the action, I didn’t want to just boringly capture the image of what was happening, I wanted to make it feel like what we wanted to say. Personally I find myself watching a film and not noticing the cuts and changes in angles, it all feels so natural and logical I just accept it, that’s why it’s hard to go into that head-space where I’m aware of what’s happening, it’s just unintuitive. But it is quite nice to finally get your head around it and dissect the process.

As the cinematographer I still mainly went with my gut feeling for the shots, as well as trying to experiment with them. I tried getting interesting items in the frame, something to catch the viewers eye but not enough to distract from the story.

The handheld style of shooting our director of the week (Juliette) wanted gave me a lot of freedom to just see how things look like from angels I might have not tried if the camera had to be glued to the tripod.

Looking back:

I came to realise that the reason film-making seems so unintuitive during the production process is that the final illusion created by the shots we see on the screen is usually so tight and logical it is a challenge to notice it’s there, it’s like breathing manually, if that makes any sense.