When I realized that this weekend was the Saturday long take shoot, I was a little sad that I had class on a Saturday. My friends said, “what?! you have to go to school on a saturday?!?!”. But I gathered all of the materials that I needed to bring for our shot, and went to Saturday class. And honestly, it was awesome. Stick and I set up the projector and the JVC camera, with some help from the guys in his group because it turns out that the projector table legs are incredibly stubborn about going in the direction you want them to go in. Also, the 16mm projector is heavy (and I’m not exactly..strong). But, we managed to get it. My projector knowledge came in handy a bit when we were figuring out how to focus the projector, and it’s always gratifying to have a skill set come in handy.
My group’s first task was to assist Gabby’s group with their project. We were featured as soccer players and picnic-goers in their film. It was really great watching their group come together and plan out their shot, as it had a lot of movement happening, and therefore had to be orchestrated just right. With a one-minute take that you only have one shot at, it’s interesting how much has to be meticulous, and how much you leave up to chance. For instance, while we were playing soccer Barrett (on camera) would follow the ball. At 50 seconds, whoever had the ball, he would pan up and get a reaction shot of their face. So we all had to be ready, and whoever he happened to be on, had to react accordingly.
And then it was my group’s turn to film. We set up a picnic on the bridge back by Friday Hall. An astounding number of people went to cross the bridge, despite the fact that it was Saturday, and they all looked at us funny (we were completely monopolizing the bridge). We rehearsed a few times until Gabby, Andy, and Cassandra headed over with their Bolex after processing their film to assist us. Andy served as our timer, and one time between rehearsals, he was holding Emma’s phone (which had a stop watch on it) and accidentally dropped it into the swamp! We tried calling it to see if it would vibrate so she could go in and get it, but turns out it wasn’t a waterproof phone.
The film processing went fine. As I do some dark room developing, I was pretty familiar with all of the procedures and it went smoothly, except when I opened the Bolex, I became disoriented and couldn’t remember which was the take up spool, and which had undeveloped film on it. To be safe, we developed both (sorry, what a waste of film =[ ) and it turned out to be the one that I didn’t expect it to be. The drying of the film was also really hilarious, the 4 of us just ran around the halls, feeling ridiculous.
It was extremely gratifying to then also watch our footage the same day that we shot and developed it. It made me never want to send any film in to any labs ever again, because it’s so gratifying when you’ve done everything, start to finish. All in all, I think it was a really great day. Definitely team-building, not just in the individual groups, but I feel like the whole class is closer, because we all managed to come together and get everything done in time. It was definitely one of my favorite assignments ever.
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