Skill-Builder 1.1: Reading Scene – Shoot
Welcome to your first shooting exercise!
1. Shoot one person – a friend, family member, or teammate – performing one hands-on activity in one location.
Suggested activity: Someone reading. If this is not possible, find a repetitive activity that happens in one location, such as assembling a puzzle, playing a solitary card game, or doing a craft like knitting or painting. Give yourself space to move closer to or farther away from your subject. Keep it simple – you already have plenty to learn. As we progress, we’ll introduce more complexity with multiple people and locations.
1. Camera and Tripod: Use whatever camera you have, ideally with a tripod. If you don’t have a tripod, keep your camera zoomed-out and physically move around to frame the different Shot Types.
2. Camera Settings: Use full Auto mode for focus, exposure, and White Balance unless you’re experienced with Manual control settings. Adjust the Neutral Density manually as needed.
3. Shot Types: Capture at least 10 different Shots using different Shot Types and positions. The number of Shots you need depends on what it takes to visualize the story of the activity you’ve chosen to film.
a. Take the ‘Shot Types: Human Body‘, ‘Shot Types: Framing‘, and ‘Shot Types: Content‘ graphics with you as a reference.
b. Remember to get wide Establishing Shots (ES), Medium Shots (MS), Cutaways, Over-the-Shoulder (OTS) Shots and lots of Close Ups (CU).
c. You do not need to capture the Shots in any order.
4. Seven second Rule: Hold each Shot for a minimum of 7-10 seconds, or longer if the action continues to change.
5. No Camera Movement: Don’t zoom, pan, tilt or move the camera while recording the Shots. Between takes, you can move the camera and use the zoom control to set up the next Shot.
6. Mantra: Practice the ‘hold’ part of the mantra: Focus, Expose, Compose and Hold.
7. Don’t Direct: You are learning how to shoot activities that you cannot control. Use the activity’s repetitive nature to gather the needed Shots from different positions and with different Shot Types.
8. Silent Film: This is a silent film. There is no need to record sound.
9. No Editing Required: Focus on shooting, not editing. The more you practice shooting a variety of Shot Types of different activities, the more natural the process will become.
Backup Your Footage: After the shoot, proceed to the ‘Media Storage’ module for instructions on how to copy your footage to both an editing drive and a backup drive.
You are learning a lot fast – if you are working in a group, support each other!