Filming techniques

It's time to start filming and today in my lessons i've been learning about different techiques to give great effects.

The first technique i learnt about was how to alter 'Depth Of Field'. This alters what is in focus in the shot. It emphasizes certain subjects in the shot which will be great when filming my narrative. Essentially there are two types of Depth Of Field, Wide DoF, which focus's more on the background and Narrow Dof which focus's on a main theme in the shot. So moving from a Wide to a Narrow DoF it outlines what im going to focus on, i feel this will work best in crowds of people.

Depth of Field:

To start filming i will need to follow this procedure to make sure the camera is on all the right settings.

- The camera must be set to manual [P] on a XM2 camera.
- The manual/focus has to be turned on, and this will appear on the screen.
- White Balance: this needs to be set to either natural or artificial light depending on where iam are filming.
- Exposure: Shutter Speed: slow right down 1/50.
- Aperture: opened up as far as it can go.
- Gain: can be adjusted to brighten and contrast the footage.

Equipment i will need:
Camera
Tripod
Clapperboard - useful for making shooting and editting easier.
Lighting - When filming outside i will use something with a high albedo, it must be reflective otherwise i wont give off any light.

To get a feel for this and to get some shots, i went out with a group of students from my class to start filming some depth of field shots.

My first shot was of the clapperboard so that i became used to using one before every shot and to help me during editting. Here is the shot of a clapperboard.



For a long time we spent adjusting camera settings and moving the models around in the shot to try and capture a good example of narrow and wide depth of field. After a while we realised that it is critical we get the correct distance and angle of the shot so that we're able to use the pull tool efficently. Here is two camera shots that were unsucessful, they show what is is not ment to look like and then we can compare it to successful shots.

Too much of a blur, out of focus.



Too clear in focus.



As you can see these shots we're useless. After lots of practice and time spent into fixing the shots we altered the pull and changed the settings to use the camera effectivley and the results were great we got two good shots.