Scarlett's Evaluation

During this project I worked as the Camera Operator. This is a role I would normally shy away from as I lack confidence in my camera skills. But as we decided to challenge ourselves as a group at the beginning of the project, I thought that it may be a good idea to work with the camera a lot more to learn new skills and improve my abilities. 

I am fairly happy with how the project ran. I believe we worked well as a team, even though we had a larger team than the other groups taking part in this project. Having more group members definitely worked in our advantage as we were able to give everybody a specific role rather than sharing tasks. For example; we were able to have two editors; one to focus on sound and one to focus on vision which was definitely useful for a film with a soundscape. The vision editor only had to focus on one aspect of the editing rather than juggling vision and sound at the same time.

Looking back at the filming process and the final edit, there are a few things I believe could have gone better. During shooting we had issues with using the television in shot due to lighting. We decided it may be better to try editing the footage we wanted to show on the TV in post-production. This was not as easy as the group originally thought while editing and in the end, it had to be left as it was. Even though the film has a black and white filter, the radiating light from the television is still very noticeable and distracting and that is not what I was aiming for. I do believe that the final edit is easy to follow and tells the story that we wanted to tell from the beginning but it could have done with more outdoor shots. Obviously, timing comes into consideration here and during the post-production process it is not always possible to fit in every shot. Although I think if we were to re-do this project, I would have liked to focus on more outdoor shooting and possibly cut down the length of some of the shots in our edit as they do seem a bit long sometimes which can lose the interest of viewers.

Overall, I am happy to have worked within a different role to my usual and I think I managed to do quite well. I'm not expert and I don't think I ever will feel fully confident behind the camera but I had the chance to work and experiment with two different cameras during this project and I was able to chose the one I worked the best with and spend a bit of time learning about it. I was hoping for a gloomy and dark appearance in this film and I believe that was achieved which is fitting for the atmosphere as the topic of David Bowie's death is, of course, very dark and sad. I think this project has definitely a valuable experience for me.

-Scarlett