Learning Camera Angles - Assignment #2

This assignment focused on learning and demonstrating 33 different camera angles and shots. After seeing the exemplar video, Adventures of Elmo, I realized that my learning curve for this assignment would be nearly verticle! Unward and upward!!!

At first, the biggest challenge for this assignment was to come up with a theme. So many choices, so little time!! Finally, I decided to combine this assignment with a project I am doing with a Grade 2 class in one of the schools where I work. I had been practicing using the camera, tripod and light kit from the university as the students interviewed members of their community about the history of their town. And I needed some additional shots from the community to include in the class video, so I decided to combine these shots with my 879 assignment.

Here are the steps in my learning journey:

• To begin, I wrote a script about the history of the community, incorporating information from a Reader's Theatre script I had writtern previously for this class.
• Then, I began to think about what shots would work best for different elements of the video, panning, long, medium, etc. For some of the shots, I tried to "make them work" although creatively, they are a bit awkward. I added them to my script page.
• Next, I thought about adding some sound effects and downloaded some creative commons sounds to use in the background.
• Finally, I convinced my youngest son to help me with the narration as I felt it was too much to try and run the camera, narrate and think about sound effects all at once!! And we headed out to capture some video.

The Day:In total, my son and I spent six hours capturing different shots, locations, angles, and so forth. The biggest challenge (other than keeping the boy happy), was the in camera editing. It took quite a bit of time to rewind the tape to exactly the right spot since we could not do editing on the computer. As a result, there are a couple of "oops" - when I cut him off at the beginning of his narration, and when I didn't rewind the tape correctly. This proved to be a huge time sucker throughout the day.