My experience of shooting the job profile was not really a pleasant one, or even all that successful of one. I felt really apprehensive and awkward, approaching my sibling with the interview section itself, and even then, it was somewhat difficult. But then it came to the matter of capturing B-footage, and the anxiety I felt got utterly overwhelming. It sucked and I was embarrassed out of my mind just thinking about it. I ultimately got cold feet and opted for royalty-free footage instead.

Our one-minute video is a pretty simple premise: a bit of a comedy short that involves two students in a study room, trying to do their work, but getting into an escalating back and forth stealing contest, fighting over each other’s supplies and items. We’ll need a study room in the VMMC building or elsewhere as the shooting location, as well as my camcorder as a camera, a tripod to hold the camera steady, and some basic items that serve as the props for the short.

The digital effects of this work are heavily based on greenscreen, with greenscreen and the backgrounds edited in through that taking up the bulk of the video, creating fake backgrounds and false screen projections, among other things. It seems to go for a more vaguely surrealist approach with visuals that are somewhat strange and repetitive. The typical realism of cinema seems to be subverted in this work, rather than strictly followed for that reason, although it does still try to follow some logic, having hand motions interact with the text sometimes as an example.

Visual evidence is tricky to acquire without access to the actual thing your documentary is about. As the reading itself says: “Making a documentary with visual evidence requires the filmmaker to go out and find something happening in front of the camera that that tells the story to the audience far better than any interview with an expert.” That said, it’s hardly an impossible obstacle to overcome. If I were in the position of having to do so for a documentary about COVID Nurses, I’d probably try to include a variety of approaches for the sake of minimize the need to reuse clips and ensure there’s enough visual variety as to not distract the viewers. I’d include not only actors to re-enact certain scenarios being described in the documentary, but also things such as b-roll footage of various tasks being performed or panning over locations. Perhaps footage could even be taken in other locations where vaguely similar things to the nurse duties and covid infection could be taking place. It would all have to be incidental, and I’d have to react quickly to them, but if it could capture those moments I’m looking for, then that would go a long way to helping out the documentary.

The clip we were provided from the show Shameless was rather chaotic and crowded, there’s no disputing that. There’s tons you could analyze and discuss, especially in regard to the continuity of the scene. The stuff that stuck out to me the most would probably be the use of the milk as a visual anchor to give the scene something to center around and bring some structure to this visual cluster. The fact that most of the shots have the milk in the shot brings some consistency, which is a very good thing to keep the chaos from getting overwhelming, especially for folks like me who can sometimes suffer from sensory overload. It’s also an example of continuity between shots, showing what is being done with it and how each shot of it is progressing from the last.

The ending sequence in Steven Spielburg’s Duel is a good example of editing for continuity, which I’d like to break down for this blog. The shots are all kept focused on and don’t deviate from the general environment of the crash, that being the desert cliffside. Even as it’s cutting between shots of the truck, the main character, and so forth, it all remains the same location and it’s obvious when looking at the shots. With the continuity maintained, the scene has the space needed to let its climax play out. Notably, the shots of the truck tumbling down the cliff, getting decimated, the shots are frequently of a larger scale, with many wide shots and long shots. Meanwhile, many of the shots showing the main character often being close-up or medium shots. It helps to emphasize the scale of each perspective, with the scale of the main character in that space being rather narrow while the scale of the truck and its destruction was rather large. It helps bring continuity to the work by keeping the backdrop and the scale consistent with each perspective.