Film Techniques For Me

Tonight presented our class with many new useful and interesting techniques for filming our team movies. Although some of the techniques seem out of reach for inexperienced and poor college students, some techniques seem very doable. One filming method that I know I want to use in my team’s project is a close-up. There are so many different types of close-ups and each serve a specific purpose. One type in particular that I like is the extreme close-up. This type could be very functional in a scene where the character is worried or has some sort of distinct look on her face. We can also do an over the shoulder close-up when two characters are in conversation with one another.

There are also many lighting techniques that I believe our team can definitely handle. If our movie turns out to be one oriented around horror, we can light the characters from below. This type of lighting casts many shadows on the villain’s face and makes him appear more ominous. Lighting from both sides and above also seems very plausible. This type of lighting creates a studio-filming feel for the set. Backlighting and lighting on the main characters face is also something we can make happen for our short film. All of the different lighting techniques seem achievable as long as it doesn’t involve some sort of crane to raise the light extremely high!

Another technique that I thought was fascinating was changing the images presented after showing the look on a person’s face. If you show a man that looks sad and then a coffin, the viewer believes he is sad because he has lost a loved one. If you show a picture of a small child and then a man that looks sad, the viewer believes he may not like children or had a bad experience with a child at one time. This technique saves time because you don’t have to re-film characters but can just film objects instead. Our team project will most likely use this technique as well.

All of the techniques mentioned above are within our reach because they don’t take a whole lot of experience or filming equipment to make happen. Even new filmmakers such as ourselves can use basic editing software to create interesting effects. We can also orient the camera to produce different depths in our footage. As long as we utilize the light sources available to us, we can definitely create some interesting lighting on the characters and in our scenes. We will utilize all of these techniques and more because we want to make our short film as awesome as possible. This is our first time and we intend to give our all!

One other source of inspiration for film techniques would definitely be the classic movie, Citizen Kane. I watched this movie with my roommate after we started this class. It was such an amazing movie filled with all sorts of different camera angles, lighting, and special effects. This movie is still looked at today for inspiration by true moviemakers. Citizen Kane is the ultimate movie for finding techniques for producing a new film. Orson Welles is someone that I look up to for sure when it comes to making movies.