Photography project - ''passengers''

Passengers

Noticing people, their behaviour and reactions is the core element in this photography project. Capturing surface, which is human facial expressions in this case, tells us their individual stories as well as tendencies of life in the city. Apathy, exhaustion, anonymity, alienation and detachment... Public transport is where these things come across very vividly. Place where time gets distorted, people get carried away with their own matters, even though the environment is always changing and unstable. It is as if every person there creates his/her own tiny private space. This is a collection of personal moments in public. Real, spontaneous or still emotions of a human being in the routine of the city. 

Many students use HDSLR Cameras for filming their projects. My college ‘Ieva Austinskaite’ who studies BA Photography course at Middlesex University, asked for help in producing short clip for her final project ‘Passengers’ I decide to test my new “Canon 5D Mark iii” camera to this project. Lancester in his book ‘Dslr cinema – crafting the film look with large sensor video cameras’ covers the cinematographer’s toolkit, which provides the cinematic look, the ‘film look’. This book describes benefits and designs the possibilities of using DSLR’s cameras. From my point of view as a low budget filmmaker, I found this technology as the best choice because this camera has good data rate, processing power, and capability to perform more uncompressed media capture. During the process of filming ‘Passengers’, our main object was to capture personal emotions of people during their trip in the public transport, which was quite challenging. In order to shot this this short clip it was necessary to use long lens and fast blocking shots. “Blocking is where, when, and how subjects are placed and move in the composition, whether working with actor or characters in a documentary. How they are placed, when they move, where they move from, and where they go are dependent on the story” Lancaster, (2013: 9). During this project we faced few main problems. One of them was the choice of the tripod. With long lens is essential to have really stable tripod, because during the filming with 200mm lens even a small touch of the tripod would make big differences in postproduction. As a result, even the stabilizer effect would not save the footage – it becomes really shaky and hardly fixable. This project involved Timing, pacing and rhythm. The rhythm making process depends on duration and the placement of the shot. In Post – production I was editing in three different windows (Fig.1) Moreover, three different timelines were required as well as specific locations of shots as a result of different duration of each of them. “Timing is the attribute of rhythm that arises as en editor determines when cuts and shots occur. There are three aspects of timing to be considered when discussing rhythm in film editing: choosing the frame, choosing duration and choosing the placement of the shot. “Karen (2009: 44).

                      

 

(Fig.1)

 

   

Karen, P. (2009) Cutting Rhythms: Shaping the Film Edit. Amsterdam: Focal/Elsevier

Lancaster, K. (2013) DSLR Cinema. Crafting the Film Look with Large Sensor Video Cameras. 2nd, Rev. Ed. Oxford: Focal