C’est deux films que je vient de regarder. I’m watching a lot of DVDs at the moment. I have neither television nor a fast connection, therefore, I take advantage to study the cinema. It’s a good way of spending time, of being transported into other timezones, towards other cities I constantly find more information as the days’ progress Only a few more days till my group’s multicamera and I’ll be busy every day until the end of the week.
I’ve been reading about documentary makers and it’s interesting. Today I read about several of them, took notes, and explored the ideas that they demonstrate. The one that has confused me is Kossanovksy and his ideas of Dogma. I’m wondering how you do a documentary without having interviews or cutaways. Does he mean that we should not use them gratuitously or in some other manner? I need to do more search on this particular aspect.
Directing a Multicam is easy, after being a cameraman at many conferences. it’s a matter of knowing which shots you would like to have had with just one camera but couldn’t get. It’s easy, switching from one source to another and making sure the pacing is right and that there are not too many screw-ups. Overall it went well and I enjoyed it. It was different today as I was a simple camera operator.
Soon I may have internet access in my halls again and at that point the writing will begin again. it’s hard to be inspired in a library. On the positive side I’ve watched up to three new documentaries since last night so I’m wondering whether to look at the origins of french and English cinema. I had some inspiration whilst attempting to watch Nightmail by Grierson. Tonight I shall be watching Philibert’s L’empire des Sourd, documentary I recently read about.
There’s a studio, three cameras, four female dancers, one male. It’s a cabaret show yet no one is in costume. That’s because it’s a practice session for those who will be using the studio in two weeks. I don’t like having a prompter on the front of the camera because it makes smooth movements harder to achieve. It doesn’t matter. I’ll get it right for the proper costumed event.
It’s six weeks into the course and the first deadline is approaching. It’s for globalisation and I need to work on it today to save on stress later in the week. I went out to Central London to record some vox pops asking people about myspace. The weather was good and people were quite willing to talk to the camera. In fact, it’s quite surprising to see what a high percentage of people accept to talk about.
Yesterday I bought a series of six of Broomfield’s documentaries and I watched one of them today. Chicken Ranch is interesting because Broomfield lets the camera appear in shot, through mirrors and more. He also allows himself to appear, although only fleetingly, at least in this documentary. He makes observational documentaries and allows the viewer to come to his own conclusions. This is a style of documentary where the action happens in front of the camera, with no use of voice over.
When you’re the producer one of the first things you do is make sure that the person you’re meant to be filming is at the location where you want him at the time you would like him to be there. A few days ago though, when someone else was producing the talents did not show up and we waited five hours for no reason. This was frustrating since i had at least two other things I could have been doing instead.
Being a resident assistant is a great job at the same time as it’s a lot of responsibility. It means that we have access to every room in halls for a few hours a week although in reality we’re only allowed to go from one room to another. We have to go around making sure that everyone is ok. We check that all kitchens are in a good state and that people are not unhappy.
I’m back in England, at uni, in a new room, for another year.