River - Filming Overview

Overall, I had a great time filming. During last year's project, I was in front of the camera as well as behind, and as well as this I had to do the editing. This meant that I didn't get the time to put a lot of thought into the camerawork. This year, my focus was entirely on the cinematography and the music. In this regard, it meant that I had more time to spend thinking about how I was going to do a shot and what would make it best. It also meant that I could take time and research certain cinematography styles, like Edgar Wright's and Hideo Kojima's. 


I enjoyed having the creative liberty to consult with the director and decide how a shot should be played out, as well as taking it upon myself to film things the way that I think would look best. It was also great to get the feedback from everyone after a shot was taken and people could suggest ways to do a shot better. We were fairly efficient with our filming, despite the fact that it took a fair few days to get it all done. We didn't have an excessive amount of takes, and a fair few of these were due to things that were outside of our control, e.g. people walking past or excess car noise.

If there's one thing that I would change about how I did things, it would be taking the time to properly set up and calibrate the steadycam that we had. Towards the end of the filming, I was just wanting to get going and didn't bother re-calibrating the steadycam, which is something that you must do every time you put the camera on to ensure that it is straight and stabilizes correctly. You can see the side effect of this in some of the shots, however it isn't too much of an issue and is one that can usually be mitigated with the addition of stabilisation in post-production.

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