Leicecter Trip - Review

Leicester Trip - Review of Visit

The Wednesday we went to Leicester started off quite slow as gathering and checking the equipment took its time. We had met up as planned in the College as a central point that we both new also as a place where we could get the equipment helping each to carry it. the equipment that we collected in the morning was the Cannon D5 Camera with flash card for memory but we had already collected a basic tripod. all sorted we headed to the town centre to go to the bus station. We boarded the bus and bought a day ticket that would take us there and looked at the scenery on the way there. We thought that it would look nice to record but with only one charge on our battery we decided to record what we wanted and could in the centre of Leicester first. If we had the possibility of recharging our battery we would have recorded a lot more, the same would be said for the storage but our limitations made our shot choices more thought through. This limit in retrospect would be quite linked to the New wave film makers as a lot of them would have had a very small budget and would have to have used their film wisely even with the experimentation. 

Once we had got into Leicester town centre we headed through some back streets to capture some footage of back streets and ally ways the screen shot bellow shows the shot we decided to take. the framing is a little off but has some nice feature such as the lorry making it more claustrophobic. the double yellow lines lead the shot on to the distance with the side of the walls and lorry helping give depth of field. We moved along after only a short while here as workers were near by and were watching, wanting us to move along.

We went to a square where students were passing through and linking it to my brief of trying to capture people of our own age which was one of the reasons Leicester was chosen for having two universities in the city which would lead to a higher than average young adult population in the city centre. This is where we found a problem with some of our footage as we would have everything, as far as we were aware, on manual yet the aperture and focus would auto to something different after only a couple seconds of recording. In future recordings we added a few seconds after it auto defaulted to redo our focus. In these shots it is unclear if or to how much the aperture would have changed.

After a while we decided to travel a little way down from the edges of city centre towards where I thought there would be a park, which would have good opportunities to capture fewer people but walking a closer more personal, maybe even more natural, with the surroundings of the park. The long and short of it is, I got us lost. This was a negative thing against our planning as even with street names and looking on a small map on my phone it took us a while to find anything helpful. We found a local city map which did help us greatly and after our frustration of being lost we took a clip of our relief and decided to stop and film in the park right by the map.


We Found A Map from Conker on Vimeo.

The park that got us back on track was neither the one that I originally knew was near the town centre, nor was it a particularly big and shielded by nature. This park however did have a steady stream of people who were about that Wednesday lunch time and we took the opportunity to take varied interesting shots of the people who passed us. We had set our selves up on the tripod with it balanced on the ground quite low whilst we sat on a bench right behind it. We kept the angle still at eye level for the most part and took some still shots and panning shots to get the parks space.

We headed back into the town after our rest, lunch and filming in the park to find more people for some crowd shots. We found a few other shots to take such as between trees looking up to the bright sky to get some

We had some interest whilst feeling as you might expect by being out in public recording with a camera and in various shots we caught people looking directly into the camera. This was good to highlight an element that is used in new wave film which is that it utilised non actors.

We captured a fair amount of crowd shots over the mid afternoon and in heading back we took some shots on the bus. In these we took footage of the streets as we hurried by, knowing that the shutter speed would effect how steady the footage was and how blurred the frames would be. Not quite knowing much we only dabbled in the low end of shutter speed from the very low 25 fps to 60 fps and slightly higher.

Taking the camera back with me to do a night time shoot. I used the contrast between the light and dark to experiment with the camera and show similar urban environments. I achieved these shots by increasing the ISO to its upper levels and opened the lens aperture. With the aperture wide it created a shallow depth of field I was able to experiment with the isolated light creating orbs out of lampposts and car lights.

Combining my experiments of aperture, ISO and shutter speed I collected some interesting shots that explored the naturalism inspired New Wave with some exploration of light.

Leicester Recording Trip

Planned Location Shoot - Leicester

We were tasked to go out and get some footage that could be used in our own New Wave short. In the beginning there was a plan for us all to travel to Oxford one Wednesday on a trip to gather the footage but that fell through. To do this task now, in small groups we went to different places to get this footage. Me and fellow HNCer Connor Stinton, decided that we would go out and film in Leicester and its town centre. The three reasons we decided to do this were: It would be easy and relatively inexpensive to travel there (48 bus trip) ; there are two universities in the city so the to capture people of a similar age to us would be higher; it has a large pedestrian centre too which would be great to capture.
We chose to go on the same day as the original Wednesday as the planned Oxford trip but keeping an eye on the weather leading up to it. Equipment was to be collected in part the day before as people involved in the equipment were still headed to Oxford. The equipment which we wanted to borrow was: Cannon 5D, Zoom Mic and Fluid head tripod. We were to meet at the college for 9am and be on the Bus to Leicester by 10am to be in the town before midday and we would record until the memory and battery ran out as the last bus wouldn't be until 9pm and we knew that wouldn't be our main factor for leaving. Set up and ready to record scenes of non actors getting on with modern life, we awaited our project trip to Leicester.

 This is a map view and satellite view of Leicester.

Health and Safety

Camera and personal safety will be an issue that must be looked into and followed. To operate the camera correctly and with safety you must know where the key elements of the camera are and to treat them carefully. The cameras lens is a sensitive piece of equipment so you must be carful of bashing or damage through accident or neglect. The lens on the Cannon D5 DSLR is a zoom lens with focusing capabilities in both auto and manual. When manually operating the zoom and focus be carful as not to be too forceful to damage the internal components. The camera is electronic so you will have to be weary of water and the weather, in particular, the rain as the internal components may be damaged. The camera is a weighty piece of equipment and if not kept on its strap or held securely either on a tripod or in hand could cause injury to persons. When cameras are set in a tripod it must be secure and the tripod must be stable on the surface it is on in case of damage to the tripod or camera due being to incorrectly set up.

There are other problems that may occur when we are out recording in Leicester. Working in a public space there is a possibility of having equipment broken or stolen by members of the public. You must always know where your equipment is when at a location and at all times when possible have it in eyesight incase of loss. If recording on the edge of or in roads be very weary of approaching vehicles and make sure you can be seen and can see a fair distance down the road so you or the vehicles can stop. If recording inside be aware of your surroundings and any fire escapes incase of emergency and always think that getting your self to safety is a higher priority than collecting any equipment.

Blonde In Love Editing

A Blonde in Love - Self Edit Recreation

For this remake we captured footage to use over a few days and a couple of shoots in a group. After sharing the footage we all started our own edit in Premier Pro. As in other projects in Premier Pro, in order to keep everything easy to locate and import I created the file and brought together all the source materials into the same folder. I created it in the format suited to the footage we had taken and then overlayed the original scene, on a higher video track, and re-sized it and moved the position so it would serve as a guide. With some of the shots we hadn't recorded enough for the take, so there were a few things that I tried to extend the clip to be long enough like reversing the shot and using the cutting tool to copy frames from still parts and repeating them. After laying the footage into the desired order I went into the effects window to find and apply a gray scale effect to change my material into black and white. The reasons behind doing this was that it looks more like the original source also to be more consistent in feel as the light changes appear less noticeable. The next task was to create the subtitles that would appear through the project, which was done by adding new titles at every instance. It was long fiddly work and noting where the subtitles should be became more guess work; as the longer the subtitle the more different the object as a whole was, effecting its position needed. Exported out after a couple of watches through and one from a friend, I had finished the scene.

A Blonde in remade from Luke Heritage on Vimeo.

Practical Shot Experiments

Practical Shot Experiments

This was our first time out practically with a camera so we went out shooting to try and experiment with types of shot and framing. We were going to change the aperture, shutter speed and ISO which we had recently learnt and wanted to get examples of their effects. This all changed when we couldn't use the camera as neither of us knew how to work it, before I got an introduction to the Canon5D with magic lantern.

First Attempt

In order to get some footage we put as much as we could find on to auto and started shooting things after a short discussion of each shot to take. We were not organised and had no set shot list so there was an amount of improvisation where it came to shooting. We instantly came across another problem, there was little to no control over the Aperture, Iso and Shutter Speed on the main menus so we decided just to shoot. Then the next problem was we didn't have good control over the focusing and zoom of out shots but through continues efforts we think we are getting better. "The inner swivel thing does the focus and the big outer swivel thing." There was one thing which made the progress of our learning particularly slower was that the camera would rarely take shots longer than 5 seconds despite there being plenty of storage on the SD memory card. I took as many shots as we thought covered all basic techniques we could do without and further control.

Here are some of the short shots we took


Camera Short Shots from Luke Heritage on Vimeo.

After our first attempt we went back and sought help and information on our various problems discovering that our lack of control could be solved with Magic lantern. The problem with the short length of video footage was due to the SD card and the cameras conversion rate. I got some instruction on the 5D and how to edit the levels of the aperture, ISO and shutter speed. Going out again the shots in the day time in the video below were our immediate experiments. We noted that when the shutter speed was faster things appeared sharper and movement was less blurred but twinned with the smaller aperture less light came through. The night shoot was a week later and I chose two shots showing the effects of focus on a wide aperture and the grain given by a higher ISO.

5D Film Clips Experiments from Luke Heritage on Vimeo.

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