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.