During the last production meeting, I was surprised by low attendance, but it also gave me more freedom in choosing a role I wanted to do. I considered the camera operator or PA. the matter was resolved quickly and I gave way to the person whose first choice was PA. In effect, during this week I was camera 1 operator - I was framing captions from a book.
At the beginning of the workshop I was slightly afraid of operating under pressure of time and on such a small format like a book. My fears have come true partly, but overall I was surprised how well we have worked as a team today. Communication at the stage of shots testing was surprisingly pleasant and intuitive - when I realised that scripted frame looks strange it was not a problem at all to adjust it. This small amendment gave me great satisfaction. Initially, during rehearsals of shots, it was difficult for me to keep up with comments from the gallery and at the same time set the camera. At some point I stopped focusing so much on conversations from the gallery, and the fragments that were directed to me were picked up as if automatically. Similarly, later when we rehearsed a programme I paid a little bit too much attention to the script and what is happening next to me, the other cameras work etc. When I focused only on my task, I quickly fell into the rhythm. Sometimes I fell out of it because of falling captions and minor delays, but a simple, clear hand gesture to the person responsible for it solved the problem.
I noticed two interesting ailments in my work. First of all, I have noticed that for the most of the time I treated the preview screen on my camera as an actual shot. I used to ignore frame lines. Realising that helped me a lot with accurate framing, especially with small pages. I did not feel doing this mistake while working on wider frames. A second thing was too quick panning. At first I did not adjust the tempo to the size of the frame. In the middle of the workshop I realised that camera's pace is felt more when the movement itself is not long. It seems to me that I was able to correct it before the end of the workshop.
I was happy to see a very satisfying effect of my work while watching the final take. Multi-camera work seemed to me more difficult than a single camera but anyway, I feel like I am doing better with a little bit of pressure.
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| I was extremely happy with pleased with the cooperation on the set. |
