one shot

03.10.08

since i was not able to make it to class this day due to unforseen circumstances surrounding my trip back from spring break, i decided to do my blog for this past week about week 8.5: the one shot.

set for saturday the 15th, and only ill-timed due to the tarheels playing in the semi-finals at 1:30pm, i thought the one shot was a very fun project to be subjected to outside of class time. i went into the project regretting that i wasn't able to make class on monday, seeing as how i knew little to nothing about the bolex camera (and still really don't) but luckily for me, i have an ace group (alex, amanda, and patrick) who are always there to help.

before saturday, alex sent me a few update e-mails on what i missed, and catching me up to speed on the idea that they had come up with: the life of a book. at first, i wasn't sold on it, only because with a shot of 56 seconds, i was wondering how we were going to show that when the book didn't have any time to be read, much less opened (the essence of it's life, right?). but then you realize, on occasion, that's not the point...

on saturday, our first task (amidst fleshing out our story as a cohesive group) was to help group #1 on their shoot, which was the demise of balloon head. i was glad they went first, because it gave me a little more to get accustomed to the idea of shooting with a bolex camera (an idea that for some reason, seems very foreign to me). but during their shoot, i picked up some solid bits and pieces about how the camera works, and thanks to looking at projects from previous semesters in class, had a good idea about the perceived effect (i.e. look and feel) of what we would be getting. while group 1 was developing their film, we had time to almost fully block ours, so by the time we got out into the field, our shoot took little to no time.

the book we used was "on the road," by jack kerouac, a symbolic gesture at the very least, and our shoot went off almost without a hitch, minus the fact that during the actual shoot, the film cut off after only 50 seconds of filming. uh-oh... now this is where i got confused (mainly on how the film operates internally) but we had to crank the film back up and shoot the last 6 seconds again (does it not rewind the film to the beginning? what happened?) it's more or less a minor detail that can easily be fixed during the editing process, but i guess the biggest problem is that without an absolutely perfect match-on-action (which is virtually impossible) between the first shot and the second shot, even the editing lab cannot make this appear as a true "one shot."

but then again, i guess thats just how things go...