REAL reflection (September 1st, 2009)

OKAY, today I've decided to TRY to write a REAL reflection. Really, I try, but it's a really hard thing to do, write all formal and stuff. Especially if it's a blog, because usually for blogs you can use all sorts of slang and stuff.

ANYWAY, today, Ms Wong wasn't here (*GASP*) and Ms Rosati came and taught us about film stuff. She put us into groups and I'm in the same group as VIKKI HUI, Katrina, Alex and Logan. We learned how to log in to the Mac system and went over our 5 questions and picked the "best" five to ask the people. I picked the one where I asked them to compare our air quality with the other places they have been to. Some of my groupmates and Ms Rosati all said that people may not have traveled and stuff, but really, Hong Kong people ALL travel. They must have at least been to Macau or something and YES there is a difference. Most of the people you see on the street in, say, Causeway Bay would have been to at least ONE place outside of Hong Kong. It's probably like Taiwan or something but it's still SOMEWHERE, you know? So I don't think that would be a problem. You know what would be REALLY interesting though? We could as a homeless person, or a beggar. Because they spend like all day outside on the streets, so they would probably be affected more than us, and it would be really interesting to see what they think. :)
After we did all those things we learned about doing camera work and we got to see different shots on the screen while Ms Rosati used the handheld camera to film the shots. I think that's a really good way to teach us camera angles because last year we only looked at the PHOTOS and it's sort of different looking at photos and looking at someone actually DOING the shot makes it easier to understand how to do it and what effect it has on FILM. And then we looked at the ending of Bonnie and Clyde. I've never watched the movie, though I have heard of the name somewhere. When I got home I searched the name up and found out that Bonnie and Clyde were actually real people who robbed banks in the 1930s, so I probably heard their names in some teenage book I read where the main character (usually a girl one) always refers to old things and compares her friends or people she knows. I actually kind of want to watch the movie now, even though it is quite old (it was made in 1967), but the clip we saw, the ending, looked really interesting and the editing and camera techniques are very good. I also have a feeling that the style of the film is different from the films we usually watch today and will be worth analyzing since lately I have been wanting to watch something that is different from the "mainstream movies".
We are supposed to draw a storyboard for part of the clip we watched. I had a little bit of experience with storyboarding because Ms Riddell told us to do a storyboard for our first assessment last year, but it ended up more like an artistic comic thing, but still...So ANYWAY, I'm going to work hard to try to fit all the different shots into SIX boxes and it's quite HARD because I'm really bad at "condensing" things. But then, I can still TRY. :)

The most interesting part of today's lesson (at least it's SUPPOSED to be the most interesting part) was the part where we got "jobs" and tried working with the camera. I was assistant camera operator, which means I don't do much apart from stand next to the camera and assist Logan, who was the camera operator. We were supposed to have a go at making a shot of something and Alex, who was our director, chose this horribly boring shot of the Mac computer screen and it turned out looking kind of weird. But anyway, I had fun being called a professional-sounding name AND I learned that the person who does lighting with the reflectors is called the Gaffer. :)

I don't think Ms Rosati likes me very much because I'm such a bad student and I talk a lot and I have really different opinions (compared to a lot of other people), but I think she's really PROFESSIONAL and stuff so it's really good to have her teach us and it's good that we could hear someone's professional opinion on things.

Vikki, Katrina and I are supposed to go and ask 3 people our 5 questions during the weekends, I don't really want to do it during the weekends and stuff because I don't have time and Katrina can't do it so we decided to do it on Friday. It'll be kind of hard finding people in school to interview, I know because I was with the Friday Morning News last year and we had a HORRIBLE time finding interviewees, really. But we'll try hard and I really look forward to doing our first real filming "task". :)

QUOTE OF THE DAY: PAIN IS PART OF LEARNING WHO YOU ARE.

OVER AND OUT. :)