Impulse

Today was my first day shoot­ing my doc­u­men­tary. There’s no bet­ter way to appre­ci­ate the mas­tery of vet­eran film­mak­ers than to try to make a film your­self. Those really cool shots filmed from a vehi­cle dri­ving along side a bicy­clist — looks easy, right? Hard. Especially when your vehi­cle is not a motor­cy­cle like ESPN uses, but is a Ford Explorer dri­ving through tiny sub­ur­ban streets.

It’s been an inter­est­ing day. Being a crew of one is much more of a chal­lenge than I had thought. Trying to make sure the audio is good, while mov­ing the cam­era to track the peo­ple I’m film­ing and still have an inter­est­ing shot, while try­ing to remem­ber which ques­tions I’ve asked, while think­ing about how this scene will edit together with other scenes, all while try­ing to be engaged and relaxed with the peo­ple in the film so that they remain relaxed and spon­ta­neous, it’s over­whelm­ing. I’m still think­ing about too many tech­ni­cal things — like sud­denly remem­ber­ing, halfway through a scene, that my camera’s viewfinder shows a big­ger area than a TV will, so my tightly com­posed shot will have heads lopped off when viewed on a TV. But, I’ll get used to this over time. That’ll free me up to do the other 4 jobs more eas­ily.
A part of me wishes that this were my 3rd or 4th film so that I’d have all that expe­ri­ence under my belt and could really do what I want with this. But, you’ve got to have a first film some­time, and this is mine.
The cool thing is, I’m still hav­ing fun.
Updated: Added a pic of the first com­pleted tape of the project. Now, I really must sleep.

Related posts:

1. Day 2 of shoot­ing