One of the trickiest thing to accomplish during the shooting process, was making sure that my job was done within the time that our Producer gave us, making sure that we were really using our time to the fullest. The hardest part of being a Cinematographer, is that you are depending on people to do you job. I can set up the camera and get ready as long as the director tells me which scene we shooting and which shot we starting with. I am sometimes ready and just have to wait around until everyone is in place and ready to go and that could become time wasting for me in particular. It was a very interesting experience also to work with Dan, the Sound Operator, because he was very professional and like me with the camera, he took his time to make sure that the audio was as best as he could get it. That was a bit time consuming sometimes, but I understand that if you want the best you can get, you need to give it time because this kind of stuff doesn't get sorted on its own. At the beginning I think it was a bit hard as everyone was doing their roles and stuff setting up for the shot and it is hard sometimes to trust that everyone knows what they are doing and do it properly as well, because there is nothing more annoying that getting a nice shot but crap audio or getting nice performance but not a great camera work or even get everything great but bad directing or bad acting. I started to understand with the production stage of this show, that the dependence on everyone to do their roles is real and you don't really have much of an option apart from hope things go well. Even though it wasn't my job to keep an eye on, I was wondering if the actors were going to come knowing the lines from the script or they were still learning them or anything. This whole trusting circle was quite hard for me at the beginning, but the majority of things came out right and the ones that didn't are the ones I have been converting into learning curves and talking about throughout my blogposts.
The main issue that I had to manage, was making sure that my shots were right and if we had to do other takes because that one didn't work, that ideally it wasn't because of me. In order to achieve this, I had to practice quite a lot with quickly focusing (mainly for the pitch scenes) as there was a lot of movement and zooming at the same time. On the other had I needed to keep an eye on the focus and the exposure as well as it was hard sometimes to keep the same tone of image throughout the day. There was a few shots that were not in focus and one of the reasons for this, apart from the fact that sometimes in can be tricky to see it in the camera screen, was that there were times when it was so sunny that I couldn't even see the screen so it was really hard to see if everything was good or not. I tried using the Viewer directly which helped in a way, but it can be harder as my vision becomes limited and I can't see the actions very well or changes in the environment. I learned that in an ideal scenario I needed to have something around the screen to block all that light incoming, but it was a good and tricky experience in the end.
In order to avoid wasting time, I tried to keep the scenes with as much coverage as possible but not many takes as the time didn't give the chance to do as much. The reason of this was because the more time we had to film, the more money we had to put into it. We managed to do it in it then, there were shots that didn't come out as good and couldn't use in the end, but I believe that the use of coverage actually helped with filling those blanks or those takes that didn't come out as great. I think that the worse moments was when either Illy as Assistant Director or Aimee as Producer, came around to say that we had to leave soon or start wrapping up when we still had a few scenes to shoot. I think the first two days were the hardest one, the first one being literally the first one and the second being the pitch day, because it was when we were still adapting to all this people in the crew and actors and locations and making sure everything was working out within the time limit.
I learned that the only way to make all this happen was with effort, perseverance and more important passion for your job. I will leave this quote here from Brazilian football legend Pele that I have carried with me for a couple years now:
"Success is no accident. It is hard work, perseverance, learning, studying, sacrifice and most of all, love of what you are doing or learning to do."
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