Today I will be presenting a camera critique which I have summarized below:
Yesterday, I filmed a shot that I will be using for the table top animation. For that task I will be compositing our obstacle course animations into real footage of a table top. For this I needed to film the table that Toby modeled – the table at my parents house.
Due to work, I had a limited time in which to film. This meant that I filmed indoors at 5 o’clock in the afternoon. Neither the location nor lighting were ideal. This meant the location would be dark, cold and would require artificial light. As you can see there are several ways that these factors could have impacted my final footage.
In order to limit these effects I tried using the appropriate ISO and f-stop to make the best use of the light available. However, I couldn’t fix all of these, especially the temperature of the lighting and the grain of the footage but I should be able to fix these in post. If I could do this shot again I would not film at this time.
The camera I used was the uni’s Canon D600 camera. As I was shooting a close up of a table, I chose to us the smaller of the two lenses.
Before filming I did a series of tests to check settings, lighting and angles.
This was the first shot I took. As you can see it is blue, dark and soft. This was due to the lack of light and the high aperture. Even though I used a high ISO the aperture was severely limiting the amount of light let into the lens.
This time I turned on the lights and increased the ISO. The exposure is much better in this one but the image is still very soft and grainy.
Finally, I dropped the ISO back down so the image would be more sharp and also used a lower f-stop so as increase the light and make up for the lowered ISO. These settings seemed good and I was ready to shoot the footage.
These were the setting I used in the final footage. The ISO is high so it lightens the shot but not so high that the footage becomes extremely grainy. The low f-stop lets more light in thus allowing for the lowered ISO and the shallow depth of field draws attention to the action and softens the background. I believe that the settings I choose were adequate for the location and light conditions.
So here is the original unedited footage. Please note I will be fixing this up for the final composit but did not have time to last night. Also, I obviously did not have a tripod.
When composing this shot I kept our planned animations in mind. I also considered the rule of thirds and tried to apply this while filming.
As you can see, the position of the table leg and the top of the table lies along a third. This was done so as to create a visually appealing shot.
As you have just seen, my footage is less than adequate. The camera is shaky due to a lack of tripod and the footage is grainy, washed out and cold due to the lighting conditions. There are several ways that these could and can be fixed.
A tripod would have fixed the shakiness and proper lighting would have fixed the grainy footage. I should have filmed at a better time of day or set up proper studio lights. Unfortunately these are things that I can not change now. However I can fix the washed out and cold footage by simply correcting the levels and colour balancing.
In summary, while I tried to make the best of the light and the situation the final footage is not great and I could have done several things at the time of shooting to improve the quality of the shot.
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