Lisa Parisot spoke to our group about sequence shots. As some may know, they are the wide shot, medium shot and tight shot.
The wide shot basically establishes the setting. It allows the viewer to grasp where the series is being shot. The medium focuses more on the person or thing and what they are doing. A tight shot came be extremely close; it focuses on a specific part of the person or thing. It focuses on perhaps movement of the hand, or focus on a person’s eyes as they cry or something. She gave the example of her husband’s hand with a garden glove moving things around the ground.
“The Nose Knows”
She uses this as a reminder that screen direction is very important and that the viewer can become disoriented if the direction is not consistent. It would be bad editing if a person was walking out of the screen from the right to left and all of a sudden they are walking back into the screen from the left.
She said that people should edit their shots on the action, if not the story will be filled with “Rock Shots.” She was showing a video about fixing up the lawn, so she mean that a bunch of close up of rocks would be boring basically. It seems like she meant it was an easy way out of editing instead of dealing with action shot editing, which if done provides a more interesting video.
She gave rules that are the basic rule of thirds. She explained how one wants to frame the interviews. You want to be able to see both eyes of the person and generally want to get a shot from their shoulders up to the top of the head. You do not want to be too far away. You do not want cut the top of their head off. But this is different from photographs and some different style of video films I have seen, this seems to be for news purposes. You do not want to be too far, because for example, if you are interviewing a woman (like the video she showed) you do not want to see all the clutter on her desk.
After the basic information she gave, she gave information about cameras. She said do not buy cameras that record on DVD or tape, but buy hard drive cameras. We talked about digital sound recorders as well. Some people were confused because she said she never zooms or allows people to zoom because it is not natural to the view. I suppose most of this goes for editing purposes.
