Frame by Frame: OPTA Videos, Part 2 — Starting to Shoot

(Time to Read: 4 mins.)

(This is part two of a three-part series cov­er­ing video pro­duc­tion for an elearn­ing project. Part 1 cov­ers pre-pro­duc­tion plan­ning and prepa­ra­tion, and Part 3 cov­ers post-pro­duc­tion edit­ing and pub­lish­ing.)

Months after our ini­tial plan­ning for the OPTA video project, June offered the oppor­tu­ni­ty to begin actu­al­ly shoot­ing video footage. The main instruc­tor would be in town and avail­able, and the large physio lab we want­ed to shoot in would be free and emp­ty. Being the sum­mer ses­sion, few­er stu­dents and fac­ul­ty were in the build­ing too, which made for a qui­eter envi­ron­ment.

Roles and Rules: Who did what

We were for­tu­nate to have mem­bers of the OPTA pro­gram avail­able to assist. For most of the shoot, we were a small team of four. OPTA pro­vid­ed three peo­ple to help with pro­duc­tion: Kris­ten, an instruc­tor who’d be the main demon­stra­tor and nar­ra­tor, Car­men, the project leader who would be our floor direc­tor to man­age the shoot­ing ses­sions, and Shaleen, who would be our on-cam­era mod­el. I pro­vid­ed tech­ni­cal guid­ance and video gear, and was the cam­era oper­a­tor.

Near a large win­dow, we hung up a large sheet to act as a sim­ple back­drop. This would help our mod­el to be seen clear­ly and reflect some nat­ur­al light back into the room from the large side win­dows. Our instruc­tor and sub­ject mat­ter expert, Kris­ten, would nar­rate the action from off-screen. To record her live audio, we used a lapel micro­phone with a long cord going into the cam­era. With the room fair­ly qui­et and Kris­ten hold­ing the mic close to her mouth, back­ground noise from the room’s ven­ti­la­tion sys­tem was fair­ly min­i­mal. Dur­ing live audio record­ing, sound can echo quite eas­i­ly in a large, uncar­pet­ed room. Any noise from ceil­ing lights and ven­ti­la­tion sys­tems are always a risk. Our brains tend to fil­ter out “back­ground noise”, but micro­phones hear every­thing.

On a small video pro­duc­tion like this, why have a Floor Direc­tor?
It may sound like overkill, but hav­ing a Floor Direc­tor real­ly helped to keep our work coor­di­nat­ed. We need­ed some­one to lit­er­al­ly “call the shots”, pro­vid­ing ver­bal cues to the cam­era oper­a­tor and per­form­ers, so that every­one knew what was hap­pen­ing. The Floor Direc­tor helped every­one know when to start and stop their indi­vid­ual per­for­mances, while keep­ing a run­ning check­list and notes on which shots were com­plet­ed and which were not.

Dur­ing the OPTA shoot, Car­men would sit off to the side of the cam­era at a small table, call­ing out each shot:

“Exten­sor Carpi, Shot 1, Take 2, Roll Cam­era”.

The cam­era­man (me) would reply “Rolling” or give a thumbs-up.

Car­men would say “Action” for the per­form­ers to start their sequences.

Hear­ing the word “Cut” from the direc­tor would stop the record­ing. If all went well, we’d hear “Looks good. Let’s move on…”

Shooting (out of) sequence

Record­ing was usu­al­ly orga­nized around sequences of sim­i­lar shots cov­er­ing the same mate­r­i­al: all the medi­um shots of a par­tic­u­lar sequence would be done first, and close-ups or alter­nate angles were usu­al­ly shot after­wards. This helped to ensure that shots would match if edit­ed togeth­er from dif­fer­ent takes. Often mul­ti­ple takes were required for each shot. It’s rare to get a per­fect take the first time; some­times extra takes are need­ed because of a flubbed line, or because some­one comes up with a bet­ter way to do a shot. For con­sis­ten­cy, tape would be placed on the floor, mark­ing where the cam­er­a’s tri­pod would be posi­tioned for each day’s medi­um shots.

Because we shot out of sequence, we end­ed up with hun­dreds of lit­tle shots stored on the cam­era in the order they were record­ed (named by date/time). The direc­tor’s ver­bal prompts, call­ing out the shot num­bers at the begin­ning of each shot was a huge asset to me lat­er dur­ing edit­ing; it helped me iden­ti­fy footage and put it into the right order, accord­ing to our orig­i­nal shot list.

Often it was nec­es­sary to show the direc­tor or the per­form­ers what the cam­era was see­ing. Most often, Car­men could just peek into the cam­er­a’s viewfind­er, or I’d piv­ot the viewfind­er around to let them get a glimpse at the fram­ing of the shot. I’m still hop­ing to devel­op a bet­ter tech­ni­cal solu­tion to help a direc­tor see the cam­er­a’s shots in real-time. For exam­ple, it would have been ide­al to use an exter­nal mon­i­tor that the direc­tor could watch through­out record­ing, to see how shots unfold from the cam­er­a’s per­spec­tive. I’ve nev­er got­ten that set up, but it can be done using a tablet with Wi-Fi, or via an HDMI adapter and a mobile app to get the video stream from the cam­era.

Reaching our Estimates

In all, our lit­tle crew prob­a­bly shot video in the physio lab for at least twelve hours, record­ing scenes for 12 videos which com­bined to total 66 min­utes of fin­ished footage. That’s approx­i­mate­ly a 12:1 shoot­ing ratio — not too far off of my orig­i­nal 10:1 esti­mate.

After cap­tur­ing all that live footage, the shots had to be edit­ed togeth­er back into the sequence of the orig­i­nal shot list, and var­i­ous tech­ni­cal improve­ments and adjust­ments also had to be made. All that edit­ing, sound and video improve­ments, titling and cap­tion­ing would be done dur­ing the post-pro­duc­tion phase, which is detailed in Part 3.