Exhausted from a full day of work, I spent my evening getting my monthly dose of Divergent. Divergent is an underrated science fiction film that I just can’t seem to get enough of. I would tell you the exact number of times I’ve re-watched it if I didn’t stop counting after my tenth rerun. I guess I have never really gotten over how good the story line is and how well it was visually presented to the audience. All the reruns have been pretty identical experiences except now. I was unusually intrigued by how every moment was captured. Learning more about visual literacy has definitely given me a new appreciation for videography and the art of film making. Just after watching my favorite scene, I found myself searching for ‘Behind the scenes’ YouTube videos of the Divergent series.
I have never really previously thought about how much work actually goes into making films. All the way from two minute videos to hours of movies and documentaries. Watching footage on how one of my favorite movies was made gave me some insight to how complex film making is. However, working on my group’s project these past couple of days definitely gave me a deeper understanding of how much planning and effort a few seconds of video could take. In the midst of writing out our story board multiple times, practicing different scenes, organizing actors and scouting locations, a particular challenge faced us all in one wave.
The gimbal.
The first challenge with the gimbal was learning how to spell it. We had referred to it as the ‘gimble’ for quite a while since it seemed to make more sense before we were duly corrected. Our professor set the gimbal up in front of us and showed us the simplest functions before letting us practice with it . After collectively watching part of a twenty minute tutorial played twice as fast on YouTube, the most exciting piece of information we learnt was the selfie mode function.
We all got our hands on the gimbal for the rest of the evening as we took turns learning various shots we would execute for the film. As time progressed, we all had our ‘gimbal times’ the night before and morning of the shoot. Personally, the more time I spent practicing with the gimbal the more I felt like it had a mind of its own. It was definitely harder to execute what seemed effortless in my head as we planned out our story board which was all part of the learning process. Eventually, we all had our chance filming with the gimbal and earned our name ‘gimbal girls’.
Bringing our ideas to life these past couple of days was certainly a new and thrilling experience but perhaps the best part of my week was watching Lucy, my classmate, bounce a reflector on her head trying to make a child smile for the camera.
