Night Experiments VII - [Cinematographic Attempt III- Little Red] - PreEdit I + Shoot Evaluation

Shoot Evaluation

I feel like this is my strongest shoot so far. In terms of composition a lot of the photo's were spot on were i was looking to go with it. I wanted to bring Red Riding Hood into a 21st century context, but no spoon feed the story to my audience. I wanted to created the shoot in a way that was more subtle, so the introduction of the woodcutter was my way of doing that. 

In terms of Mise En Scene, i used very limited resources with this shoot. What i had originally intended to happen with this was that we would be using a smoke machine, flooding the floor with smoke, then shooting, but after our power source fell through and gave up its life, i was forced to improvise. I feel like i did enough without it to be honest. Although i would still love to experiment with a smoke machine on one of the shoots in the future.

Over the whole shoot, night focus was especially difficult. My live view function on the camera wasn't working properly with our ML firmware that the 5D was operating, so it was stuck to a ridiculously high ISO, meaning that live view images were incredibly bright. This made focus really difficult.However, despite this, to honest, these are some of the sharpest night photographs i've taken with a model. Because of how strong the light source from the headlights were i could operate a much higher shutter speed than in prior shoots, so the photo's were less blurred.

For the first time i started using costume more in this shoot, more than just asking my model to wear a nice dress. This creates such stronger shots and far greater sense of Mise en Scene than in other shoots. I think that the woodcutter's outfits in the next parts of the shoots are fantastic. I also think that using such a large axe worked really well, it was really clear what was going on and who it was meant to be. 

So in order to keep the feel of film, i used what would be cut away shots to create the feel that i was looking for. These are really sharp and i feel that they actually worked better than i thought they were going to when i took them.