Time to Film — Myriad Misadventures

The last couple of weeks I posted a bunch about filming stuff on Instagram. One week I talked about how I was planning to film some more stuff and wanted to step up my game so I bought a Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 4K. Then the next week I talked about some of the fight videos that we’ve filmed. I also mentioned that my friends and I are planning to branch out and film some different genres in last week’s post. This week I’m going to expand a little on some of that and then next week I’ll talk about the fight videos we’ve already done a little more.

I started the blog in 2016 or 2017 but didn’t start fight videos until 2019. I’d always liked the idea of filming fights but it didn’t go anywhere until 2018 when I met with Tre (from ‘Water Wars’) to talk about a fight, which didn’t materialize, and started working on ‘The Map’ with Dan, which we filmed in early 2019. We filmed ‘The Cafe’ later that year, then filmed a bunch more videos in 2020, especially in the beginning of the year. 2021 was a little slower but we still managed to film a couple. That brings us to this year. Like I mentioned last week my friends and I decided we wanted to keep filming stuff but try to branch out a little and try some different things. I also wanted to improve the quality of my videos a little and decided to buy a nicer camera. And learn how to use it, which is probably more important than getting it. I’ve spent the last couple of months learning how to use it and I’m pretty excited to start working with it. Yesterday I got my first real taste of using it when I helped SJ film part of an upcoming music video for a new song. I got my first real taste of editing footage from the camera when I filmed ‘Scenes from Lockdown’ a couple weeks back. The video itself wasn’t as technical as the short films but it got me some editing practice.

Now why did I decide to do this at all? Not long ago I was mostly interested on acting. I was directing and writing up storyboards out of necessity. Acting is still what I enjoy the most but recently I’ve gotten more into the directing and cinematography side of the videos. I don’t have a ton of friends (that was awfully sad to type) so I figured the best way to make good videos was if I could do more stuff. So I upgraded the camera, I’m learning how to use it, I’ve been trying to think up stories, I’m reading about cinematography. Hopefully I learn something.

So far it’s going…okay. There are definitely fewer opportunities to just go out and shoot with cinematography than with photography. When I was starting to learn photography I could just walk out the door with my camera and take some photos. See what worked and what didn’t, experiment with different styles, practice editing. To an extent I can do that with cinematography as well. I can walk outside and take a video of something. Make sure the colors and the light are right. Practice cutting between clips. Tweak the color in post production. But such a big part of cinematography is telling a story and I’m just not good at that, especially by myself. Some people could probably tell a story filming flowers outside their apartment but not me. I need to sit down with my friends, come up with a story, write a script, make a storyboard, film, and edit. And this takes a long time, even for a video that’s just a couple of minutes long. So while I feel like I’m making some progress I feel like I won’t really know until I’ve had a chance to go out and film a full a short video with someone. Hopefully soon.

The future is looking good, and the past wasn’t so bad either. Next week I’ll talk some about the fight videos I’ve done already and the process behind making them.

Thanks for reading and I'll see you on my next trip. Don't forget to click the links below and follow to stay up to date on what I'm doing and where I am and to see all the pictures and videos from my trips.