Camera and lighting project 3 is up and running already.

For this assignment we’re to produce an entirely visual piece that has some narrative to it. Andrew raised the standards about three-folds more this time… no more Channel 5 kinda stuff.


16mm film. SGD$200 for a two minute reel.

It should be fun…. I grabbed my teammates from Project 2 again so everything should run better now that we know how each of us behaves on set.
We talked about many different ways to do this.
For one we could actually just go ahead and do a silent comedy like Charlie Chaplin (ohhh my hero…) and Buster Keaton. On the other hand we could do a montage like the great Russians did ( like for say…. Have this lady chopping her vegetables in the humble kitchen then the next shot is maybe someone stomping on an ant’s nest. Brings out a whole new meaning when you watch it doesn’t it?)

We actually thought of this horror love story. It’s about this nerd who’s obviously alone. He writes a letter and then throws it out of the window, looking up at the moon, just dreaming. After that he meets this really gorgeous lady in red and next thing you know he’s having sweet candle light dinners with her. He sinks into this state of lovey-dovey stuff whereby everyone else is walking fast and he’s in his own world all warm and fuzzy. The last scene they are on his bed, close enough for their nose to touch. And they’re giggling… and they stare… and finally they kiss each other ever so softly. As he closes his eyes, a smile forms across his face and he lays face up, hand behind his head, smiling and dreaming. The camera tracks away from him and we see… there is no girl!
But and eerie red cloth drapes across his bed.

But then we scraped the idea because we intend to film three weeks from now and that’s the Hungry Ghost Festival so… no.

At the end of it all they voted for my story. I wont reveal details of it yet but trust me…. Those of us who are familiar with my die-hard attitude to making war-related films might know just what’s coming up.

Yup… Jiahui probably has an idea what’s coming up. Rifles… helmets… overcoats… action!




The famous “Battle of the Field” video. It was the only thing I had to get my foot in FSV and propel me into the film-making world..seeing how my results sucked. It was made in Dec 2004 and edited on Ulead Media Studio Pro 7 (im using Avid Liquid now). I actually brought over my desktop system (including 5.1 speakers) over to school and camped there for a month just so that if I wanted to film anything I could just call the guys up and have a shoot. Due to accusations of it being “too violent”, it was never screened for the CCA Open House. I’ve come a long way since that video lol.



Once again I’m the director of photography (we didn’t vote… I planted my butt there before anyone could hee hee) so with the power bestowed in me….. the lighting will be like my blog header…. Awesome! I’m trying to go for that look but it may be really difficult because that blog header was heavily photoshopped. But we’ll see how.

The scene will be an interior night scene. Gonna be a lot of trouble with replicating moonlight.

Oh and… hee hee…. Our Project 2 scored a B. But there was this remark from Andrew that went, “Camera movement could be more stable.”

zz…. I used to be the most stable handheld cameraman!

Anyways I did up this video from the bunch of clips I took in class a week ago. We had a class shoot where we learned to use the Bolex film camera.



The other time when my mom said that Saddam’s school in NTU had new equipment and all that I kinda rolled my eyes a bit. Well firstly it’s not really about how new the equipment is… look at me I’m using a Kenny-cam and I’ve had my fair share of nice pretty photos coming out from it! In school we know of some people who say they take nice photos with their huge fat SLR cameras but when we see it the only reason it looks nice is because he did the shallow DOF thing (where after a certain distance the image becomes blur) and that his camera has 11 megapixels resolution. There’s just more to photography than a big fat camera…. Though having an SLR would help..

So the whole reason I’m saying is just to say that our lovely Bolex 16mm film camera was born in the 1960s. It’s a lot older than most of us here but look it still works!


The Bolex camera. In the next scene (no audio) Andrew was going through with us on how to work the dolly. We're gonna use that for Project 3 most probably.

These cameras come for about 15 thousand bucks a piece or maybe more. Made by the Germans so you’d have some idea on how mind-bogglingly technical this thing can get (but still efficient!). Handling this thing is like handling plastic models; you need to feel for how much of a beating the parts could take.

On any shoot we have three people running this camera alone.
The DOP would be the guy looking through the viewfinder (on student productions at least), the 1st AC does the focus pull and zoom and everything to do with the lens (for the Bolex it’s manual turning. They have dials on the lenses for the 1stAC to see) and the 2nd AC has the fun job of putting up color charts, loading film cameras and log-sheets.
This week I was the 2ndAC and it was a pain in the bunghole – you had to time the number of seconds the camera is rolling, convert that to how many feet of film that is, log it down then be alert for the next roll. And the other time there were plenty of short takes and I wasn’t the sort of person who could see conversion tables clearly… in the dark.

Then I had to load the film as well…. in the dark. Analism!

In the next 4-minute video we were set up to replicate a daytime interior.
Sunlight to shine into the “room”, a bit of indoor-motivated lighting.
Daniel will come into the room, talk a bit to Deborah, then kill her and walk off.

We had three lights on the set that day. It isn’t much but you’ll see what effort it takes to set up all the lightings. Andrew had us calculate the color temperatures of the lights in Kelvin (like say… 3200K temperature means the light is orange or tungsten, 5500K is daylight, means blue. The film is tungsten balanced so the 3200K light will turn up white on film… I want orange lights to turn up so how do I do that… tra la la la la) and put up gels on the lights to go for that look we want.
It takes quite a lot of effort for everything to pull off…. And will only work if everyone knows their place. No kidding, Eisenstein…
This week we had the class shoot and some people were sulking. Another was making fun of himself. People of authority couldn’t really handle other people. At the end of everything everyone was sitting down on their chairs, looking up at Daniel on the 9-foot ladder while he keeps repeating, “Where do you want the light to point?!?!?!?!”
Andrew came in and was obviously pissed and started making all these “You’re fired!” remarks.


Cam and Lighting class last week. Shows you a bit of the production process and how much of a 1940s Russian metal factory kinda synchronization standards needs to be on set.

I’m gonna put here a bit of trivia. May not be accurate because I’m just a student….

The lights get awfully boiling hot in a very short time. Andrew switched on a redhead spotlight and within the next 20 seconds he touched the barndoors and it boiled his skin. While he was teaching and waving his arms and caught a glimpse of his finger – a long clean straight section of the skin was protruding out.

That joke about the McDonald’s ad came from a discussion earlier on how anti-climatic it was (the one where the man jumps over the couch and watches football.). Shouldnt there be a roaring cheer somehwere? Yeah we criticize what’s on tv a lot.

Behind the set, where Yvonne is handling the gels, there is flicker on the lights. In real life you cant see that but on camera with it’s frame rates and all that it appears. It happens because of the current fluctuating in the wires and blab la bla all these physics stuff. So this is why we need to read the fine prints on the lights to see what frame rates do the flicker appear so we could avoid that.

Deborah is playing with a light meter. What we do throughout the shoot was measure the light’s intensity. Like say we want it to be at 250 foot candles, we get that on set, dial it to match the ISO of the film (like your film cameras have 100, 200, 400 ISO stock), then dial it to the aperture… and uh….. something else. I have no idea how to work that thing. But basically it guides us to “see” the contrast ratios between the lights and see how well a subject is lit. etc.



Shooting on the Bolex isnt like using a video camera where what you see is what you get. The viewfinder is just a piece of glass. Depending on the skills of calculating apertures and light intensity and all that…. What you want may not appear. It could come out underexposed or overexposed. Mind-bogglingly anal. Add that to the filmstock/light temperature issue.

The measuring tape is used to measure the distance of the subject to the camera. Let’s say its 10 feet… then the 1stAC comes to the lens, dials the focus to distance marking of 10 feet. It’s easy if it’s a wide shot but when it’s a close up and the DOF is really short where if the calculation is a feet or 10cm off, the subject starts to lose focus. This is why we get so frustrated when the actor isnt cooperative and fidgets here and there all the time. We try not to have ego-centric cast members on our shoots. And the best part is that you wont really know if it’s off focus even if you're looking through the viewfinder.



After the film rolls, the 2ndAC (Justin) does the logging. 1stAC (Jeffrey) rolls the spring in the camera. DOP (Rui) is supposd to do sth but I don’t know what. At this point of time the director could talk to the actors… gaffers could tweak the lights.. etc etc.
So when Andrew said that in Hollywood, the average number of takes per day is SIX…. I guess we all can understand why now. Well it did take us two hours to set up, shoot, and pull it down. And we only had two takes.

And which other polytechnic courses in Singapore allows you to do all these?

Only in FSV!



Just for show, the video below was a mish mash of what I could gather from the failed NVAU Tenth year anniversary production that I ran. Made in 2005 so you’ll notice that I found ways to add in explosions and sparks. Audio is TERRIBLE. Erwin was audioperson on set and we didnt brief him enough on how to work the microphones.
There was a mix in the cast; main characters were ppl from my previous FSV class and the others were from NVAU. You know... i love having Jia Hui, Aaron, Jason Zhang, and others frm that grp of boys in my cast list. They cooperate well and dont poke their dicks and heads and necks into what others are doing.



One thing's for sure... the film wont be released anytime soon.
I just hope I still have chances to make these types of films…. I guess it's my forte.

Posted by Audi Labels: Filmmaking