My Reelity

After the concert, and after helping out to move the props and stores out of the Esplanade, I finally understood why my friend had asked me to help out. I was initially surprised because I know he had no lack of people who would volunteer to do the job.

He reminded me in the midst of moving a dman heavy projector that this is the third year out of the three years he had set aside to reach his goal. And I’m proud to say that in the three years he had accomplished much. A stark contrast to my five begotten years. >.< So I think, in a finale of sorts, he had requested his closest friends to be part of the experience. And I am glad I didn't turn down this privilege.

Its a weird feeling to be behind the camera, but I guess its not one that I would take long to get used to. I shot a total of over 7 hours of footage, spread over one and a half days. But thanks to my training as an actor, which also required me to stand all day most of the times, I was able to survive the ordeal, hehehe. 😛

Initially, I had problems with panning. Due to the tripod stand not set up properly and/or in serious need of oiling, most of my panning shots were quite jerky. So I tried not to pan so much, and decided to try zooming in and out.

The problem with zoom is that I always forget which is zoom in and which is zoom out. So at crucial points when I want to zoom in, I would zoom out instead. I guess thats not so bad as compared to the times when I want to zoom out, cuz the actor moved off frame liow, but I zoom in to emptiness instead.

And amidst all these problems, there was the occasional body movement malfunction (i.e. I kick or knock some part of the stand or the camera) causing the shot to either rocket sky high or plummet to ground bottom. -_-”

These are the reasons why I’m not a cameraman. 😛

But I did get a certain sense of satisfaction putting what I learnt into use eventually. I had my master shot, medium shots and close-ups in most scenes, and though it was hard to follow the actors’ movement on stage for the medium shots, I think I got most of it in. So hopefully, there’ll be some useful footage.

I just pity the editor who’d have to sieve through hours of footage to piece the final cut hehehe.