Shooting the short film

First thing that I had to do in the morning was, to learn how to use the cameras. I had done this before in my film studies class, so I was just going through it again, but I was making sure I hadn’t forgot about anything and saw this as a recap to what I had been told before. After Mickey (media technician) had done all of the explaining about everything; I watched my group put the camera battery in and out of the camera. Next part of the lesson; the class was getting showed how to use the tri pod and how to put the camera onto the tri pod. Because I had already learnt how to do this in my film studies class, instead of just sitting down I got up to help my other class mates.
After all of the explaining about the cameras and tri pods where over and done with we were all told to get back to our groups. Once we was in our groups we all got handed out our storyboards to get started with planning how we was going to shoot the short film. I did all of the story boarding. I kept all of the drawings simple but put in arrows and camera movements in the correct boxes to give me basic guide lines to direct the short film and each sequence in it.
When we got to our setting for our short film, the first thing I did as the director was made sure that all of the mise en scene was done. I put the cards out on to the table, I tried to make it look like there was actually going to be a tarot reading here. While I was doing this the rest of the group was setting up the tri pod and turning on the camera. Once I had laid out the cards I went to look at the story board I had done and got my group members to their positions that they was supposed to be in to start.
When we finally got into filming and acting the storyboarded scenes out, I started to make the group take more than one shot of one sequence. As a director I thought that by doing this it will give us more material to work with when we got to edit the film together. And also we would have more choice to pick from. I think that whilst we were filming as a group we worked well, but I think that I was a bit of hard work for me because I had to tell everyone what to do and how to do it. At one time when we were doing the over the shoulder scene and a point of view scene I had to do the camera work for it. Because I thought that these two parts of camera work would be the most important parts in the short film. So I decided to shoot these parts myself. I kept the camera rolling until I got the exact focus that I had wanted to get. Although I had chosen to do this role I felt a bit uncomfortable doing this, this was mainly because I am not used to telling people what to do and how to do things. But I feel that if I hadn’t pushed my group to do as much as they did whilst shooting the sequences, there wouldn’t be much to work with when we was editing and the end result wouldn’t be as good as it could be.
I was happy with the overall footage that we had shot and even though it was a hard task for me to direct everything, I can say that I had a fun time filming with my group over all. I also got a taste of what it is like to direct and do some camera work also which I both enjoyed doing.