Field Study Assignment

Thinking with a Camera

During the past few months you have been conducting Field Study Assignments that have been designed for you to practice scouting a location and applying your practice-based research skills. This assignment is meant to put these skills into practice in a rigorous manner in order to prepare you to execute your research in the field, which should address the following tasks:

• What are the materials needed to bring a representational world alive and to capture ethnographic particularities and social patterns?
• How should you best use these tools and techniques to offer new ways of knowing a context, a group of people, and a set of issues?

You will only have 2 days (Wednesday and Thursday) to shoot a 6-8-minute video on a chosen topic comprised of three discrete sequences edited-in-the-camera. You will not be expected to do any post-production editing aside from basic assembly and titling. Thus, you are not expected to construct a polished film or seamless narrative. Rather the emphasis is on shooting in the field. To this end, we would like you to focus on three core aspects of camera-work:

1. Technical: You should spend as much time as possible during these two days shooting with your camera in order to get completely familiar with the settings and know how to quickly and intuitively make adjustments in framing, zooming, focus, exposure, sound levels, etc. This should also extend to how you move and position yourself with the camera and how you adjust the proximity of the audio capsules to the source.
2. Stylistic: This assignment should function as a model for the film and editing style that you anticipate applying in your master’s field research, such as observational, interactive, sensorial, experimental, poetic/metaphorical, etc. By trying different approaches, you will get a better sense of what appeals to you most, what works best in a given situation, and what best reflects the kind of subject matter that you are addressing. You may choose a different direction once in the field, but this is an important opportunity to experiment with the relation between Form, Content, and Social/Ethical engagements.
3. Structural: Every shot you make begins to build your film, so you must become highly selective and intentional about what you are recording and what you are not. In this assignment you will develop these skills by practicing an approach called editing-in-the-camera. In narrative film, this may mean executing a series of pre-scripted shots, but in more spontaneous documentary contexts this means anticipating and responding to a situation in situ. Rather than simply letting the camera roll (which might be a good choice sometimes), you will be constructing sequences of events as they unfold in real-time while making selections of when, where, how, and how long to shoot each shot. Thinking about when to hit start and stop, where to position your next shot, and how one shot leads to another will be immensely helpful to you later. On the one hand, it will help you anticipate how shots fit together, thus making the construction of scenes easier later; and, on the other hand, it will reduce how much footage you have to process, thus making it easier to organize your materials. It is advisable to review our working definitions of sequence versus scene.
   1. Sequence is a group of shots unified in space and time with respect to the profilmic reality.
   2. Scene is a group of shots unified in space and time with respect to the structure of the film.
   • A sequence could be broken down into a series of scenes.
   • A scene could be comprised of a series of sequences.
   • A scene and a sequence could be identical if unified in space and time with respect to both the profilmic reality and the structure of the film.

For this assignment, you will not be permitted to edit your sequences into scenes by fine tuning your cuts or rearranging footage into another order. Instead, for the purposes of our review, you will try to retain the three sequences exactly as you shot them. After two days of shooting, you may have dozens of such sequences. These sequences should be 2-3 minutes on average. You will select three to show on Friday for a 6-8-minute total.

You will only use editing software to assemble a selection of your three selected sequences. You should include a 5-second black slug between each sequence. Don’t forget to have a black leader at the beginning of your assignment. You should have a title page with your name and the title, “Thinking with a Camera.” If voice plays a significant role in your film, then you will need to subtitle it, but we encourage you to not rely on voice.