Progress Report 二

It's been a week since I returned from my two weeks filming in China. All in all it was a very productive trip. About 22+ hours worth of productivity in fact.

The logistics of the trip limited me in terms of what equipment I could bring. When taking UT equipment overseas, you have to have the camera in your carry on luggage. This was especially difficult for this trip because I was flying on Air China, which is very restrictive about carry on weight – one item, no heavier than 11 lbs. The class’s standard camera, the Z5U, was almost twice as heavy as that with its case. For that reason, I was given an A1U. That was actually for the best in all areas. The A1U is a smaller and lighter camera, much more conducive to being carried around all day long. I was working with a pretty stripped down list of equipment. I had a monopod, a shotgun mic (4073), the top of a table mount as a boom substitute, two XLRs, and a pair of headphones (which stopped working after the first week). That was it. I could not find a lav that was free for the two weeks I would have been using it. Since there was no one to hold the “boom,” I had to put our shotgun in the position of the camera’s mic. The 4073 was a little thinner then the camera mic, so, to fit it in the holder, I had to wrap it in tissue. I hooked it up to the external power supply to save the camera’s battery. I put the battery pack in the pocket of my coat (it was very cold) then wrapped the XLR cables around my arm. It was bare bones, but we got good results. Although the quality suffers in low light situations, the A1U still produces a great image. And, although lavs would have been ideal for interviews, the shotgun produced decent quality audio.

One of the inevitable difficulties of shooting was the language barrier. I don’t speak Chinese and many of our subjects spoke no English. Because of that I needed to rely on my Mandarin speaking friend to alert me when a particularly interesting thing was being said. When filming dialogues, I had to go on intuition as to whom I should be focusing on and what to make the framing. However, it also had advantages. Because our subjects couldn’t casually interact with me, it made it easier for them to forget the camera while they were doing their routines or talking, giving our interviews a nice, casual tone.

There were some other big challenges. We only had two weeks to shot, no going back for follow-ups, so we had to be conscious of what we were getting and what we wanted. A lot of our filming was done in big, public spaces, so I had no control over the surrounding people and noise. Also, I was a single camera dealing with very active subjects. It was sometimes a struggle to decide whether it was more appropriate to film wide, getting a full sense of the movement, or close, getting the sense of the personal strain, concentration, or complexity of the action. As much as possible, I tried to split the difference.

I’m still a bit astonished that the trip went off as smoothly as it did. None of the equipment got lost and all the essentials were glitch free. We were given wonderful access to a very interesting cast of characters. We got to film in some very visually interesting locations. And, personally, I had a great time. Now all that’s left to do is sort through all the evidence of that great time!

Back to the grind!