Part one:
Before starting shooting, I had to preplan and think of the exact timing and angles before calling my sister in and working with her. Working with my little sister was difficult and I had no idea that it would be that way. As I am an impatient person and my little sister is the complete opposite. She had final exams so there were instances where she couldn’t help me so we had to squeeze all the filming into two days. I did the best that I could to work with what I had and what I could get a hold of.
I used a tripod and camera that I borrowed from I.T and worked with that. I also realized that all this had to be done in one shot or it would be very jumpy and hassle to edit. This time I had shot the same the whole thing 36 times and that was one of the most difficult part of shooting, standing up in a hot room. Before shooting, I was in a dilemma because I had no lamp to work with. I had nothing close to the lighting in the film. Fortunately, someone I know had the lamp which I borrowed for the purpose of filming. It was the orange/yellow light in the film and very concentrated. As the light was really harsh the first time, the drawings and writing in the book didn’t show really well. Here are some examples from my shots showing how harsh the lighting was.
Part TWO:
Figuring out the lighting situation was difficult but now that is solved. The other issue I had is that the cover of the book was way darker than I intended and the lighting soaked up the color. The a4 paper I printed on was normal and had a shine to it and that didn’t work well in the lighting. I did what I could through editing and changing angles and nothing worked. I started editing with what I had to show what I could in class and harsh lighting is what I ended up with.
Another problem that I had was working with my sister. No matter how many times we did that same thing over and over again there would always be a mistake. She got a hang of it very quickly though and I was impressed. Keeping track of the time and how long I needed her to pause was more than enough to make the shoot go as seamlessly as possible. I cut down as many things that I didn’t need in my video footage and ended up with less amount of footage. Here are some examples as to why I had so much trouble and the footage i ended up with:
Reem Abdou 