What Can a Filmmaker Learn from Photography?
“Thank you so much, Professor Leblanc-Roberge! I had a blast this semester, and I hope I can continue to develop my art and ideas in the near future!”
Honestly, I originally signed up for photography to obtain my final production course for my major. After signing up, however, I found out that I didn’t need it for my major (having already fulfilled the requirement), but I stayed in the class anyway, and I am glad I did.
One of my goals for the class was to learn more about lens-based technologies and processes. As a filmmaker, I was already familiar with basic camera functions, such as adjusting the exposure/F-stop/aperture. I was also familiar with how much the lens mattered when it came to taking photos or recording video. However, since I haven’t had as much access to lenses as I did during the class, I never got a good chance to use different lenses with my Canon T5i. After taking this class, I definitely see a major difference with my photos now than I did before! Using a zoom lens and a single prime lens produced one type of images, but, after playing with the various lenses from Sage, I got different effects from the subjects of my images. Overall, I felt as though Advanced Photography allowed me to experiment with different cameras and lenses, and I learned a lot about how I could manipulate my images even further!
Another aspect of film that I wanted to learn through photography was “mise-en-scene,” or the arrangement of subjects/props in front of the camera. While I have always wanted to control what props were on-screen along with how actors moved, there was always something that wouldn’t work out! For my photography projects, I utilized studio spaces to be able to control what I could put in front of a camera. By the time I got to the third and fourth projects, i had full control over what I could frame, and I was extremely happy with the results! Through photography, I feel as though I was much more careful about what I had in front of the camera, along with how they were positioned.
What Have I Learned?
Outside of the technical aspects of this class, Advanced Photography allowed me to do the one thing I love most about film: experimentation. I learned a lot about my common themes, images, and styles by playing around with the camera and my subjects, and it helped me develop an artistic identity that I will probably carry into the future, especially as I prepare to shoot my first major short film. Through experimentation, I explored the ideas of paradoxes, transformation, and cyclicality as three major drives of our lives. We tend to either ignore or overlook how they come into play, but, through my art, I was able to exaggerate these ideas and evoke certain responses that you can’t get from aesthetic art. Because I am inspired by many types of sources, I often have a hard time in unifying my films stylistically and thematically. However, I spent a lot of time trying different things through my photography, so, by the time I got to making videos for my final projects, I was able to present a much fuller idea of who I am as an artist. In a way, I became much more passionate all while learning more about lens-based technologies and techniques.