Again, I apologize for posting this late, but many things are going on at the moment, and when I'm not shooting or sitting in class, I'm sitting in a movie theater or typing up some movie stuff. But let's cut right to the chase: Week 2 of my year at the San Francisco School of Digital Filmmaking.

What I really like about this school is that they slowly introduce you to the craft of filmmaking but at the same time make sure that you as the student are getting as much first-hand experience as possible. The second week introduced us to using filters to our advantage and grapsing the pros and cons of using natural light.

So, rather than having us start with artificial lighting, our instructor first made us go out and experiment with sunlight. Of course, sunlight is not always ideal, but it's important to know how natural light works if you plan to shoot outside and you don't have an entire lighting kit with you.

What we also talked about during week two was depth of field, a tool I particularly love to use already. With this you can control the area in front of and behind your subject, which is in focus. It looks great and is pretty easy to handle as well. The rest of the week we spent prepping our first project, which I will describe in detail in a separate entry.

To give you a short intro to our first film, we had to film a short piece no longer than three minutes, and we couldn't use sync sound, text or dialogue. The main objective of the assignment was to evoke an emotion; to make our audience feel something. Everything else was up to us. No need to tell a story, but the emotion was to be the central part of the project.

We were allowed to use sound effects and music, but our instructors encouraged us to stay away from music because music obviously often evokes an emotion by itself. The goal of the project, however, was to evoke an emotion through our images. It may sound like a very easy job at first, but it sure wasn't.

I will post a detailed report about my shoot and editing process shortly, but I can tell you, shooting this on your own with the help of one partner is a challenge, even though I found it to be a very enlightening experience. Again, it showed me that respecting a camera is so vital when trying to put together your own little film.

All in all, week two was a shorter class week, but it supplied us with everthing we needed to know for the first task. Looking back at the first two weeks in film school, I can only say that I've learned a great deal about the camera I own and the ones we use at school.

BTW, that's me in the picture above to the left, and my buddy Peter on the right. This is from a short shoot we did during week one. Basically, we had to grab the cameras and film a one-minute piece without editing anything to get to know the first camera. We ended up filming inside a small elevator for a while.