Artistic Response to Balloons

Balloons (Candace, Charlotte, Tess, Kaia)

Since my role is cinematographer, I will be evaluating the cinematography of our film Balloons;. The overall response from my classmates regarding the cinematography is quite positive. One of their criticisms was that the shots filmed under dark lighting were noticeably grainy. This was an issue in my Film Noir and Twilight Zone films as well, and to prevent this problem from happening again, I should try adjusting the ISO settings on the camera. 

I am quite satisfied with the overall mood and look of the film as I think the colour scheme was able to give off the sad and helpless atmosphere that the character was living under (a stressful school environment and society) with colours like blue, black, grey, and green:

 There were, however, a few shots that did not match the colour scheme, mostly the shots from the cafeteria scene. There was a sudden change from the cold colour tone to a warm colour tone between the classroom scene and the cafeteria scene: 

To make the film more aesthetically pleasing, I think that I should have put more work into location scouting and set design. I should also mention that the major problems we faced during the filming process were related to locations. Since we could not film at an actual local school, I had to try and make CIS look like a local school by using a lot of overhead shots and close ups. I was able to conceal the real identity of the location well but I did not put enough consideration into the colours of the locations. We should've filmed at the new cafeteria rather than the old one because the colours of the furniture matches the colour scheme of our film better. 

The repetition of the overhead shots is meant to help with reinforcing the theme of our film - to reflect the repetitive, "spoon-feeding" education system HK local school students suffer under. To keep the film visually engaging, I tried to widen the variety of shots by filming the overhead shot from another angle, as seen in the third screenshot below.  

Even though the camera was already mounted on the fig-rig, many of the shots still turned out to be shaky and this was one of the major flaws of our film. It was very difficult to keep the fig-rig stable while filming overhead shots. I noticed that other film groups were using another type of camera stabiliser, which I hope to look into and use for the next film project. 

As mentioned above, a lot of close ups were used in our film to help emphasise the character's emotions. I was largely inspired by the use of close ups in the Odessa Steps sequence in Battleship Potemkin.

The audience also seemed to enjoy the two shots that go around Tina's head, which were used as transitions from bedroom scene to the rooftop scene. I was inspired by the donut selfie trend (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcHAHZhBCUk) and I think that it turned out very well. I originally wanted to film this shot using the dolly, but I realised that the shot was too close to the actress to use a dolly. I asked the actress to hold the fig-rig by herself and move it around her face and we managed to achieve the same effect. As an IB learner, I became a better problem solver - we realized that it wasn't worth it carrying the dolly all the way from CIS to Central just for one shot, so I decided to use the fig-rig instead. However, I really enjoyed the use of the dolly in the other group's film (Bernd, Chris, and Isaac) and I hope to make more use of the dolly in the next unit. 

The use of intellectual montage is very evident in our film with the use of symbolism shots, the most prominent one being the balloons that are meant to represent the character's thoughts and feelings (the film starts off with colourful balloons and ends up with red / white / no balloons). The rope around Tina's neck is a symbol of stress and suicidal thoughts; the Winnie the Pooh falling off the table is a symbol of the loss of innocence and childhood; the shot of Tina putting spoons of rice into her mouth placed next to the shot of her flipping through her textbook is representing the spoon-feeding education system in HK; and at last the semicolon in the close up of her writing is a universal symbol of mental illness.

It was interesting to see how other groups presented the use of symbolism in their films. I found it very unique how one of the groups (Raghav's group) placed American food and Mexican food separately to represent the US-Mexico border. 

In terms of storytelling, the audience was able to understand the story well, even though I worried that they wouldn't understand the purpose of the balloon shots because they seemed to be quite randomly placed (which turned out not to be an issue after Kaia finalised the edit and added a few more balloon shots in between). Overall, I am very happy with how our film turned out and I think that I expressed more of my own ideas in this unit, especially because I am in control of the camera. I found that we filmed a lot more efficiently as I made good use of the storyboard and shot list. They helped me a lot with organisation (making sure that I don't miss any shots).