For
everyone that I cover, I also want to more intellectual shot as
coverage. I realize that not all dance work is done on the dance
floor, or studio, but there is plenty of office work that is just as
important. To portray this, I had Toshi sitting in the park, writing,
studying, focusing.
Some
other coverage footage that I knew I would utilize was with Toshi
simply walking down the street. Since every street in New York City
is busy, it was easy to get some good shots while walking down the
sidewalk. For this I got both close-ups, and more far-away shots of
Toshi disappearing in the crowd.
After
shooting at the dance studio, I knew that I would need incidental
shots, and coverage shots of Toshi. For this, I made sure to get a
brief rehearsal of Toshi while we were at the studio.
To
call it the first day of production seems to be a bit of a misnomer.
It seems to imply that I had a production plan in mind. I didn't.
From
the first episode of Listen
To The City Breathe, I
supposed that my production methodology would be to interview the
subjects on multiple days, and then try to get some additional
footage of them as they lived and worked. To be sure, this is the
methodology that I used for this third episode (as well as the second
episode. But looking back, I can see that this indeterminate take on
the process led to this film taking quite a long time to produce. The
first episode was produced and released within two months. The first
interview for this film was shot in June 2017. That means that from
that first day to the day of release was about nine months!
There
are a lot of reasons for the delay of the production of this film. I
don't want to get into too many issues, but some of them include 1)
other work obligations, 2) other life obligations, 3) other films
with earlier due dates, and even 4) slight depression.
Way
back in June, I asked Toshi if he knew a nice dance studio where we
could film an interview with him, and he chose one.
Just
like I said before, I used two cameras for each interview, a Sony
a6000, and an iPhone6. I also wrongly assumed that I couldn't take a
bad picture with my new, better camera. Only now can I look back and
recognize how I could have framed things better, and learned more
about how to use a camera properly.
For
one thing, back then I always shot with the camera on its automatic
setting. I felt like since I didn't know about cameras, the good
people at Sony certainly programed this camera to take a better
picture than I ever good. Perhaps that was correct, but that logic
kept me from actually learning how to use the camera's settings for a
long time. Although the session in the dance studio was controlled
enough, this thinking hurt me in the future.
From
the beginning, I knew that I needed an additional audio recorder,
which would produce better sound than the onboard audio recorder on
any camera. To serve this function, I've used a ZOOM1 recorder and a lav mic to capture audio.
Even
with a new camera, I knew that I would still use my iPhones because
for these documentaries, I love shooting with two cameras at once, in
order to get b-roll footage, and especially to help clean-up dialogue
by the subject. But I really wanted to get a tripod for the iPhone. I
suppose that I could have done an online search, and found one, but
instead I went to a local store. But when they didn't have one, I
bought a selfie stick, and tore that apart to rebuild a nice tripod
for my iPhone.
Having
worked with the OSMO camera stabilizer for the iPhone before, I felt
like I had to have one for my new camera, too. After a bit of
research, I decided on the Zhiyun Crane. For the most part, it worked
well, and I got what I needed.
The
next piece of gear was a nice portrait lens for a6000. I chose the
50mm lens. It opens up to f1.8, which allows for a lot of
light, and a shallow depth of field. With a new camera and lens, I
started to feel like there was no way for me to take a bad photo!
I've since learned this sentiment was very wrong, but I will discuss
that later.
Before
I started filming Toshi's (link) episode of Listen
To The City Breathe, I
had decided that this was going to be a project that I want to
continue indefinitely. The main thing that meant was that I would
have to upgrade my gear. After all, the first episode (which you can
watch HERE link) was filmed almost entirely with an iPhone6, with a
few shots filmed with a Canon Elph point-and-click camera.
The
first piece of gear that I got was a Sony a6000 camera. Looking back,
I could have spent a bit more on a better, more up-to-date camera,
but a lot of the footage that I was seeing in my research seemed to
show that this was a very decent camera to use for this sort of
project, especially as an entry level camera for someone who knew
nothing about photography.
Contacts: 
, and the film: 
