Listen To The City Breathe: Episode Three: 10

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.