School Promotional DVD Shoot

For the past two days I was helping out the promotional dvd shooting for Nihon University School of Medicine. (boy were my legs sored after standing for 2 full days ...) It's my first time involving in a real video shoot environment. Though the scale was nothing like a big screen movie, it was a very valuable field studies nontheless. I had the chance to be in the realtime environment, up close with the equipments, and talked to one of the great camera man in Japan, Tabe Masami. I asked him a lot of things about DSLR camera and he was nicely to explain to me in details and taught me a few tricks of his own. He's 67 years old and still full of energy and enthusiasim in what he does best.

One of the thing he told me that I remembered the most was "Always think about how to tackle the shot first before shooting, whether it is opening up the aperature or increasing the shutter speed. Everything in the frame tells a story, so it's important to take care of every details, say if the background should be soft and blury for a more feminine character or strong and sharp for a musculine character."

For more info about this great man, check out his own website at

http://homepage.mac.com/masayoshitabe/index.html

Anyways, now I know that shooting a movie isn't an easy task. Especially making a big scale movie, it requires leadership, energy and enthusiasim. Right now, I think I only have one out of three, ouch!