Psychology of Shot

    Lots of films play with the idea of playing with the audiences emotions, they get you invested and get you to feel certain ways during certain parts of the film. This is something that we are trying to implement into our documentaries. For me I don't really understand "detailed shots" so I will be discussing camera angles I will be using in my documentary. One camera angle I plan to use is low camera angles. I plan to mainly use this on the school building itself. This type of angle can portray a type of importance or size which is how I want to portray the school as a very important piece that can seem daunting to new students entering high school. For the interviews I feel the best way to portray them is with a eye-level view of the subject as they are being interviewed for a feeling of being in the conversation itself, perhaps some over the shoulder shots as well to really give that feeling that you're there really listening to this conversation of what they are describing. I definitely want to grasp just how huge the school is so with the low camera angles onto the school I also plan to use some wide angle views and establishing shots of the entirety of the high school or the best I can get of the entirety of it. I really just want to convey that the high school is portrayed as this huge mountain that you have to climb and get over to continue with your plans in life. But besides how a shot looks itself what can also affect the is the color of the shots themselves. Color is very important and depending on how its used can portray many different emotions in many different ways. While I may not be able to affect the color in most shots until I get to editing there are some ways I can affect it. I can decide to record at certain times such as if I wanted to portray a certain feeling with shots of the school by recording either during the morning/evening or night since each of those times during the day have different colors spectrums. In post editing I can also use filters to drown or saturate colors I can use this to add a stronger feelings to certain shots and really make them pop out compared to other parts of the film. Besides these two things what also impacts a scene is what's in the scenes themselves. A cluttered scene can feel claustrophobic or a feeling of urgency while an empty scene can portray a lot of things depending on what else is in the scene, like an empty scene can change depending on the colors that are being used in the same scene. Overall I will be thinking about all of these points and how I can use them in my own documentary to my best ability to create a fairly well documentary that effectively portrays different emotions.