NightCrawling

For our Documentary on freeganism we felt that capturing a bin dip would be an essential element and would give us the opportunity to include some more exciting footage giving context to the interviews. This would likely require shooting with a hand-held approach, with low lighting conditions as it would in all certainty take place at night, and probably involve a degree of trespassing. As an almost alternative to our poetic documentary, and because i wanted to familiarise myself with the Sony HDV-Z1, I went out and filmed a friend who was doing a photography project on voyeurism as he took pictures of people from high vantage-points such as car-park rooftops.

This was a great emulation of the  scenarios we will likely encounter when we film the eventual bin dip, with low level exposure of light being one obstacle to overcome as well as featuring aspects of someone climbing into places they shouldn't. Despite being hand-held i was surprised with how smooth some of the footage turned out, and very little colour correction had to be applied to the darker shots, mostly only on some over-exposed shots under car-park lighting.
I was partially inspired by Thierry Guetta's early footage from Exit Through the Gift Shop, taken as he pursued graffiti artists at night as they created their street art, his camera glued to the subjects at all times. The artists he followed would often clime onto rooftops as well, and Thierry is constantly present to witness this, even though his participation is minimal.