Having shot tests and short films on a variety of cameras, it was interesting and reassuring to return to shooting a short film with a familiar camera: my Fujifilm X-Pro-1.

While this model is now supplanted by superior updates, I enjoy using this camera for its manageable size, simplicity of control and terrific image capture, which served me greatly when shooting with it before.

The project this time was “Sisyphus”, a short film about an endless quest, which I shot on green spaces near my home in south east London.

@jonathanbartvideos

Short Film shoot #filmmaking #video #greatoutdoors #nature #southeastlondon

♬ Electric Counterpoint – Steve Reich

As a filmmaker, I’ve been very interested in writing and directing dialogue-free stories: it was enjoyable to build a story with just sound and vision, and excluding words.

If I were to do it again, I would aim to record better sound. The in-camera microphone caught a lot of wind distortion. While the camera has no socket for an external microphone, I could have recorded clean atmosphere tracks with my digital sound recorder.

Editing in iMovie was enjoyable. While I have the rudiments down on this tool, I’d like to experiment more with sound post-production on future projects.

According to Zanah Thirus’ excellent and informative microbudget indie filmmaker’s podcast, the most welcome compression for festivals is an H264 compressed MP4 file. Getting to this with iMovie was difficult: for some reason, when exporting, my settings button didn’t show. It was sheer luck that I clicked on a certain part of a grey area on the export window that brought up the menu I was after.

I’ve been editing some other videos; mainly test shoots and home recording, but in every shoot and edit I have aimed to learn something. Whatever the mistakes or learns in this, I enjoyed this production and look forward to my next.