Basic Camera Skills Session

Reflections on camera session
Although we didn't get round to finishing our short 'simultaneous action' film, i have found this session to be very useful.
One of the most useful parts of the session, in my opinion, was the chance to go over the basic shot composition, including shot sizes and shot angles.
I also found the more relaxed session a good chance to get a feel for the Canon XM2, which i have never used before. My first impression of the camera is that it that it is a very functional and well well designed unit that was fairly easy to use (although, don't quote me on that later on in the project when we start doing some more complex shots).
For our dialog scene we decided to join 2 groups of 2 so that we could have two camera operators along with 2 'Actors', the main outcome from this task was, none of us in the group are meant to be actors :-).
For our action scene we decided to pick the news story of 'Sinking of the Concordia'. Our plan was to have the Captain on the bridge as the ship crashes, contrasting with passengers in the lower decks as the ship tilts. In the end we only had time to experiment with the passenger perspective shots. We used dutch tilt techniques along with well timed actors to give the effect of the room tilting. This took a couple of takes to get right; in some of the takes we had actors seemingly defying gravity as the rolled uphill.
Overall i really enjoyed the exercise and am  looking forward to further my skills in future sessions.