Pulling Focus

Pull Focus from georgie wing on Vimeo.

I wanted to practice the technique of pulling focus. The pull focus technique is where the main focus point of the frame is changed by pulling focus onto another part of the image. I created a short film to show this technique. I focused on making sure that my shots were neither under exposed or over exposed. I did this by looking at the light meter on the screen and trying to keep it as close to the centre of the meter as possible. I had the camera set on 24 frames per second as this is the usual frames per second that is used in moving image. My shutter speed was 1/50. I wanted my ISO to be as close to 100 as possible so that my footage was not grainy and was therefore higher quality. However due to it being an overcast day I raised my ISO to 400 however when I focused on a different part of the room it was underexposed so I raised my aperture. However it was still underexposed so I had to raise my ISO again but this time I set it at 800 and this resulted in the footage being perfectly exposed.

My footage that pulls focus between a coffee cup and a water bottle worked well and was perfectly exposed due to my focus on the light meter. If I were to do this task again I would use a tripod because two of my clips were shaky and therefore the pull focus effect wasnt as effective as it should have been due to the unsteadyness of the footage. The tripod would ensure that the camera wouldn't shake and therefore my pull focus would have been more effective. I included my last clip in the video because it yet again highlights that without a tripod the footage can be ruined. The pull focus also didn't work in the last clip because I was trying to focus on two things that were not far enough away from each other and therefore they were both in and out of focus at the same time.