Tag Archives: camera

USC

“Laghe Raho!” with Trojan Cricket Club

By Audrey Moore

“What a shot, yaar!  SHABASH!”  The batting team roars with excitement, cheering on the teammate who just successfully smashed our taped tennis ball outside of Cromwell and into Brittingham Field.  Another six runs are added to the score.  Immediately, I check my camera and scroll through the photos to make sure I got a good shot of the small white ball whirling past the bleachers; content, I kneel back down in the dugout and poise myself for another set of cricketing clicks.  This is the focus of my life for the next six hours: it’s Friday Night Lights, and there’s no place I’d rather be.

In fact, this is my life every Friday night.  From 6:00pm until midnight, I trek from my nearby apartment to the Cromwell Track and Field Stadium to manage our Trojan Cricket Club’s Cromwell Premier League (CPL) tournament and photograph our players.  Now as the acting club President, it’s amazing to believe that just over a year ago I couldn’t even describe the rules of cricket, let alone partake in this fun, competitive pastime.

I owe that to USC.

Given that USC has the highest percentage of international students enrolled in the world, it’s no surprise that some of the first friends I met here came from countries far outside the U.S.  In my freshman year, the International Residential College toured me around Chinatown for the Mid-Autumn Festival, where I tried my first moon cake (red bean is definitely the best!) and ogled over traditional dragon dances.  My Kenyan choir friend taught me how to play the congas after a rehearsal session at the Caruso Catholic Center.  And the Indian graduate students who worked in our dining hall introduced me to cricket.

Continue reading “Laghe Raho!” with Trojan Cricket Club →
L.A. Life

Fading Into the Background

By Kevin Jiang

Living in Los Angeles, you are bound to see a celebrity or two walking around. I mean, Hollywood is the heart of the film industry and you can’t walk a block without seeing some sort of filming activity. Consequently, this summer I came upon an interesting opportunity to be a background actor.

To quickly explain, background actors , or “extras”, are all those silent people in TV shows or movies that walk around in the background, cheer in a crowd, fill a party, or sit in a café. Whether you notice them or not, these “extras” are an important part of filmmaking. They make the action on screen believable.

I only got into the background business a couple weeks ago, but I’ve already worked on multiple sets, from the long-running television staple NCIS, to tween programming on Nick and Disney, to a small unannounced feature film. The experience, besides teaching me EXTREME patience due to sitting and waiting for hours upon hours until needed on set, has also given me an appreciation for all the work and coordination that goes on behind the scenes of a TV show or film. I mean, you’ve all seen the credits that roll after a show or movie has ended and you’ve probably wondered, “Who are these people?” Being there on set and witnessing the intricate network of communication and the complicated set-ups for lights, sound, and camera, I fully comprehended the importance of each individual and their role in the crew.

Photo by Paulo Wang on Flickr

To film a single scene, you’ve got your actors, of course, whose job it is to come prepared, but then there’s also the hair and make-up artists who must execute the vision of each character’s aesthetic, and the lighting and sound crews who are in charge of creating the perfect atmosphere and ensuring the sound quality, and the camera crew who needs to get the exact angle and camera movement. And, last but not least, you have the background actors who must get into place and know exactly what to do when the camera starts rolling.  All together, it feels like organized chaos, like when musicians in an orchestra all tune their instruments at the same time. Of course, however dissonant the sound is while they prepare, the cacophony is immediately forgotten once the conductor raises his wand and leads the ensemble in melodic harmony.

Continue reading Fading Into the Background →