The shoot from week six proved to be a humbling lesson in the importance of pre-production. We decided to use my pitch idea due to easiness of the location I was thinking of using (the speakers in the hallway parallel to the classroom).
My idea was to shoot a person walking through a space and being distracted by two speakers making noise above them. From there I was planning on the distracted subject accidentally bumping into a second subject and dropping all their things. At the time of writing the script I thought that the idea would work really well and be really simple – I was wrong.
This was the script we decided to use.
- EXT. Office building interior – DAY
Billy attentively walks through a city hallway concealing a small object in his right hand. Whilst Billy walks through the space he notices two wall mounted speakers in the corner of his eye. He ignores them and continues walking. As he gets closer to the speaker a he notices a sound coming from the speakers.
Left Speaker
A flock of crows is called a murder
Billy is distracted by the distorted voice coming from the speaker. He stops walking briefly, clenching the object in his right hand tightly. He looks up to the left Speaker which is static and silent. He starts to walk again.
Right Speaker
Cherophobia is an irrational fear of fun and happiness.
Billy looks up again. As confused as ever. He stares again at the two now silent speakers. He starts walking whilst still looking at the speakers.
As Billy quickly walks away he does not notices a second person coming his way. Billy stares at the speakers. Both confused and now scared.
Right Speaker
I hope you don’t forgot your sisters birthday on Friday.
At this moment Billy walks into Samantha. Billy knocks an unnecessary amount of papers out of her hands.
Billy (frantic tone)
Oh my lord, I am so sorry!
Samantha quacking collects her belongings without making eye contact with Billy. She also picks up the undefined object that Billy had been holding the whole time.
Samantha (frustrated tone)
Idiot
Samantha quickly scurries away with both her belongings and the object that Billy had been holding the entire time. Billy stands up having not noticed that he has lost his possession.
Right Speaker
I’d be embarrassed if I were you
Billy stares at the speakers as he gets up. He still hasn’t noticed his missing item. He stands motionless, still perplexed at what just happened.
On the day we faced a number of issues that all could’ve been resulted if we spent a little more time on our pre production. Despite Caitlin’s best efforts in making a storyboard in the 5 minutes that we had before we went to shoot, we had no real structure in our hour worth of shooting time.
In retrospect there is a lot of stuff we can take away from our shoot in terms of pre-prod.
Firstly, we didn’t really allocate roles for the three of us in the group. Instead we had Larissa operating the camera and Caitlin and I both directing. I can’t remember exactly but someone from group two operating the boom. This lack of real structure meant that before every shot, the three of us would deliberate about what the shot should look like. This meant that by the time the our hour was up, we had completed four shots. In retrospect clearly defined roles would’ve made the shoot much more efficient.
Another aspect that I now know is really crucial to a successful and efficient shoot is making sure to have some sort of shot-list or storyboard. In this instance,we relied on trying to shoot the script, without any real direction or understanding of what the shot would look like. This approach not only wasted an insane amount of time before each shot, but also meant that we overlooked shooting shots from later in the script that would use the same or at least a similar framing.
We didn’t manage to record any foley but I feel that we didn’t deserve blame for that. As we only had around 45 mins to shoot our shots and before the class Caitlin and I agreed that we were going to record foley whilst the second group was setting up their shots. This later became impossible because the second group’s shot was in a lane near Cardigan Street, which was both super noisey, consisted of different surfaces to our shoot and also look like 10 mins to find.
In terms of making my two edits, I decided to make one with and without sound. I decided to make the edit without sound because we forgot to turn the camera to using it’s external mic.
In the first sequence I wanted to create a really nice and fluid sequence of someone walking and getting distracted by the speakers. I thought that we did well to create the effect of the speakers being higher then they actually were (they are around 6 feet in the air). We achieved this shooting down from the speakers POV (first shot) and by using a low shot angled up in the second shot.
I was concerned about the pacing of my first edit due to the first two establish shots being quite drawn out and my next shots all being quite fast and fluid. Despite this and the obvious lack of sound I thought it actually looked quite good.
In my second edit, I used the audio from the boom mic. Whilst editing, I realised how useful the clapper was to merging the audio. After the near impossible task of trying to merge audio/clips with me clapping out of frame, having the clapper felt like a serious luxury. With this edit I wanted to put more emphasis on the speakers. I decided to zoom in on the speaker in my first shot to establish the speaker motif, this resulted in a decrease in the clips quality which I couldn’t seem to fix (I’ll write a post on trying to fix that later on). In general I thought that the clip was framed really well and the pacing was quite fluid.
My only critique of myself for this clip, would be the different footstep volumes, which despite my best efforts, I couldn’t exactly match up. I was also undecided on what type of editing I’d do and went for simple cuts, which I felt kept the clip as simple as possible.
AG