‘The Sketch Shoot’ – Reflection

I have shot the film and am now editing it. I had my friend act in the sketch shoot of ‘The Loveable Moron’ with me, as the quality of acting or production was not the main focus. What was the main focus is having another friend who is a highly skilled and experienced DOP, use a Canon 5d mk ii DSLR with no tripod or microphone, film the entire sketch film with the universal shotlist and the script.

Throughout the experiment, he was a little confused at times due to the shortened descriptions and lack of detail, to save space, on the shotlist. He understood a lot of what he was reading and began shooting. While the quality is not the main focus, he stuck to the shotlist and filmed handheld to the best of his ability. However, he did have some qualms with the way the shot-list was ordered in a shoot-edit style. I reflected upon this criticism and explained how I had made the shotlist in a shoot-edit style (despite that being impractical in my opinion) to save time, and to allow for a quicker, but more technically problematic shoot. It was not on the forefront of my mind, but his criticism had made me realize some technical issues with the shotlist.

As we finished the shoot, he noticed how the shotlist was very elaborate and explained a lot of detail, but he still felt as if he was not entirely sure what he was doing. What I learnt from this experiment was that if the DOP does not have prior knowledge of the film, the universal shotlist may not serve as great or efficient a purpose as I thought. However, it is also the shotlist’s conjested space and small amount of in depth description of purpose and technique that may have contributed to the confusion. The final edit of ‘The Loveable Moron’ will be a very interesting study to reflect on.