Alright, so although the scene isn’t polished yet I will hopefully update it in another post once its finished.

For now I’m just going to reflect on the production itself and include a few notes that got left out in my Pre-production post.

Characters and actors

Sarah – Steph Tsindos

Richard – Juilo marchado

To work out the script we decided that we should improvise the scene first and then work at it from there. after a few run throughs I nailed down a couple of points which acted as ammunition for the actors to fire at each other during the argument, this turned out better than expected and allowed to get a somewhat consistent script.

The biggest issue with the production was that I only had Steph available for this improv section so during the shoot Juilo had to effectively guess the timings and delivery of the lines. During production this seemed like the best method and the pacing and delivery seemed to work giving adequate breaks for responses, however once we hit post production it urned out not to be the case as some of Steph’s responses lasted much longer than expected. This meant that I was at a lack for footage of Julio listening to Steph ,The result meant that the editing was forced to work to keep illusion of temporal continuity by cutting away to unsuitable shot, or by stitching audio snippets together to shorten the conversation. This meant that the visual rhythm was not as desired, especially in the argument, however overall I think it is still passable. This problem could have probably been avoided, given more planning, however seeing as the improv and shooting all occurred on the same day it seemed the only solution. I also think I could easily remedy this problem by simply reshooting the side shot, but with more specifically rehearsed timing.

Another smaller issue which was also effected by the audio was that the music at the beginning of the piece was meant to be diegetic, and lower in volume as we see Richard turn it down. Due to framing and audio timing however this is not as obvious, or evident as I would have liked it to be.

I think was the tracking shots went better than expected considering I was the old office wheelie chair method.

At the start I was planning to use elliptical editing, to expand the time in which the conversation was occurring and also to circumvent scripting a whole conversation. I was also planning on having Sarah’s voice be inaudible through the phone. These ideas both went out the window once we further than expected writing the characters and the backstory.

Other thematic ideas which crumbled due to the enforced editing where using Richard proximity with the camera, as a symbol for his distance in the relationship( this was aimed to be during the start of the conversation). Another idea that fell short was that I was planning to use Richards swivel in the chair during the argument to correspond with a turn in his character. The lighting ideally was meant to reinforce emotional tone as he was meant to be lit with more contrast once he turned around, casting half of his face in darkness. This idea also fell a bit short, however I think that the lighting still looked nice and worked to an extent.

Here’s my shitty storyboard: