Today we shot a script written by Jackson Freud. The script was set in an interrogation room and is a quirky little number. We were told that we had to shoot sections of the script WITHOUT changing any of the dialogue or action. We decided to keep the first section and remove most of the first page, due to the time constraints. This worked to our advantage, because the script actually did make sense when we cut out the first part of the dialogue and jumped right into the juicy bits. I ended up directing the scene and we went first. We managed to film two master over the shoulder shots and a close up of two characters. This was useful because when I cut the film together later on, I found it quite easy to edit the footage together. The most annoying thing about the camera was that during the over the shoulder shot, the camera auto-focused on the back of someones head, instead of the characters that were speaking. This is a valuable lesson as I will ensure to set up the manual focus properly next time.

The most important thing that I will take from this lesson is that it is really hard sticking exactly to the script. We were lucky that we had a script that could be selected from and still make sense, however in future I would find it hard cutting entire segments out of a script and still making sure that the story is coherent. I will always question the presence of elements and be economical when I write, this is because nothing should be in the script that doesn’t need to be there or that doesn’t move the story forward. I found that the section that we cut out of Jackson’s script, while it did set up the scene, and create more context for the story, it was ultimately unnecessary and could be cut out without negatively affecting the script. Below is the version of the footage that I edited.