© 2015 karlwalker

Let’s Reflect, Baby! Pt. 2

The production of my love child of a tracking shot was quite straightforward. The way that i came up with the location is quite ordinary! I was walking to the gym (which is briefly visible in the previz and final product) and i was struck by the light columns (At the beginning of the take) on the other side of the road. These little lights added great texture to the night as on the corner was a large orange street light which was AWESOME since in that whole area all the other street lights were different colours. This got me intrigued and I imagined someone walking out of this dark place and across the road.

My next thought was… “But surly I’ll hit a dark patch that will look shithouse and that will be that!” But i realised that the little side walkway across the road had these small wall lights! WHY? I have no clue! But they just lifted the little walkway to make it look cinematic! So i continued to walk through this new amazing location that I’d already seen a million times before and realised that after getting through the carpark there were all these stores that left their lights on at night! LIKE BIG SOFT BOXES!!!! Now this was getting to be too good to be true!

I saw some cars driving around the car park and liked the way their headlights flowed over the asphalt. The lighting in this little place was superb! The other day I met with a man who owned a RED – Dragon! Beautiful camera! and he said to me “Karl, It is all about lighting and lenses, you can have a good camera but if you have bad lighting or bad lenses, then it doesn’t matter what you shoot on!” and I realised that if i could use one of my lenses in this place, it would look great!!!

So i decided to make a pre-viz of the location and my idea, so I saddled up the glide cam and grabbed my house mate and did a walkthrough! AND THANK GOD I DID! cause it looked great and it highlighted the places in the scene where I could see myself in shadows and refections, most notably is the bollard at the entry to the car park. In the Pre-Viz you see me as clear as day and i realised that the way to remedy this was to wrap around the bollard! This gave a nice depth to the scene and one that i enjoyed, but I did feel as if it distanced the camera too much from the character. The shot size and frame used in the pre-viz is almost identical to the shot size of that used in the final product. This is due to focus of course and also to make sure that any bumps or wobbles aren’t incredibly noticeable! I would have LOVED to change up the shot size as I feel it would have added a greater dynamic to the work! It would have enhanced parts and eased off others! It could have created another dimension for the narrative to represent. THIS would have been great but unfortunately technology and my budget got me in the end…this time…

In the pre-viz we did shoot some alternate routes but the look and feel and dynamic wasn’t the same. It lessened the space and the tracking shot felt more of a gimmick then as a product of the scene.

The shoulders on the subject in the previz are very sharp and defined and it looks great don’t get me wrong, but alas the type of person who is walking at night, angry at the world and the labels that have been placed on him, does not wear a blazer. he wears whatever he wants, he dresses for his own comfort, and not to please anyone else, and for this reason, it is why i decided to make the main character wear a hoodie (more on that later)

The music within the previz has this great driving feeling! It is a string quartet version of smells like teen spirit by Nirvana. I discovered this version as i became excited for the new Nirvana documentary and loved that this piece of music had been reinvented and gave this evolution and forward momentum. In the documentary it is used as a building to things to come and that is exactly how i used the music in the pre-viz, it is there to push the action but also to lead to the end when it strips away and leaves the viewer, alone with this unstable young man.
The music of the pre-viz would be great to use but of course it is impossible to get copyright clearance for such a popular song! But! My house mate is a musician and is also a film composer (he plays the musician and the main character in the pre-viz) and has agreed to design a score for the scene. He has agreed that it has to be a driving, dark piece. I stated that I wanted a string quartet because I love the bonding of two things that don’t seem like they should. Eg; 1920’s with rap or dubstep, or strings with 2000’s era violence or action. It creates a great representation as it changes the whole dynamic, if i had the original ‘smells like teen spirit’ underneath the pre-viz, it would sound shit! It would be a hammy, stereotypical amateurish piece of work that has been produced by a young guy who has no original voice and no unique talent apart from being able to work a video camera. YOU NEED TO BE ABLE TO BE BOLD STYLISTICALLY! if you aren’t you’re never going to find something new and truly beautiful because you’ll be wandering in what someone else has done before you.

The music in Bela Tar’s clip of the Wreckmeister Harmonies was a great inspiration as it added another dimension to the scene and I realised that with a long take, the sound becomes more important. The sound now becomes this living thing alongside the take and is there to weave with the take and to enhance it. With a long take you strip back the editing and the movement around the scene so the shot becomes continuous, the action becomes continuous and you can’t heighten the feeling with cuts…so how do you do it? MUSIC! The music of the long take establishes or enhances the tone of the take because we can not achieve anything similar because we cannot cut or show what we have to see or feel, we have to hear it.

The biggest thing i believe that i learnt from the pre-viz was that you cannot handhold a glide cam, with a 5d and a shotgun mike, for 5 mins, over hills and dales. Not. Possible. Too Heavy, stuff that idea! So I managed to get my hands on a glidecam vest from the steadicam operator at work and THANK GOD I DID! (more on that later too!)

And One last thing! The track into the back at the end of the pre-viz i added to give myself an end point. We did a run through where the main character exited frame and it just felt terrible, i was left with this final image of an out of focus road with no punch, no meaning. So i decided to finish on the back of the character because A) it would give me a definitive end point and B) because the black drift into the character is incredibly emotive and combines with the narrative in such as a way as to leave the viewer with this harrowing feeling. We track into the darkness of him as he says “I have to get away” and we have entered his world by the end of walk, we have entered his darkness. The black leaves the audience disorientated and lost, just like the protagonist, scared in the dark. The choice to finish on the back was as much technical as it was thematical.

KFW.

Post a Comment

Your email is never published nor shared. Required fields are marked *

*
*

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>

Skip to toolbar