At first, the exercise was kind of confusing to our group and we were a bit all over the place. We spent a lot of time just wandering around looking for places to shoot. I did, however, find the exercise very useful. To be honest, I would rarely have thought that it was possible to film one conversation scene between two people in completely different places without it being jarring. This is something that is helpful to know though because there might be circumstances where this is necessary to do. There was a kind of comfort in finding out that you could film a scene in completely different places but, when it is edited together, it looks as though it is done in the one place. I’m actually quite surprised that this was the outcome for our shots.

I was kind of the director’s assistant for this task but we didn’t have super clear roles, which was probably why we were a bit all over the place. This meant that I was kind of questioning whether what we were doing would actually work. I spent a lot of the time trying to work out whether the eye lines were right from shot to shot or whether the setting would look the same in the final product. It turns out that I should’ve just trusted the process and our director more because it all turned out well, thankfully.

Our group chose to use quite expressionistic lighting for the second mid shot of one of our characters. It was really fun to use the black and white boards to achieve this and draw from film noir lighting to try and capture the suspicion of the character. I once made a film that utilised film noir conventions and I learnt more about lighting than I ever had before doing that shoot. I researched films such as ‘The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari’ and learnt how lighting can almost take on a whole character itself and since then, I have been interested in expressionistic lighting. It has been great in this studio learning more about naturalistic lighting and how, in many ways, this can also be expressionistic in its own way.