This week I did a test shoot for scene 8 of Touch On/Touch Off (using my housemate as a stand in for Wil, who plays the main character, George, in the film). Although we will be using a tree in Princes Park for this scene, I decided to just test shoot the sequence on the nature strip outside my house. I like the wide establishing shot at the beginning of this scene because the tree branches help to frame the character in the shot. However, I think it might be better to punch the framing in a bit tighter so that the character doesn’t seem so distant.

The main problem I had with this scene was shooting the phone. It was difficult to capture the ‘3 missed calls from work’ that are meant to flash up on the screen when the phone is lying flat on the ground facing straight up at the sun. The glare makes it so that you can only see the reflection on the screen. Nevertheless, I did actually like the reflection of the tree canopy because it foreshadows the last shot of the scene. I think if I framed this shot a bit closer in I could capture the notifications on the phone better and hopefully get a few seconds of the tree reflection when the phone screen goes dark as well. I think the phone we’re using as a prop for the real shoot is also newer than the one I was using, so hopefully the screen light will have a bit more ‘oomf’.  It is also a shame that the grass in this shot looks so dark (I think it was caused by either one of our shadows); thus the colouring does not match up with the other shots in this scene. However, I think you could get the grass looking the same in each shot by colour grading and masking out the phone.

I experimented with a shot I hadn’t storyboarded for this scene as well: the high angle shot of George falling onto his back. Although this shot didn’t edit into the scene as smoothly as I would have hoped (there were some issues with continuity), I still think it is worth including because the last frame of the shot is quite beautiful:

It also works well with the proceeding POV shot of the tree canopy at the end of the scene.

Script:

Storyboard:

Edit: