I shot my individual scene task, yay!
I chose to shoot exercise 1B, “Tony’s Office”. I actually think I missed the class when we shot this exercise, which might be why I was most drawn to this script. I was drawn to the script because didn’t have any preconceived vision of how to shoot it; it was novel and full of options. I was also drawn to it because – like my project script – it was a dialogue scene between two characters. And I anticipated that finding more than two actors would be too difficult.
With this dialogue scene, I chose to experiment slightly with the convention of shot / reverse shot. My scene was a single dolly shot. It was a little complicated blocking-wise – it required interesting choreography. This is essentially the shot:
- Front-on CU Tony (frame right); front-on MS Giselle (frame left) steps into frame.
- Giselle delivers line: “I’m getting married.” Tony looks up from papers. Beat. Forward dolly (to Giselle); pan right while dollying; backwards dolly (meanwhile Tony slowly turns around to face Giselle)…
- … To land on right OTS Giselle (frame left) and MS front-on Tony (frame right).
I wasn’t sure how this shot would work initially, so I practiced with my DSLR and a couple of chairs (as people) at home on the night before. I realised that what I was doing was trying to keep Tony in frame right, despite the start and end frames not matching (not being corresponding shots). If I filmed the shot without anyone moving from first position (except for the camera), the final position would miss Giselle and Tony would be centre frame. If only Giselle moved, then it would be an awkward looking / unbalanced shot – part of Tony (background centre frame) probably obscured by part of foregrounded Giselle.
So, my solution was to move the actors during the dolly/pan.
For the first position, Tony stands outside of the dolly tracks facing away from Giselle. Giselle stands with one leg inside the dolly tracks and the other leg outside. During the dolly and pan, as soon as Giselle is out of frame, she steps completely outside the dolly tracks as well as forward a step or so. When the pan reaches Tony, he turns around to his right – one leg stepping between the tracks and the other leg outside them – to face Giselle.
It was actually a lot of fun to choreograph.
As for the result, well, the dollying and panning is pretty rough, as is the focus pulling. But at least I got better acquainted with the camera from all of that!
I shot on a 5D Mark II that I borrowed from the techs, and used (I think) a 24-105mm zoom lens at its shortest focal length. So, I got a really nice wide angle effect, which made the dolly-pan more visually arresting.
As for logistics, I shot it in the edit suite area because I didn’t want to have to lug the equipment (there was a lot of it) too far from the tech area. I also thought that mentioning to prospective helpers/actors – i.e. other RMIT media kids – that I was shooting inside building 9 would help my chances since building 9 is familiar to them. Even then it was still super difficult to acquire actors/helpers. I eventually got Gabby and Kevin to act – which worked because I wanted actors that were around about the same height (because of the dolly shot) – and Will Ellis to help set up. I was super lucky because all of these guys were great – Gabby and Kevin were easy-going and acted well and knew their lines, and Will was fantastic support to have. I was extremely glad that I’d asked another person to help (I’d considered just shooting the scene with the actors and myself) because the techs wouldn’t let me take the equipment on my own – there was too much of it. I also needed another pair of hands to help set it all up and another mind to think about things that I was missing / another problem-solving mind. It was difficult to mentally (and behaviourally) accommodate for other things when I had my mind so focused on trying to recreate the scene I envisioned. So, I guess that a little support goes a long way. The team makes all of the difference. This is definitely something I need to consider in regards to my actual project.
Link to my individual scene task: https://drive.google.com/a/rmit.edu.au/file/d/0B1L4VsojczZFSFJnOFNSTmp6eXM/view?usp=sharing