© 2015 ellathompson

MMoW#18(ish): SHOOT REFLECTION

So, I had my shoot. (Yay!)

Exhausting few days of pre-prod. and then an equally exhausting (in a good way) shoot. Man, it is hard to produce and direct and AD and production design etc. at the same time. Very little mental space left over. I definitely learnt a lot during that shoot day (and during pre-prod.).

My cast and crew were brilliant and generous and I cannot thank them enough for their individual efforts. I couldn’t have done it without them.

 

General issues that I’ll quickly get out of the way:

  • Cable that we ran from the power-board to the corner of the car park was faulty, which cost us half an hour (to replace with another lead).
  • Lights turning off constantly because they’re on a timer (I foresaw and tried to plan for this by adjusting the amount of time before they turn off, but unfortunately the longest time was still quite short, and it was quite a hassle.)
  • Neighbour who was down in the basement for a while for some reason was extremely unhappy with the smoking. I apologised to her and explained the procedures with the basement’s car exhaust filter. (She’s always determinedly grouchy – e.g. she’ll stomp her feet if the apartment below her is making noise or something. Also, 90% of the residents in the apartment block smoke, so the whole building already smells like cigarette smoke – one resident was smoking in the basement on the morning of the shoot even.)
  • I paid minimal attention to continuity (regarding actor performance, props, eye-line etc.), which I will pay for in the edit. It’s difficult to have the mental space to attend to continuity among three different coverages of the same scene. So, continuity went a little neglected. Then there were the continuity issues – like lighting disparities, framing disparities etc. – which, despite our efforts, are quite obvious among the shots.
  • A lot of the time, we’d do five takes and then realise that there was a light-stand or something in the shot. Then we’d do one more take without the light-stand and then move on, so there’d only be one usable take. This inefficiency could have been solved if I’d used a split.
  • Only one SD card for the Canon 5D Mark II – we ran out of card space and I had to run up and get my 60D. There’s a huge difference between the look of what we shot on each camera.
  • General time constraints – I’d packed a lot of shots and setup changes into one day.

 

CHRONOLOGY OF DAY

We shot the wides for the Anderson-Yeoman and Aronofsky-Libatique styles first. We liked the look of the location lights off for the Aronofsky-Libatique style, so we kept them turned off and continued shooting the LA 45 degree MCUs and the CU 90 degree side profiles of each character. Then we put the lights back on and shot the Anderson-Yeoman MCU whip-pan, the MCU front-ons of each character, the square tracking shot (handheld though, which didn’t look that nice), and the bird’s eye shot (also handheld, and not so bird’s eye).

By then, Kai and James had left, and we proceeded to shoot the Lubezki-inspired long-take tracking shot. I’d left this shot to after the other styles because it really required the actors being familiar not only with their lines, but with the pacing of the action and dialogue. It was a complicated blocking shot, requiring challenging coordination of character and camera actions and intuitive timing. So, I wanted the actors to have practiced the lines in a more fractured way during the preceding shots, and to have developed an broad understanding of the pacing, which came via my instruction during those early shots.

Finally, I wanted to grab some ECUs for the Aronofsky-Libatique coverage style. I’d left these shots till last in case we were running behind time (which we were) because I only really needed the actors for ECUs that involved their faces, and the rest I could cheat by using other people’s hands and single shots of the objects themselves. But I had time to get most of the ECUs, and now I only need to get a couple of pickups.

So, that’s a brief summary/chronology of the shoot day. Oh yeah, plus breakfast and lunch and snacks – they occurred somewhere in there too. Now I’ll go into a bit more detail about how shooting each style went.

 

RESULTANT SHOTS

ANDERSON-YEOMAN STYLE

The difficulty with this style is its emphasis on perfect shots. Perfection is quite literally the look. The wide dolly shot has camera shake and camera shadow can be seen when we pass the column.

The double whip-pan shot is not really in focus until Bobby leans forward, and the start and end frames of each whip-pan are not quite symmetrical.

The front-on MCUs for each character are not symmetrical, and they also have an awkward framing (a sliver of table at the bottom) because we thought that the DSLR’s shaded areas (on the screen) were parts included in the video frame. Which they weren’t. (We’d framed up for a still photo rather than a video.) The bird’s eye shot was not flat bird’s eye; it was a very high angle shot. It was also done handheld, which gave it more of a grittier look (not really Anderson-Yeoman style).

Similarly, the square tracking shot was done handheld, and it doesn’t work for (at least the opening of) the shot. If it were another style, the second half of the square shot is quite interesting. But being Anderson-Yeoman style, the grittiness that the handheld shake brings simply doesn’t work. Ideally, this would have been a dolly/crane shot. I actually don’t know how it would be achieved, but the ideal look would have been smooth horizontal and vertical movements. The shot is supposed to encapsulate the geometric (/square) look in Anderson-Yeoman cinematography. And this geometric style even operates in the camera movement. I wanted to translate this idea to the setting I had (a table and two characters) – literally draw a ‘square’ with the camera. In this shot, I was also sort of imitating the geometric tracking – purely horizontal and vertical camera movement – in the opening of Moonrise Kingdom (2012). Not only was it a difficult shot in terms of our lacking resources/expertise, it was a difficult shot in terms of cues and pacing (speed of the camera movement, when to move, pauses in dialogue etc.). I ended up shooting a couple of takes myself because it was quite difficult to coordinate from afar. This relates back to a class discussion we had about the difficulty in communicating what you want to your camera operator without actually taking the camera and showing them. It is a skill that I will absolutely have to work on. Definitely not the best director move, but I hadn’t physically rehearsed it with my DP, and time wasn’t on our side. On the other hand, that’s kind of what this project entailed during shooting – less standard procedures because of the experimentation involved. Anyway, the key point is that the resultant shot doesn’t work for Anderson-Yeoman because it’s too rough and gritty.

So, our shots may be inspired by the Anderson-Yeoman style, but I’m not sure if the resultant shots bear much resemblance to Anderson/Yeoman’s work, simply because of their lacking symmetry, smoothness, and cleanness.

 

ARONOFSKY-LIBATIQUE STYLE

The lighting looked great on set, but didn’t translate to camera. We spent quite a while trying to resurrect the lighting – balance it out for both characters, flatten it a bit, silhouette the characters, have the cigarette smoke illuminated. In the end, I didn’t want to spend too much time on lighting because it wasn’t a priority from the start (we’d decided on the spot to use the dramatic, low lighting) – the key concern was more in the camerawork. But, in hindsight, I may have been a bit hasty to say “that’s enough” with the lighting setup, because (1) it looks odd in a few of the shots, and (2) there isn’t a symmetry with the lighting among the shots (distracting continuity issue). What we were trying so hard to achieve was slightly silhouetted figures (but still somewhat illuminated from the front) and glowing cigarette smoke.

_MG_0663

I do, however, like the lighting in Bobby’s LA 45 degree MCU. It’s not what I was going for, but it’s quite beautiful and dramatic and gritty, and very Aronofsky-Yeoman. What I really like about the shot is the cigarette smoke – I was trying so hard to illuminate it, but it instead stands out as shadowy dark smoke. I think it looks great. (Despite not having symmetry with the lighting in the other shots.)

There was also a slight lack of symmetry between the framing of each character’s respective LA 45 degree MCU and CU 90 degree side profile, but it’s not too distracting.

Individually, the extreme close ups are really cool. I love extreme close ups though, they’re one of my favourite types of shots. We held up a black board thing as the background for each shot. Again, however, we had the lighting symmetry issue with each character, which will consequently detract from their combined effect in a montage. Individually, though, the shots are awesome.

One larger issue we had during shooting these ECUs is that the 5D’s card was full. So, we shot the rest of the ECUs on my Canon 60D. But the 60D was reacting very differently to the lighting. We should have spent more time adjusting the settings to try to reduce this difference, but we didn’t – mostly because time wasn’t on our side. Consequently, some of the ECUs have a completely different look from the others.

Another (smaller) issue with these ECUs was that I wanted to go in even tighter with them, but we didn’t have a lens that had a long enough focal length. I might borrow a macro lens from building 8 to get these pickup ECU shots.

All in all, though, it was exciting to be playing with lighting and a grittier look and dramatic angles and extreme close ups. I really enjoyed shooting the Aronofsky-Libatique shots, and I think the rest of the crew did too.

 

LUBEZKI STYLE

So, we rehearsed this a few times, knotted down the moments where Thomas needs to stop walking, where the camera splits from Thomas, where Bobby delivers his offscreen line, where the camera jumps forward with Thomas’s arm offering the cigarette, where it leans in and out with Bobby as he gets the cig lit, where the dialogue needs to happen faster than it was during the other coverage style shots, etc.

Then we started doing takes. I also shot a few takes myself because again I found it incredibly difficult to coordinate everything from afar. I’d also practiced the tracking shot by myself many times at home with two chairs as people, so I’d kind of built the camerawork into my procedural memory. But I also wanted to shoot a few takes myself simply because I was really interested in this shot from a camera operator perspective, and I want to improve my skills/understanding in that area too. So, Mustafa would have a couple of goes, then I’d have a go, then he’d have a go, then I’d have a go, then he’d have a go, then I’d have a go – we’d take turns shooting. And this kind of worked because it gave the other person a rest before they’d have to pick up the camera again. And boy did I need that rest, because shooting that tracking shot was so incredibly physically demanding and difficult. I learnt so much during shooting that tracking shot. Most of the written camera direction was to “float” in or out, up or down, this way and that. But “floating” is not as easy as it seems. I thought that using the shoulder mount would make it easier to achieve this camera movement. It is so incredibly difficult to get a camera movement that balances “lingering” as well as “floating”. It either looks like the camera is not moving, or it’s obviously moving. And then it’s really hard to pace the camerawork – not only to coordinate it with the actors’ performances, but to physically transition from moving smoothly and quickly to a slow float. You also need to have a feel for everything – to know when and how to move. It’s very intuitive and very difficult. And then to do all of that while maintaining focus on whatever needs to be in focus at the time. It requires so much technical and physical skill to achieve the shot that I had originally envisioned.

The take chosen was the third/final one that I shot. The camerawork was closest to what I had envisioned – moments where the camera reacts to the characters’ movements, etc. Aside from the overly long walking at the start, the pacing in the first half of the shot is nice. The second half of the shot, however, is not paced so well. Camera movements happen too fast. The camerawork looks unmotivated by the situation, which is not the intention. Perhaps it would have looked more motivated if it had that smooth floating effect, but it still wouldn’t have looked motivated enough. The problem is in the speed of the camera movements. Or maybe it’s more in the speed of the transitions between key camera movements. It came down to a matter of coordinating the actors’ dialogue and actions with the camera placement and movement. The actors and the camera have various cues for each other throughout the shot. But I think that everyone became so conscious of one another that they started racing against each other. It was a difficult performance exercise on everyone’s part, and an incredibly difficult overall performance to coordinate.

There are also many issues regarding focus within the shot. One particular section that is not so nice because of the bad focus is the part (again in the second half of the take) where the camera “inches in and around” to a CU/ECU of each character’s face. I severely overestimated the focal range that I was working with, and the result is not so aesthetically pleasing. It would have worked better if I’d begun that “lean in” movement from further back. But, then again, I really wanted a close up / extreme close up frame of each character’s face in that long take. So, part of the issue was that I was working with the wrong lens for the job.

That aside, filming this tracking shot was probably my highlight of the shoot (alongside shooting the ECUs). I got so much out of it and now have an even greater appreciation for long-take tracking shots. I really enjoyed shooting a few of my own takes. It was just really fun.

 

OVERALL

Most of this post has been me pinpointing where things went wrong, but that is an inaccurate summary of the shoot. It was so exciting to be trying out such fascinating shooting styles. It was a successful shoot. And this was because I was surrounded by enormously generous people – my crew was brilliant and supportive (and fun), as was my cast. Despite the few setbacks, the vibe on set stayed positive and relaxed. I was enormously lucky to have such an enthusiastic and helpful (did I mention generous?) cast and crew. It was a fun and calm shoot because of them. I cannot thank everyone enough for their generosity. (Thank you Lisa, Kai, James, Steve (actor), Mark (actor), and Mustafa! And thank you to my mum and dad for pre-making the food and putting up with my equipment and props and notes throughout the apartment!)

Enjoy some BTS photos.

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