In this class we shot the scene with the nervous pacer and the crossword aficionado. We slowly arrived at our location, with me making a detour to print off a crossword. When I arrived at the set nothing had happened yet, so I took the role of director and started getting things moving. We had about 45 minutes to shoot the scene.
I spent a while trying to decide upon my first shot, because I wanted to start strong. I wanted to start on the crossword solver and tilt up to the nervous pacer. This turned out to be harder to execute than expected. We started off by trying to use a very long focal length from far back, but from the angle this created we couldn’t see the crossword. We ended up getting closer and using a shorter focal length, but I still think the shot we ended up with didn’t show the crossword clearly enough. We could have moved closer and used a shorter focal length, or just used a seperate shot to establish the crossword.
After this shot the rest of the crew was worried that we were moving too slowly. Like other exercises we’ve done in this studio, the first shot did take a lot longer than the rest, because at that point we also had to visualise the whole rest of the scene. With any amount of planning in advance, this visualisation process could be significantly shortened.
The next shot was shot from a lower angle and looked really good, but it was also fairly similar to the last shot. If we had more time, I would have gone back to have a different approach the first shot.
Next, we got a shot of Natalie walking up to the camera, with the camera at her eye level. From my assignment 3 investigations, I knew the camera would have to be quite high if I wanted the shot to be straight on when Natalie got close enough for the shot to be a medium close up. We did this and I got the result I was looking for.
From this point on we moved through the shots quite quickly to make sure we covered everything. I’m less happy with some of the shots we filmed towards the end of the piece, but considering the time we had to get the exercise done I was happy with the result.
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