For this weeks exercise, Robin handed out scripts to us featuring two exercises located in the two different entrances of building 9, the East and West foyers. After class myself and a few others went to the locations and discussed how we could approach framing and lighting the scenes. This made me feel really prepared for the shoot day.
I was really happy with the group I was part of for these exercises, everyone has a similar level of knowledge and we were all clear on what roles we were interested in doing and what we weren’t. This made the process go really smoothly, and meant I could leave the class feeling like I had gotten a positive group experience out of it.
For this exercise, the director really wanted to do the entire scene in one shot, therefore minimising editing and creating a compelling frame composition. I think this is a really interesting approach to filmmaking, but it is time consuming. Unless you’re a framing genius, it requires a lot of planning and preparation. Therefore the majority of the time we were in this location was spent planning the camera movement and making sure the actors stuck to their marks. It was really all about timing things perfectly, while keeping the camera movement smooth. Unfortunately this ate up most of the time that would have gone into discussing lighting, so we just used natural light. Which is quite clear when they exit the building and the shot is quite overexposed. It would be really good to do this exercise again, in the same groups, now that we have the camera coverage down pat, in order to try to really perfect it by working on the lighting issues.
Now for the second exercise, the director had the idea of attempting a handheld camera shot, by holding the tripod (sort of monopod style) as an anchor and following the action this way. The footage may be a bit shaky, but I liked that both the directors had a technique of sorts that they had planned out and wanted to try. I acted as one of the extras in this scene and it was interesting trying to follow marks and make sure that everything was timed correctly. We didn’t use any artificial lighting for this exercise either, it became more about how we could tackle the techniques and work together to make it all go smoothly when we started to record. This space has the opposite problem to the first area, which is surrounded in white walls and glass, whereas the Western foyer is all black walls and reflective doors. The primary light source being the large doorway facing West. So the footage is far darker in this location than the first.
I think the main issue that we faced and one that we all agreed we should reflect on later on our blogs, was pedestrian foot traffic and the unpredictability of it. This was particularly apparent for the Western exercise where we were using the lift as part of the scene and had to start and stop shooting for people wanting to use it. While we had an issue with people walking through the scene for the Eastern exercise, that location serves as more of a back entrance to the building, while the Western entrance is the main one, so it was particularly busy. So, while the second exercise was less complex, in terms of us working out how to compose the scene, we probably had far more takes from the second location due to how many times we had to cut due to someone trying to get through to their class. This really drove home the need to secure a good location, because relying on the unpredictable public to allow us to finish a scene, with minimal interruptions, could really devastate a shooting schedule.