My group for Assignment four consists of Darcey, Louise, Sam and Quinlin – we plan to shoot a scene where two characters leave a location, in this case we’ve secured the Magic Mountain Saloon, and walk to a car. There will then be a brief dialogue scene between the two characters inside the car. We will be shooting the scene inside the car at a different time and location to the first scene and this will challenge us, as we will have to recreate the unique lighting conditions created by the Magic Mountain signage, as well as create a visually interesting scene inside the confines of a car.

We also came up with the idea of recreating the same content, but at the day time – which would create a new range of challenges. Though I think, given the feedback of our presentation, it will be best to focus on the night scenes.

In terms of the aesthetic we are attempting to capture, we want to use the red neon lights of the Magic Mountain Saloon located on Little Collins St and explore how colour can add dimension to a shot. We have a lot of ideas for the inside of the car scene, and we’re exploring how to best capture the lighting outside, and balance that with the reflective surface of the windows. We’re looking into how we could add texture to the windows like dirt or rain, shown in the below picture, and Juliet, who works as a production designer has given us some really good advice on how to achieve this effect. I would love to do follow that advice, because I’m very interested in production design and all the factors that go into a shots mise-en-scène. I really found listening to Juliet’s advice really insightful and it’s an area that I desperately want to explore.

In terms of camera coverage, there are many directions we could go in. For the leaving the venue shots, we are thinking of doing a variety of establishing shots, such as an over the shoulder tracking shot following them out to the car or a wide shot. For the car interior scenes, Darcey created the below story board showing different angles we could go for. I really like Robins suggestion of having the camera behind one of the seats focusing on the person in the opposite seat and then just cutting shot reverse shot. I would also like to explore shots using the beam of the cars headlights and taillights, to break up the interior shots.

Some of the broader obstacles I came up with for this idea are: working around the pedestrian foot traffic outside the venue, which I’ve found in past class exercises can be quite challenging (we’re planning to film later at night and earlier in the week to mitigate this issue). We have to maintain continuity between the first part of the shoot (exiting venue, approaching the car and the interior car scenes) by having consistent lighting, which means paying close attention to weather and the natural light changes and recreating this for the car scene. We also have to prepare for lack of space inside the car, this will affect many things from the camera and lenses we choose, to the camera angles available to us in that limited space. There will also be very limited access to power, so sourcing battery powered lights is essential, so our next step will be choosing the appropriate lamps by doing lighting tests. There will be many basic WHS procedures that we will have to abide by, but a more obvious issue will be the light placement on the street, ensuring that they are not a hazard to pedestrians.

We presented our idea for Robin, Paul and Juliet and I thought it went really well, I think we were one of the more prepared groups in the class, as we have a pretty clear vision of what we want to accomplish and therefore were able to communicate that effectively. I think this came down to how much we prepared for the presentation, we really knew that we wanted to explore filming a dialogue sequence in a constricted environment like a car, with all that, that entails like reflections and outside light sources. We knew that we wanted to explore colour, but only from a justified light source, so no random purple light for no reason whatsoever which seems so pervasive in student productions at present.

I really like doing presentations, even though they make me incredibly nervous. I find that it’s so much easier to communicate my ideas through talking about them, because it really forces me to have to sit down and do things like create a powerpoint and breakdown the idea into categories based on the areas like obstacles or the camera coverage. It creates a great deal of clarity, even if the anxiety beforehand is absolutely awful.

Some of the feedback we got was:

• Paul spoke about superimposing the image of moon and location logo on the windscreen of car – consensus was that shooting scene in day and night was good.
•  They liked our proposed use of texture on glass i.e rain
• Juliet urged us to make sure we choose the right lens when shooting inside the car – to be able to use shallow depth of field
• Robin instructed us against using a APS-C Camera, due to the cramped space of the car
• Robin advised against doing the daytime recreation of the scene
• Robin also gave us some interesting tips on camera angles inside the car