FRIDAY CLASS
This week’s topic was screen performance, which I think is highly relevant since performance influences just about everything in a shot/scene.
SHOOTING EXERCISE 1: Single shot with no dialogue (only action to capture).
I was on camera for this task. (I almost acted but managed to climb my way out of that – yay!) I’m not proud of my camera performance, however. I lacked confidence with the camera and was hesitant to make any sort of decision. This may have partly been because no one had really claimed the director role until a moment before we were to present our shot. I was also unsure as to whether we were going to have to change spaces for the shot presentation – that would mean that we’d have to work out a coverage construction that was translatable between spaces. Plus time pressure, but that’s always going to happen (just to different degrees). So, I had a number of things going through my head and impeding my ability to visualise and decide shots.
There’s also something else that I realised afterwards. I was thinking about how so many people can just jump on the camera with next to no prior knowledge and have the greatest confidence in the world. I’ve seen this so many times in our class exercises. I’m not like that. I’m painfully aware of how much I don’t know – so much so that I often ignore what I do know. I can feel the immense space – the void – in my understanding of everything camera, everything cinematography, everything filmmaking. This absence of knowledge has a distractingly strong presence in my consciousness. And it is probably the biggest reason for my lacking confidence when it comes to me doing the roles that I’m actually interested in.
When we were deciding shots, I found that it was difficult to pick a shot size. I wasn’t keen on doing a wide for the whole scene – all of the wides that I tried looked like boring shots. The other issue was that, if I went for too tight of a frame, I’d have to zoom out for other moments in the blocking so as to capture the action. And I wanted to avoid zooming because I didn’t think I’d be able to do it (1) smoothly and (2) in a way that didn’t look tacky. Then there were the many times that people suggested for there to be a focus pull; my understanding is that the Sony EX3 – with its permanent lens – requires a significant setup to achieve a focus pull, including the distancing of objects from the camera. It wasn’t worth it, in my opinion, because we’d have to move everything around and reconfigure the blocking and fine-tune the camera settings to achieve this one focus pull. I could be wrong, but that’s my understanding of it.
The resulting shot was actually quite interesting. After quite a while of debating the shot, Kai suggested that the camera should act as the window, which introduced a lot of new framing options. As soon as we switched Jess’s pacing from the background to the foreground, we were on our way. Although the shot size issue still stood – I wasn’t sure what sort of shot size would work for a relatively tight opening frame on Karl as well as for a later frame that would capture Jess’s action of looking out the window (right in front of the camera) – it opened us up to the option of fragmented framing.
We had four stages to the shot:
- MS HA Karl at table with Jess pacing across camera in foreground (obscure, periodic movement)
- Pan-tilt (right and up) to frame up on right-hand side and lower half of Jess’s foregrounded face as she peers out the window. Karl’s figure balances the left-hand, lower side of frame in the background.
- Pan-tilt (left and down) to lend right-hand/top of frame to Jess’s hands as she takes her phone out of her bag and looks at it, and left-hand/bottom of frame to Karl’s hands doing his crossword.
- Pan-tilt (left and up) as Jess walks, stops, exchanges a look with Karl, then turns and crosses her arms. The left half of Jess’s foregrounded body is on the left of frame, and the top half of Karl (bottom half is under desk) balances frame right in the background. We only see Karl’s eyes in the glance exchange between him and Jess.
What is kind of interesting about our resulting coverage is that we never saw Jess’s face – well, we didn’t see her eyes. We only saw her body language. This was appropriate since her character was required to be so mobile during the scene – her character’s concern and agitation is transparent in her impatient movements and restless actions and worried expressions (we only showed lower facial expressions). Her performance was heavily body-language-based. Karl, on the other hand, was required to be stationary. So, his thoughts/feelings weren’t manifested in large actions and movements. It was far more important for his face – and eyes – to be visible so that the audience could garner information from his subtle expressions. In fact, this restrictive framing kind of worked by focusing the shot only on Jess’s actions and Karl’s reactions to Jess’s actions (his watching her; his exchanging a glance with her).
Performing the shot for the class was a challenge in itself. It was difficult to get everything right in one take. The main issue was that the framing was slightly out each time – we didn’t have ideal marks for the actors and my camera operating was also quite rusty. I guess this was the point of the exercise – to emphasise the chance nature of performance (even if it is meticulously prepared/practiced/rehearsed on professional film sets). And I guess performance encompasses crew roles too – particularly the camera operator/s and boom operator/s and production sound mixer.
The other group’s single shot was interesting too. I remember thinking that their use of offscreen space was cool – particularly when one of the characters exited and then re-entered frame.
SHOOTING EXERCISE 2: Multiple shots covering the other group’s script (with dialogue).
Our group originally planned to cover this scene in overdramatic, cheesy, stylistic shots (crash zooms, overacting, etc.). But I’m not sure if we completely committed to this plan during shooting. I was 2nd AC, so I’m not entirely sure what creative decisions/changes were made during shooting. I only know about he creative decisions that we initially planned.
Despite there being no first AD, we were quite efficient with our shoot. Everyone moved quickly and offered help to one another and were focused on their jobs. (Except for one thing: I realised halfway through the shoot that I had been ‘marking’ the shots and I didn’t need to – I only needed to ID them. I was just doing it out of habit. Oh well.)
It’s also interesting to look at how we choose to cover a script with no dialogue in comparison with a dialogue-based script. We get too comfortable in letting the characters’ words do the talking. We need to keep the visuals talking too.