Below is the prose I wrote, and the video of the sketch shoot I filmed and edited over the weekend in my home.

Prose https://vimeo.com/126667403

I wrote the prose as a reinterpretation of a short story I wrote previously. During the writing process, I thought about the likelihood of being able to get certain shots, locations, etc to inform my re-write of the scene. I also took notes on how I visualised the scene looking and the camera coverage I was after.

I decided to film the scene in my garage as it was the biggest, and emptiest space that I could find, that would allow me to make the character seem small and insignificant in the frame. However, the location I chose provided some constraints as well. There was a lot of clutter as well as two fridges, all of which I wouldn’t have been able to cover with theater blacks. This meant I had to carefully select my shots to ensure the clutter wasn’t framed, which restricted the camera set-ups. This meant that I had to ‘cheat’ the background of the shot of the hands tied and had to be strategic about the door opening shot. During filming, I liked the wide shot of the victim, and decided against doing the close-ups of his eyes darting around the room and gulping, as I felt the wide shot demonstrated his vulnerability. In hindsight, I wish I had shot them so that I had the choice in post-production as to what shots I would like to use or not.

Due to the constraints of the location, I also couldn’t get as many shots of the captor and the ones that I did manage to get were not interesting in my opinion. I would like to try and re-shoot this scene in a different location, possibly the breakout space in the edit suites to test out some different camera set-ups. Hopefully this will be closer to my vision than the one posted above.

I also couldn’t get my hands on a silver reflective table to experiment with reflections as I previously wanted to, however hopefully in future shoots I will be able to do so. I didn’t experiment with the lighting in my sketch shoot as I wanted to see whether I could get the desired effect with the natural light of the location chosen, or through post-production. I would like to test out using dim tungsten lighting in my future shoots of this scene and experiment with how it can set the mood.