Week 7 Class Exercise – Emmaline Dreams of Playtime
This week’s exercise for me was an interesting one, as I found the challenge in it was mostly in regards to how we would get coverage of the scene, rather than how we would light it. We spent a great deal of time before we even began filming just discussing different ways we could shoot the scene. Whether for example we would do a simple shot reverse shot with an added cutaway for the view out the window, or what we eventually decided on, which was to film from a single perspective, choosing very purposefully to exclude a reaction shot of Connor (as Ron). This decision in camera coverage to me was in large part really a decision about which characters scene this was. We could have chosen to favour both characters equally, showing each of their performances and getting the reactions of each subject. Or we could have chosen to go slightly off script and favour Ron’s perspective, showing Hilda (Eleanor) as a more distant figure. However to me, the script suggested that the natural choice was to approach the scene from Hilda’s point of view – afterall we were seeing her view of the street and her reaction to Ron’s indifference. I think more broadly this concept of structuring your camera coverage around whichever character you want the audience to associate with the most, is an important one and likely one that I will rely on quite heavily in future.
This exercise also formed a sort of ‘proof of concept’ of something that we spoke about in class, which was the ability to disguise high key lighting and more contrasty images with a desaturated black and white colouring. My intention with the lighting side of the exercise this week was largely to try and experiment with this concept and see at least to some extent, exactly how much you can get away with in terms of contrast and the way in which focus can be guided through a frame. I think that this exercise is exceedingly instructive in terms of this concept especially looking at the difference between the colour and black and white versions. In the black and white version I feel that the attention of the audience, or rather the place in the frame that the eye is drawn to is where I intended it to be (in this case on Eleanor’s face and performance). Whereas the colour version I find these frames to be exceedingly distracting. The exposure differential between Eleanor and her surroundings is not as it should be, which of course is creating a distracting image where the eye is drawn all over the place (really almost everywhere except where it should be) – and this is before we even get into the unmatched colour temperatures of the natural light and the tungsten lamp we had to left of frame.