I really want to try to become a bit more deliberate in the way I shoot my work. Sometimes the reason why my shots don’t look so clean and precise are out of my control, just as time or  physical location constraints, but quite a lot of the time it’s because I’m not 100% certain about what I’m doing and how I want the final product to look. I’ve been trying to watch more TV shows and films that have very deliberate and sophisticated shot construction in order to hopefully try to analyses them and have more ideas of what I want my own work to look like.

A show I recently finished that I feel does this is The Handmaid’s Tale. Whilst the concept and events portrayed in the show are truly dreadful, I found the production to be really beautiful.Majority of the show is told from the point of view of Offred, a woman who was kidnapped and made a handmaid, forced to serve and bare children of the generals of Gilead. In order to try to show Offred’s perspective, the show uses close-ups on a wide-angle lens. Director Reed Morano says they choose to shoot Elizabeth Moss (Offred) this way because “it feels a little bit more uncomfortable and there’s something a little bit more unsettling about that. It makes the audience close the person in much more uncomfortable way” (Indie Wire Interview).

The show also has flashback sequences in every episode, to America before the revolution. The producers wanted to give these scenes a look that had more of a “rawer edge to it” and felt closer to the current reality in the western world. To do this, they used handheld shots, with slightly warmer colours than the grey and blue shots of Gilead.

The shows titles, which book end each episode, stood out to me a lot, and not just because of how bold the font is and that harsh shade of red which match the uniforms of the handmaids. The opening titles always have the audio from the opening scene underneath them, preparing the audience for the coming visuals. The titles are very simple, yet so effective. I want to learn how to develop editing skills and establish a style that allows me to create titles that are as effective as this, while still suiting whatever project the title belongs to.

Obviously, a large budget TV show such as The Handmaid’s Tale is much more ambitious than anything I can hope to accomplish on my own. However, I can try to emulate some of the techniques they use on a much smaller scale. For example, considering what I want a shot to achieve and how I want it to make a viewer feel. Every shot will have a different answer to those questions, but by asking myself, I can start to develop each shot in a more sophisticated way before I reach for the record button. Hopefully, thinking about these kinds of things will lead to better clips to choose from when I get to the editing process.