Sometimes when a directors’ vision is strong, the ingredients needed to create the envisioned scene might not be there and the crew is just told to, “make it work.” It’s an awkward situation because the crew is not in any position to refuse the director while they’re in their God complex. The point of the exercise was to see how blocking affects the whole crew.

In the scene two girls with a camera watching and waiting for a thief to strike.

The plan was to begin with a wide shot from behind the girls and have the light coming from the window they were facing to form their silhouettes. Then move to a mid shot for further dialogue, and finally another wide shot revealing a full front view of their camera set up.

The scene we were trying to shoot looked like this:

2.  3.

There were concerns that jumping in front in shot 3 might be too disruptive, but our director Robin said that you just know until you try it.

I was put in the camera crew for the task. Since the scene contained a prop camera which was the same model that we were using to film the scene, there was some confusion over what camera was for what purpose. Our team also made the mistake of not formatting the card and it made everyone have to wait. On a real set this might be enough to make someone storm out.

An unexpected problem we faced was not being able to line up the camera with our two main characters in a way that seemed balanced but still showed us clear outlines of each figure. With everything in the dark, we had to muster every bit of detail we could from the shapes of the two girls and the prop camera. Just before shooting I noticed that the camera was directly in line with our actor from our camera’s perspective, meaning that our actor had completely blocked out the silhouette of the prop camera.

Sometimes nice surprises can occur on set. Like the view through the window we were filming happened to have a group of students making colorful paper decorations which added a nice pop of colour to the shot. This is something you can’t plan with a low budget. Different people were also walking in and out of the area a lot, which suited our script well as our main characters were keeping their eyes peeled for a pickpocket-er.