THE SHOOT

In this exercise I acted as Gerry in a gender bending, passive aggressive scene out of the 90’s. The main challenge for our group seemed to be finding a prop in RMIT that even slightly resembled a home phone. I got a real shock when the younger members of our group asked what a “receiver” and “dial tone” were when reading the script.

I learned that it might be good to ask the director what kind of shots we are doing as an actor. I thought since this scene was focused on the looks the two characters were giving each other that there might be a few mid shots or close ups but there weren’t any of me in them.

I felt like a bit of a prop since my only role for 99% of the shoot was to sit there and pretend to fill in a crossword. In the end I had enough time to draw up a custom crossword from scratch, which ended up not being in frame.

After we briefly talked about the special unnoticed skills of actors in a previous class, one being the art of doing “nothing” well, I have certainly developed a new appreciation for how hard it can be. I found that if I tried to really become someone bored by the situation, with only a crossword as entertainment, the waiting became a lot easier. It was very funny realizing how meta it all was. Especially since Natalie was pacing around nervously as part of her role, but was between takes nervously checking the time trying to hurry up the crew as we only had about 15 minutes left.

Our group took a while to actually get filming and I think it was because of some confusion between our roles. We had some very vocal actors who probably shouldn’t have been commenting on how to shoot the thing (me), the director occasionally operating the camera leaving our actual camera operators confused, and a sound recordist with no dialogue to record.

REVIEW

After watching both versions in class we were all really happy with how they turned out. Neither of them were rushed and they both had a lot of thought put in to them.

Here are some thoughts I had:

Acting: is it non naturalistic? Does it matter? As an audience we accept the established tone I think and that becomes the new “naturalistic” within the world of the film.

How do u have the actors get in sync and on the same level of naturalistic? For example in our version Natalie’s movements were very gestural and concise while I looked like I could have been accidentally in the shot; some unknowing random who happened to be in frame. I thought that the instructed back and forth pacing seemed like an non naturalistic activity in itself which sort of established that the rest of it would have to be slightly theatrical.

There were some interesting differences between the two groups.

group 1: excellent lighting and use of space. The scene was all about Julia but Gerry seemed to be in it with her because of their close proximity. I really like the way he looked back at her instead of our version where Gerry just looked up and it wasn’t as noticeable and important.The close up of Julia on her phone looked great against the dark lighting, the phone screen wasn’t too bright  and added the perfect amount of contrast to the scene.

group 2 (our group) 

There was a lot more tension between the characters because of the framing. Both versions started off with Gerry in a midshot which acted as an anchor for the rest of the scene. Julia seemed to be orbiting around Gerry, but he was bored and stubbornly uninterested.