In this week of classes, I was unable to complete the exercise to shoot a scene, instead, I did a storyboard, shot list and floor plan of the scene. The process of turning the script into something visual made me realise the number of choices that must be made prior to covering the scene. I chose the cafe scene with Rachel and Barney. With the restriction of using only 4 setups, I had to discard giving every notable line in the script its own shot. Instead of giving Barney his own shot to show him fiddling on his phone, I decided to start the shot with Rachel coming into focus. Robin mentions that this shift in focus to Rachel was different from how the script describes the scene. When creating the storyboard, I did not think about the character focus, by making Rachel enter the scene first, I essentially made her the focus of that shot. This is something I want to investigate further, as deciding whose scene it is can have a major impact on the story and the characters. Looking back at my storyboard, if I replaced the first shot with the camera pointed at Barney on his phone, the scene becomes more closely connected to him instead.

In Tim Barnard’s commentary on decoupage, he identifies the difference between it and montage. He states that decoupage “cuts up … the script in its narrative form to create a detailed plan for shooting the film, complete with camera indications, stage directions for the actors and even changes of shot” (2014, p.4). I believe the exercise we did this week is also a form of decoupage where we segmented the script into another form which enables us to shoot the scene in our heads. In the future, more effective and in-depth insight into the process of storyboarding and shot listing would be beneficial.