One of the things that I’ve noticed throughout the past couple of years, which has become more obvious in this particular studio, is how difficult it is to communicate a desired shot to another person. You don’t often notice it when you’re doing the communicating, because you perfectly understand what you want. You can visualise it. It’s right there in your head. But when someone else tells you that they want an “MCU two-shot”, well… (“You’ve just narrowed it down to about 982462728126 possible shots, mate!”)
If we think about angles, well there isn’t just HA, LA, EL. There are angles concerning horizontal and vertical and, I guess, depth axes. And there are different degrees of each. For example, non-specific angles on the vertical (rotational) axis – front left side, front right side, front-on, behind, behind and left, behind and right. We’re working in 3D here, so each single axis must represent an available scope of 360 degrees. I suppose Dutch tilts would lie on the depth axis? I don’t know a better name for it. I don’t really know how to categorise everything. That’s what makes this so hard.
But then these axes don’t have to be rotational. They can indicate levels too. The camera may not be tilted up or down or some sort of sideways, it may just be raised or lowered. That’s another thing to consider, the level.
This sort of variation occurs in shot size as well – “No, not that much of a wide shot, this much of a wide shot.” Most elements of a shot can’t be categorised, because they sit on a scale.
Then there’s camera movement. Oh, boy, is this complicated to communicate. It introduces a multitude of other variables. “It’s a tracking shot? Oh, cool… How so? Forwards tracking? Backwards tracking? Some sort of twisty tracking? What do you want in focus at each point in time? What speed? Which part of the script does it start and end on? Which starting and ending frames do you want? What should the frame be when she says this? (etc.)” Space and time are even more variable with camera movement.
Then there’s the mise-en-scène, which adds a ton more variables to what could possibly constitute the director’s desired shot. Things like lighting, focus, blocking and so on are elements whose manipulation has to be clarified very particularly, because they too have their own collections of variables that also work on scales (rather than working in categories).
Everything is so complicated because we are working in a three-dimensional space that we want to translate to a two-dimensional rectangular fragment. Add in another dimension of time and it all becomes a little chaotic to clarify. It’s complicated enough without time and movement.
That’s why the shot list is so important. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a shot list that details all of these elements. Probably because there would be too much to read, so it might ultimately be inefficient. But it’d be interesting to plot out how many variables there are that have to be considered. How many elements of a shot there are that need to be clarified and controlled.
But I do find it to be a real issue. There are too many ways that things can be done. It’s so difficult to communicate all elements of a shot. That’s why, I guess, the storyboard is so useful. Because it details so much of this in each image. But still, you plan it before you draw it. You make a shot list before you get a storyboard artist to draw up the boards. And even these boards don’t clarify all of the movement. They vaguely indicate some movement, but timing is not attended to so much.
I recently volunteered to draw storyboards for a couple of my friends who were making a music video, and I had such an issue with unclear shots. There were waaaaaaay too many possibilities for the descriptions I was given. In the end, I just winged it. But not knowing the specifics was incredibly frustrating.