Preliminary Task

The day before our session of shooting, we were told about what we would be doing as our first preliminary exercise. At first we went out with a script and storyboard and practiced the scene given amongst ourselves, thinking about how we would say the lines, move in and out of the shots and how we would shoot them with different camera placements. After half an hours practice we had until the next lesson to find 2 people to use as actors who wouldn’t be doing anything else during shooting. Others in the group found 2 actors.
There were props in the room we were using. These were a gun and some keys. We decided to move a desk around so instead of having both people standing, one would enter while the other would remain seated at the desk throughout the sequence. The lights were turned off and the only light used, other than the light faintly coming in from outside, was a lamp on the desk. The actors ran over their lines and we got the camera ready for the first shot.
The camera was set up for a wide shot of the room, so the desk was at the right of the shot and the door at the left. The idea was that one of the characters was to walk in the room and place the gun down on the table, and then continue with the speech in the storyboard telling the other character to “do it”, not revealing what “it” is, even though it’s pretty easy to come up with an idea.
JJ took over the camera; Tom helped him as well as provided good ideas for actions, movement and shot types. We took several wide shots, then over shoulder shots of both actors, as well as an ECU of the gun being placed on the table. Other shots we took were a POV shot and a panning of the floor as the sequence starts.
When it came to editing Tom and I edited together as the other two weren’t there in the lessons. In just a few lessons we felt we had done a good job but we just needed to spend a little more time on it. Unfortunately we didn’t have sound so we planned a voiceover. JJ was in a later lesson and he provided some good suggestions and learned about final cut pro. After we were finished editing we were happy with the outcome. I’m not surprised films take so long to make as we spent several days on a scene which lasted about 30 seconds.