P2(b) Following Shooting Script/Storyboard

Meaning and Purpose

It is vital in a film's production to follow the pre-production material, the script being the most vital piece of documentation on a film set as holds all of the lines and actions in it for the actors. I was important to me in the shooting of my film that I follow the imagery I had planned for in the storyboard and had the lines I had written within the script. This is shown below.

In the above scene I wanted it to be clear that the light hitting the mans face was the only light to be seen, I did this with realistic lighting as the only light in the scene (as shown above) was the practical light embodied by the phone screen. This scene was especially difficult to do as we didnt want to light anything else other than the man, breaking the illusion that he was in a dark box. To achieve this we simply placed cardboard behind the actor and lowered the brightness in the editing phase. This gave a good impression that the man was in a tight and dark space.

We also had difficult filming the box scene from a side on angle, we needed to show the actors face with the light from the phone without his hand blocking his face. We tried to get around this in a few ways, our first method was to have the actor pull the phone slightly away from his face in order to light the face without blocking, this worked well for the face however it gave too much light into the scene and lit the background behind the actor. As this didn't give us the look we wanted we tried the take a couple of times with the actor just naturally lifting the phone, this worked slightly better in terms of light but still blocked part of his face. I then had the idea to simply bring the angle of the camera around to see the actors face, this worked perfectly with the actor using the phone naturally and we managed to get the above shot through this process of eliminating ideas around an issue.

The scenes in the woods were very difficult to film as there was an abundance of harsh light, this didn't help the feel we wanted to have of this character and we had actually planned to film in the rain (the forecast was wrong however and we had to film in the sunshine). It was also very difficult to keep the camera steady while tracking, as we hadn't gotten used to the steadicam frame we were using it gave very wobbly footage. However we followed the framing of the storyboard exactly and managed to get a nice looking shot.

With our montage scene the clips were very easy t record and  collect, for the shot above we simply recorded with a tripod facing in the direction we wanted to capture the man walking down the path, this gave a smooth and steady look to the shot. We followed the storyboard and script to ensure this shot was how we envisioned it and this was easy to do due to us knowing where we would film it in advance.

The above shot is a common image in film to nature and as such we wanted a similar shot. This was harder to frame than we had thought as the lens didnt allowed us to get as close to the leaf and we needed and we also had some trouble with wind which kept moving the leaves out of frame. This however came out as a reasonably similar shot to the one we had planned and gave a good symbolisation of the fact the man was in the woods.

This shot was very quick however we needed it to be done right, the actor waved the stick to make it seem like the camera had been hit and we jogged the camera on the cut to help show this as a representation of the guy hitting someone else in the head. The framing changed in the process as we realised the original didn't look close enough to reality.

This shot was probably our most successful as we achieved a steady movement with the framing near perfect to how we had planned it. For this shot the actor had to lay on the ground to show he had been hit, we positioned the actor as we had planned in the storyboard and script.

This shot was also one of our most successful as it was powerful and aesthetically captivating. We wanted the actor to be shown in a completely dark space, as if nothing existed outside of the frame, this was achieved by created a blackout in the studio we shot in and having the only light source being the practical light held by the actor which revealed one side of his face. We followed the framing of the scene as planned in the storyboard but in the editing process decided it would look better if the actor was slanted to the right slightly, as he was slightly facing the phone this also created an interesting affect with screen direction, as in the following shot the bad guy moves into the right and faces the right, this is used commonly in film during phone conversations to make it appear as if the two people are talking to each other face to face.