Single Camera Practice - Scene Recreation

Pre-Production
     This was only intended to be a small production, so pre-production was very quick. Within our group we chose the roles very promptly, taking into account everyone's abilities. I was selected as the Director of the project, so myself and the chosen DoP - Adam Hunter - began work on a shot list. We decided the bulk of the conversation would take place in a car, and then discussed with the rest of the cast and crew as to where the car could be located. We chose the Gorleston cliffs car park because of its scenery, fairly quiet location, and closeness to the college. The shot list was completed having discussed this, and I started to compile a mental storyboard.

Production
     Having travelled to the location, amusingly stuffed into the back of the same car which appears in the film, I used the shot list to try and complete my visualisation of the scene. It wasn't until this point that we decided to use the bench near the car to film the first few shots. Firstly, I had some ambience sound recorded for overlay, and establishing shots of the location filmed. We then worked from the script to record all the necessary dialogue, filming mostly chronologically, but getting a minimum of two shots for everything, with several takes for each. This required returning to the location on a second day due to time constraints.
     The particularly challenging shots were those within the car. We had to have our sound recordist - Jack Reeve - lie down on the back seats of the car to prevent him from getting in the shots as he recorded the character's dialogue. It also took several attempts to get the focus pulled right during some of the shots. As the director, I advised the actors - Alana Taylor and Ellis Platten - on how to play their characters. In particular, I spent some time with Ellis trying to get him to think like his character so that he got a good tone to his voice and appropriate movement in and out of the car (although most of this was cut out later).

Post-Production
     I was quite hands on with the edit, because some members of the group were not so confident in Premiere. Due to time constraints, and the fact that this is not a final piece of work, we did not do any colour correction on the footage which I think was certainly needed. I gave the edit a basic structure, before doing the full audio edit in Audition once all the dialogue was in place. This was to get all the levels right when switching between shots, although this was done quickly so some does still sound slightly weird. Finally, we added the music (a shameless rip from the Bourne Supremacy soundtrack, although no copyright infringement was intended!) and the end credits as designed by Ellis in Photoshop. We decided at this point to mockingly call the project 'Below the Crease' in parody to the original short film's title.

Positives & Negatives
     For the time scale we had for this project, I am very content with it. I think most of the cinematography is good, there is lots of shot variation throughout; however I am not happy with the low angle on Ellis during his monologue. As mentioned previously, many shots needed colour grading to make them look more reasonable. We had to disregard some footage because it was so blatantly shot on a different day because of the weather, which was unfortunate.
     In terms of sound, I think everything sounded rather good. Most of the reason it sounds different between shots is simply because of whether the car door or window was open when the camera was rolling for that take. In some cases this affected where the microphone could be held as well. When it came to editing it was clear that the microphone has been nearer to Alana than Ellis and so this all had to be adjusted, which was annoying and unnecessarily. In hindsight I would have paid more attention to the audio to ensure it would sound similar, rather than focusing more on the visuals of the project. Considering the lack of audio direction, I think Jack did a great job.
     The story we went with, although the lines were already written, was still interesting and still fitted the mood of the original film. If we had more time I would have made sure the actors fully knew their lines as at some points it is obvious they are reading from the scripts just out of shot. Because of the small crew, holding the script became my job which meant I couldn't always keep an eye on the camera. Having an extra person on the set would have helped free me up more in several scenarios so that I could have paid more attention to what was being recorded and the way actors were saying their lines.
     Even though this was an ungraded piece of work, I took it seriously and encouraged the rest of the group to do the same. Motivation and encouragement is something I consider key to directing, and I think this is comparatively something that I did well - as a group we worked well together, keeping a fun environment on set whilst still getting all the shots we needed. Ultimately I learnt a lot from the project which I hope to carry through for the single camera production unit.