When I was three, I loved to move and didn’t care what people thought of me, even with a burn mask on. As an adult, I always worry about what people think and not looking like an idiot. In this film I wanted to show that change along with the longing to be carefree again. To show this I wanted to have a young woman studying, stressed then when a song that reminds her of childhood comes on, I wanted her to decide to dance, timidly at first but by the end not caring what she looks like.
To show this I chose a home video of me dancing in my living room and tried to make the girls modern living room look the same (big window, two tone walls, a couch and fan) but with opposite colors for the objects and her. I wanted to start wide and in deep focus, to show she is aware of everything around but as she gets more comfortable get closer and closer to her with flat depth showing she is in her head. I also wanted the camera to move more as she moved more.
I had a very clear picture of how everything would look when it was done but it ended up very different than I thought. I was really excited to how it would turn out and even confident it would be decent but after filming and starting post I thought it would be an absolute disaster. Thought it is not as good as I hoped originally, it ended up better than I thought it would when I first started editing.
There are quite a few things I would do differently next time including making sure sound is being recorded, and communicate to her exactly what I want, pay more attention to continuity of movements on set and tell the actor to do the same and figure out a better way to light the space.
Being DP on Britany's film was just a pleasure. She was so kind to help me move all the equipment in from my car and she had yummy snacks on set! We were done on time even though the actress arrived rather late. Baby Marshal hung out with us and enjoyed the dancing going on. It was a really positive set experience.
ReplyDeleteOne of the challenges we ran into was with the lighting. Britany wanted a shot where someone would walk by the window and the main character would feel self-conscious. It was really hard to have correct exposure both outside and inside the room. We lit the room up the best we could, but it was still a bit hard to see outside. I learned later that having a camera with a larger dynamic range could have helped and that sometimes on professional productions they gel the windows, which I wouldn't have considered. I think we also could have filmed this in the evening and it wouldn't have been so bright outside. That might have worked too.
Another challenge was filming the actress dancing around with 5D camera on a glidecam. It was hard to keep her in focus because I was using a 50mm and 85mm lens and moving all around. It was worth it though because I think the final product successfully created the effect Britany wanted of feeling like we were lost in the character's head and the rest of the world kind of disappeared. We did two takes on each lens so that Britany would have lots of footage available to use so that also helped because I'm sure a lot of what I shot was unusable and blurry.
I was really pleased with the final product of this film. I think the film is only as good as it is, thanks to Britany's amazing skill as an editor. She definitely pulled it together and the match cuts were amazing considering we didn't actually have the actress dance like the home video on purpose. This is such a sweet personal little film and I'm really attached to it. I'm glad I got to be a small part of its creation.