Day 3 was a very organised and full on experience. I intended to shoot the remainder of the car park scene very early in the morning since all I needed was close ups and interior shots of Dylan in his car. I had already filmed the shots that required my dad so I decided that this was the easiest and best place to start, because I already had material to reflect on.
However, the main problem for me with this scene was framing aesthetically engaging shots, because the camera has very little manoeuvrability when actually inside the car, and there is a limited variation to work with outside. As a result I found myself experimenting a lot more with this sequence in an attempt to film with a visual flair. The best work to take inspiration from here was the film Locke, which takes place entirely in a car as one man's life unfolds during one dramatic drive. This film successfully engages the viewer for an hour and a half when all there is to film is the driver and the car, so I filmed from a variety of angles after watching some clips in the hopes of displaying some ingenuity.
Even though I didn't film that many shots, many were complex and needed multiple takes before I got them right. Consequently my running time is 13 minutes unedited.
This 11 minutes and 5 seconds is the running time after I had deleted all of the failed shots and trimmed each clip to only include the content that would be in the narrative.
What I want to draw attention to here is not the shot, but the Mise en scene within the frame. This photograph was a last minute prop that I decided would help the audience to visualise Dylan's childhood with his brother, especially since I had cut the scene with his monologue and changed the dialogue from the voiceover. I needed a photo from home, and so I used one of me and my brother to help identify the contrast between what Dylan used to be like (dressing up and playful) with what he has become (a brooding and ominous threat). So I altered this scene slightly to emotionally engage with the fact that Dylan is both reminiscing and avenging his brother's loss. It will be an appropriate shot to supplement the voiceover.
This is another unplanned shot which could potentially act as an establishing shot. For some reason I love the rusty look of the posts because it adds to how Dylan is in an abandoned and isolated spot, unused. From a visual perspective I also think that the canted angle and obstructed view of the protagonist in the car is a great way to tease his introduction, placing the viewer at a distance where they can't quite make a judgement of him.
This was my planned establishing shot, and it turned out to be a nightmare to shoot. Because this shot required manually zooming and tilting, I couldn't just set the camera up on the tripod and record it myself, so I needed my mum to do the cinematography whilst I acted. Therefore it was very difficult to both tilt and zoom at a steady rate, as I had found when doing the focus shift and panning a couple of days ago. The alcohol can was also very difficult to throw blindly out of the window into a position where the camera could zoom in rather than have to move to capture. I have lots of takes to sort through here but at the moment I am unsure on whether I will stick to using it as my opening shot, since it didn't quite seem as cinematic as the opening shot of Mad Max: Fury Road, from which I took inspiration.
The screenshot above is from the movie Locke, and I have used it to show the effectiveness of the shot that I have chosen to replicate. The mirror acts as a form of self judgement, but also a distorted image of the protagonist that is interesting due to how you can't visualise all of the character. As an interior shot of the car I think that this works very evocatively because it enables the audience to focus on the character by looking at him through another object, thus varying the ways in which the camera frames him. One other thing I want to acknowledge is that I have trimmed the film down to a length that just exceeds 6 minutes. With so much filming still to do, cause for concern may be justified since I have already run over the running time limit, but I am treating this as a way to have more than enough footage that I can then be selective from.
One possible flaw from this morning was the weather. Unlike the other day when the sky was grey and cloudy, this morning was bright blue and clear. Therefore when I cut the scene together there may be some discontinuity caused by the sudden change in weather, but I am hoping that I can play about with the colour contrast on iMovie to reduce how noticeable this is.
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