DIRECTIONS UNIT: Preparing for shoot day / testing ideas

After breaking down my script, storyboarding my scenes, creating a shot list and blocking out my scenes, I decided to prepare for the actual shoot day itself.

I started by making a call sheet for my actors. Here's a copy:

I sent these to the actors 5 days before the shoot along with my new adapted screenplay. I then kept in contact with the actors so that they were secured for the shoot.

I then arranged travel with the actors. After finding out their locations, I recommended the best travel option for them and discussed the rough price of their travel so this could be sorted out.

Finally, a couple nights before my shoot, I decided to try out my camera angles with my family. This enabled me to see whether the shots that I had visualized and storyboarded would actually work when put into action.

Here are a couple of examples:

This is the opening interaction between Mark and Juliet. I found that this shot worked, I would just need to make sure the camera was set up in the same position (as any slight difference could make the shot look unbalanced with too much action occurring on the left hand side of the frame, or if the tripod was set up too low then their heads would be cut off).

I experimented with  the shot where Juliet crosses over to the DVD collection. I attempted to film it handheld and follow Juliet as she walked over. However, this shot felt very unnatural and out of place due to all of the other shots being static. I also attempted to pan on the tripod to follow Juliet, however, this again looked odd.

I found out that the majority of the shots I had storyboarded would work fine, however, there was one shot that I found particularly difficult to work with. This shot was the one where Juliet crosses over to the DVD collection and then turns back around to Mark. I found it difficult to shoot this scene without the actors blocking each other. The only way I could see myself getting a clearer shot of this scene would be to cross the line which ultimately would have been a worse decision than keeping the actors slightly blocking each other.

In the end, I decided to try and direct the actors in such a way that their action was not being blocked by each other. I managed to do this by getting Mark to stand further back and move slightly when Juliet would have originally blocked him. In my storyboard, I also planned to film more coverage doing this sequence of action. I planned to film Juliet picking out the DVD in a close up shot of the row of DVDs, therefore, if any of the coverage from the wide shot of both of them is unusable, I have this coverage to replace it with instead.

Although this still didn't make the perfect shot, it was the best I could get due to the space limitations in the location. I had considered changing the whole arrangement of the room around but this seemed to create more problems than it solved.

As this all meant that the actors needed to be in specific spots for the scenes to work, I went about putting colored markers on the floor so that they would be in the correct positions when it came to filming:

Once this was all planned out, I just needed to wait for the shoot day itself. I decided to give myself a generous amount of time in which to shoot the scenes just incase I encountered similar problems with the positioning of the actors.