On the advice of my friend and mentor Carl Schoenfeld, I’ve just read Lajos Egri’s The Art of Dramatic Writing. Penned in 1946, it’s a manual for playwrights, but it drills to the core of what’s important in drama, and as such is just as useful a read for a screenwriter or filmmaker.
The book is divided into four sections: premise, character, conflict and general.
What Egri calls premise I would call theme, though he soundly argues that calling it premise forces you to think of it as almost a pared-down logline, which may make you more inclined to treat it with the appropriate importance. He suggests that a premise should have three parts, indicating the dominant trait of the lead character, the conflict and the ending. Examples he gives include “honesty defeats duplicity”, “bragging leads to humiliation” and “poverty encourages crime”. Reverse-engineering a few recent movies along these lines might give us “instinct trumps conformity” (The Heat), “love transcends human flesh” (Transcendence) or “the powerful triumph over the weak” (Captain Philips). Egri emphasises that the premise must be the very DNA of the script, informing every line and every action.
We have all heard people saying that characters in a film must be three-dimensional, but have you ever wondered what those three dimensions are? Egri’s answer is: physiology (physical appearance, health, heredity), sociology (class, job, religion, home life, etc.) and psychology (morals, ambition, temperament, IQ, abilities and so on).
The premise acts as a goal to your characters, especially your lead, and powers their development – Sandra Bullock’s loosening up in The Heat, for example. Egri reminds us that character development must be a smooth process, so a character who goes from anger to love must pass through many intermediate stages such as irritation, ambivalence, interest and affection. Missing out these transitions, Egri warns, will result in melodrama.
“A weak character,” says Egri, “is one who, for any reason, cannot make a decision to act.” He goes on to explain that, in theory, any character can be strong if you choose the right “point of attack”, in other words if you write about a period in their life when they HAVE made a decision to act, when they are ready for conflict.
Lajos Egri
To generate rising conflict, Egri asserts the need for “a clear-cut premise and unity of opposites, with three-dimensional characters.” He defines a unity of opposites as a scenario in which the protagonist and antagonist want precisely the opposite things. This can apply not only to the overall thrust of the story, but to individual scenes within it too. Egri urges the reader not to fall into the trap of “static” conflict, where characters argue back and forth without escalating the situation.
Being aimed at playwrights, the book considers dialogue as the only means of revealing plot, character and conflict, but in a film conflict could be literal (as in an action film) or expressed through some other non-verbal means.
Overall, Egri’s breakdown of a script’s essential elements provides me a with useful template with which to begin interpreting a screenplay. Many people have produced books attempting to distill the essence of good writing, and it is largely a matter of taste which one you find most useful. Personally, I found The Art of Dramatic Writing clear, concise and refreshing, and I’m sure I’ll refer to it frequently.
Back in 2000 I directed and co-produced a surreal Star Trek spoof written for me by my old schoolfriend Matt Hodges. Although it was made a few months before I started blogging, the website did feature a retrospective production diary, and today I’m going to share that with you. But first, here’s the film…
Who is that handsome young fellow?
To find out how the project came about, in a strange little Malvern pub called The Prince of Wales, read the production notes on Cow Trek’s film page. And here’s the shoot diary…
Sunday, December 17, 2000
There are two Hereford-Worcester roads. Each one has a pub named The Wheatsheaf on it. These are facts. I know them. I did not know them before this day. And that’s what made us an hour and a half late as we roamed the Bromyard Downs in my mum’s little Peugot, with an unfeasible amount of equipment (and lard) in the back, at a unfeasibly early time on an unfeasibly cold Sunday morning, trying to find an unfeasibly unfindable farm.
All of this time, Matt was sat in a very uncomfortable position in the rear right seat, or what would have been the rear right seat, had it not been folded down to fit more gear in, effectively encasing the unfortunate Mr. Hodges in a metal box constructed from grip equipment and plastic poles. And a piratical wheel. Sometimes, I suspect Matt may regret writing Cow Trek.
Mike Hodges as Farmer Blackbeard
Still, we got there in the end, and eventually filmed our first shot, with Mike (Farmer Blackbeard) having quickly learnt the intricacies of tractor operation. It was then that Julia Evans, head honcho of Longlands Farm, asked us exactly what we needed to film. When I mentioned a cow in a field, she was very surprised. She had no idea. The cows were in barns. Fields would be tricky. Very tricky.
Closing my mind to the fevered panic which threatened to engulf my very soul (and a fair bit of my hair as well), I pressed on with the two farmyard scenes featuring the main dialogue twixt brothers Hodges. Once Matt had donned a flat cap, he looked more like a farmer than you could possibly imagine. Big sideburns are surprisingly agricultural. (Perhaps Matt’s next script should be about a ska band that are also farmers.)
It didn’t take long for me to start getting paranoid and shooting far too many takes and angles of everything, but we weren’t on a particularly tight schedule so it didn’t really matter. The first yard scene had that tacky low budget look with the two actors looking at a cow “that’s there, honest, but it’s just out of frame so you can’t see it”. Oh well.
Writer Matt Hodges in his role as Farmer Giles
As the sun went down, we repaired to the farm’s study, where we promptly set up a whole bunch of lights in an attempt to make it look like day. Muchos comedy ensued as Mike improvised a sequence in which he swapped his hook hand for a biro appendage to sign his cheque, and then impaled it on the aforementioned appendage to hold it out to Farmer Giles.
Monday, December 18, 2000
Having discovered, to my horror, that sound man David Abbott’s car had broken down, I was forced to get my mum to take us to the farm today.
Arriving at the delightful time of 8:00am, we were kindly provided with a cup of tea by Julia, who then dutifully got two cows from the barn and put them in the paddock near the farmhouse. Sipping our tea gratefully, we watched Julia and her husband chasing one of the cows around, trying to get it into the field. We opted to make the other cow our star.
As Matt had been saying for some time, the cow’s action consisted primarily of eating grass and walking along. This would not take all day, he insisted. Always the professional (read: know-it-all), I was more conservative. However, that cheeky bugger Matt turned out to completely right. Julia helped us out with the walking bits, shooing the cow up and down the lane. We were completely unable to get the beast to stand still next to Matt (a cutaway for the yard scene), but you can’t have everything.
The starring cow
I was loath to broach the subject of bovine sexual congress with Julia, as she had been so helpful thusfar, despite having clearly not been briefed as fully as I had hoped on what we were going to need. An effect, I decided. It would be tricky, but what the hell?
And at about midday, we realised we’d finished. Buggery. Mum wasn’t picking us up till 6:00pm. We killed the afternoon filming extra cow shots, recording sound effects and sitting around in the farm house.
In the evening I went up to Chris Jenkins’ abode, for ’twas he that was providing a basement as a studio for the spaceship interiors. We had spent all of Saturday working on the set, but had progressed considerably less quickly, and considerably more expensively, than I had anticipated. Even the Hodges’ input on console construction had not brought us up to speed. But by the end of Monday night I was confident that we had done enough groundwork to allow Tuesday afternoon’s filming to start on time.
How wrong I was…
Tuesday, December 19, 2000
Actor Si Dovey (in red shirt) and I (in gillette, I regret to say) move a set panel into place while David Abbott adjusts the jib. Actor and composer Chris Jenkins, whose mother owned this basement, is in the yellow shirt.
I can’t for the life of me remember what took us so long on Tuesday morning. We had been scheduled to finish the set between 10am and 2pm, then film the Engineering Room scenes until 5:30. In the end, we didn’t shoot a thing until 4:00pm.
Late in the morning, I sent David out to get some gerbils. Directing him to the only pet shop I knew of in Malvern, with additional instructions to pick up some extra hardboard for the set, I was extremely pleased when he turned up an hour later with three hamsters. It was around this time that Chris’ sister Sarah became an inpromptu member of the crew, looking after the gerbils and making (occasionally) helpful comments as we affixed three plastic wheels to the fake walls and inserted rodents into them. Praise the Lord, the little blighters actually went round in them! Sadly we couldn’t get them all to go round at once, but I was happy enough.
Finally Jim got to do some “acting”. The script described Engineer McHaggis as “an overly Scottish man” who does “overly Scottish things”. Jim’s interpretation of the character, combined with the poor selection of Scottish items which were available to dress the set, is best described as “a barely Scottish man doing barely Scottish things”. Not only was he incapable of doing the accent, he also couldn’t deliver a long line, forcing me to cut the scene.
Oh Jim, why?
Lee Richardson (Captain Lightstar), Chris Jenkins (Ensign Lancer) and Si Dovery (Lieutenant Steeljaw) rehearse their lines.
Wednesday, December 20, 2000
I don’t know at what point I realised that this day had about 50% of the film’s total running time scheduled to be shot on it, but I was brown-trousering when I did. However, I reasoned with myself, there were no animals today. Just lots of big dialogue scenes. But all in one location. Easy, right?
Two and a half hours after our scheduled start time, we had finally constructed the sliding door for the bridge set and were ready to shoot. Once we got going, we rocketed through it. Again, loads of takes were needed – this time because my shotlist called for complex tracks/cranes combined with multiple focus pulls, and I kept arsing them up.
I was annoyed when, about five scenes in, I had to rearrange my lovely lighting set-up in order to make way for an extra wall section. It never looked as good after that.
Lee managed to get his arse out. A deliberate out-take – the sliding door opens and there are the hairy cheeks of the Tuxman’s posterior.
Somehow we wrapped five minutes ahead of schedule, but there was then lots of clearing up to do. The mighty director was reduced to scrubbing the carpet, as it transpired that the dust sheets I had used whilst painting the set were of insufficient thickness, and the paint had seeped through to the carpet. I am told that those patches are now the only clean areas of the carpet.
Directing A Cautionary Tale last week was a very satisfying experience. There are a number of reasons for this – one is that, unlike when Stop/Eject wrapped, we are not now faced with the task of creating visual effects, shooting pick-ups and doing ADR. I’m pretty sure we got everything we needed in the can in that whirlwind three day shoot.
But the main reason is that it’s been one of the most collaborative directing experiences of my career. I’ve written before about the process of surrendering filmmaking roles to collaborators, and the joy of receiving contributions from those collaborators which far outstrip what you could have done yourself. With A Cautionary Tale I’ve finally reached a point where I am directing and ONLY directing. (We will gloss over the bit of focus-pulling I had to do on a few shots.)
It was great to leave the job of lighting and photographing the film completely to Alex Nevill, who did a beautiful job, and it’s nice to sit back and wait for editor Tristan Ofield’s first cut. It was also really, reallygood not to have to worry about the logistical side of things.
But the biggest relevation and the biggest benefit was in the improved relationship I was able to have with the actors. Freed from the invisible cord which tethers a DP to their camera, and without the concerns of a producer littering my mind, I was able (I hope) to give the cast far more attention. It is not often in my career that I have been able to sit in a trailer (okay… it was a caravan) and discuss the upcoming scene with the actors, but I got to do it on A Cautionary Tale.
Despite the late casting of Frank Simms as Gordon, I had been able to meet both Frank and lead actress Georgia Winters prior to the shoot and do some good groundwork on their characters. Here too I found the process more collaborative than I have done in the past, for the simple reason that I had not written the script. A writer-director is very close to his or her story and tends to have a very strong idea of how everything should be played. A non-hyphenate director, however, has no greater insight into the script than the actors. The result is that I found I was usually asking the actors questions, to invite discussion, rather than issuing them with instructions. I suppose some might see this as a lack of vision on my part, but I’m pretty sure it will lead to a richer end product.
Throughout the shoot I tried to maintain my philosophy of keeping the number of takes to a minimum, as discussed in a 2011 blog entry. At points it made me unpopular with Alex, but long and bitter experience has taught me that it is not worth doing another take just because of minor camera wobbles. Yes, your operator might get the camerawork perfect on the next take, but something else will go wrong – a loud motorbike going by, for example – and before you know it, it’s twenty minutes later, you’ve done four more takes to get everything technically perfect, and now the performances are no longer fresh, so you use take one in the edit anyway! Don’t go chasing the take where everything’s perfect, because it will never happen. Just make sure the performance is perfect and the audience will forgive everything else – hell, they probably won’t even notice that camera wobble once it’s cut smoothly with the surrounding shots and the sound is nicely mixed.
Reading Stanislavski definitely paid off. He underlined the importance of a fresh performance built on unique creative inspiration, chiming in with my point above. And I was even able to use a “magic if” when directing the closing shot of the film. I strongly recommend reading An Actor Prepares if you want to better understand how to engage with actors.
Stay tuned for more on A Cautionary Tale as we progress through post.
On Saturday, production wrapped on A Cautionary Tale after three days of shooting at Newstead Abbey Historic House and Park in Nottinghamshire. I had vaguely hoped to make a video diary of the whole thing, but in practice I only managed to grab a few bits on the first day:
Focus puller John Tween, director of photography Alex Nevill and actor Frank Simms in a present day cottage scene
The second day saw us filming in the bone-chilling wind blowing over the lake all morning, while 1939 was re-dressed to 1969 inside the cottage. After filming 1969 through the afternoon, we wrapped when the light fell, postponing a few cottage exterior shots until the next day.
After picking up those shots on Saturday, we moved inside for the present day interiors and the meatiest scenes in the film. As anticipated, we found ourselves faking daylight through the windows as shooting continued after dark, though we wrapped only half an hour later than planned.
I’d like to thank all of the cast and crew once again for their hard work, plus everyone who supplied equipment and props, and the lovely staff at Newstead Abbey.
A project like this leaves me with very mixed feelings about unpaid filmmaking. On the one hand I hate the stress of trying to find last-minute replacements for drop-outs, I hate how much I have to ask of people, and I hate that I cannot acknowledge people’s hard work with the renumeration it richly deserves. But I also come away with a strong feeling that this is it, this is what matters, this is all that matters – making truly creative work and having fun doing it – and despite fifteen of years of plugging away, I still have no idea how to do that while paying people. Should I therefore stop? I really don’t know.
We’re less than one week out from shooting A Cautionary Tale, with many aspects of the production coming together nicely, but others proving more challenging.
Regular readers may recall that after Stop/Eject, a project where the last few weeks of preproduction were marred by both lead actors and many crew pulling out, I vowed never again to make a film where people weren’t paid. (Puppet films excepted.) When I took on A Cautionary Tale, I figured this rule didn’t apply. After all, it wasn’t “my” film; I didn’t originate it, and I wasn’t producing it, so it wasn’t my call whether people were paid or not.
I was disappointed, but not surprised, when our lead actor pulled out about ten days ago, after being offered a lucrative alternative. Just like on Stop/Eject, it has proven very hard to find a suitable replacement, someone willing to travel way outside of London, for no money, for “just another” short film. And the search continues.
Another hiccup has been the cinematography. By mutual agreement, the DP who I originally selected left the project about a week ago. The lesson learned here is that, just like an actor, a DP must be right for the project. If you are working with limited resources, you need someone who relishes the challenge, rather than feeling restricted by it. Alex Nevill has stepped up to the plate, and I’m sure he’ll do a terrific job.
The knock-on effect has been that only today have we been able to start confirming equipment hires. For a while it looked like we might have to shoot on a DSLR, but Alex has been able to get us a great deal on a Red One MX.
Tomorrow our loyal band of runners and production assistants begins cleaning out the cottage at Newstead Abbey. On Tuesday, the art department led by Amy Nicholson will descend on the location and begin the huge task of painting and dressing it to become a writer’s study from 1903. Then, over the course of our three-day shoot, Amy’s team will have to redress it three times to bring it through the twentieth century to the present day.
Despite all the drama, I’m looking forward to the shoot. Many of the crew have worked with me before, including gaffer Colin Smith, costumer Sophie Black, sound mixer David Bekkevold, and of course Amy, and I know they’ll do me proud. And I’m sure there will be new great working relationships forged in the white heat (or more literally, freezing cold) of A Cautionary Tale’s shoot too. Stay tuned.
I’ve just finished reading the classic thesping manual An Actor Prepares, by Konstantin Stanislavski. Don’t worry, I’m not planning a career switch to the other side of the camera, just endeavouring to become a better director by deepening my understanding of acting.
Despite being 80 years old and translated from Russian, the book is surprisingly accessible. It takes the form of a fictional diary in which an eager drama student, Kostya – whom Stanislavski apparently based on his younger self – records his lessons with teacher and director Tortsov, representing the author’s older, wiser self.
The first instalment of a trilogy which continues with Building a Character and Creating a Role, An Actor Prepares outlines the mental processes which Stanislavski believed are required in order to stimulate the subconcious inspiration from which all truly great acting springs. As such, the book focuses on work that would be done by an actor on their own, before beginning their relationship with a director.
In fact, Tortsov/Stanislavski goes so far as to suggest that directors can often interfere with an actor’s preparation by trying to impose their own themes and motivations on them. “An actor must find the main theme for himself,” he says. “He must not be forcibly fed on other people’s ideas, conceptions, emotion memories or feelings. His own appetite must be tempted. The director’s job is to get the actor to ask and look for the details that will put life into his part.”
Elsewhere in the book, there is a great tip regarding objectives (read: motivation). “You should not try to express the meaning of your objectives in terms of a noun… The objective must always be a verb.” The author suggests that powerful objectives often start with “I wish…” It seems to me that if a scene is going off-track, sitting down with the actor and formulating a suitable objective beginning with “I wish” might be a constructive way to get back to the heart of the narrative and characterisation.
Perhaps one of the best-known elements of Stanislavski’s system is the “magic if”. The theory is that by asking “if” questions, maybe as basic as, “What if I was in the same situation as my character?” a performer – or indeed a director – can very quickly get to the truth of a role, a scene, or a script. By probing scenarios that don’t even occur in the script, for example, “What would my character have done if such-and-such an event happened?” we can start to build a more nuanced character.
Stanislavski also stresses the importance of the “super-objective”, the over-arching motivation which drives the character through the piece, and “counteraction”, forces working against the super-objective, which are often embodied by the antagonist or villain. This is a good reminder for directors and writers not to lose sight of what the hero is ultimately trying to achieve, and to derive the maximum dramatic conflict from the hero’s clash with the people and obstacles in their way.
Aside from these nuggets of wisdom, the principle thing I’ve come away with is an increased understanding of and respect for the craft of acting. It must require an extraordinary level of mental discipline to control your every thought and action – or rather, to immerse yourself in the character to such a degree that your every thought and action naturally become those of the character – while simultaneously hitting your marks, finding your light, delivering the lines put in your mouth by someone else, remembering your continuity, executing the director’s notes, and ignoring all the crew and equipment in your face.
Which I knew already, of course, but reading An Actor Prepares very much brought it home to me.
Left to right: Tom Walsh (1st AD), Sophia Ramcharan (producer), Benjamin Maier (DP), Amy Nicholson (production designer) and Steve Deery (writer)
Following our positive recce of Newstead Abbey last month, we returned there yesterday, this time with new crew members Benjamin Maier (director of photography), Tom Walsh (first assistant director) and designer Amy Nicholson’s assistants Anya and Charlotte. It was an opportunity for Ben to assess the power, lighting, lens and grip requirements, for Tom to consider the logistics of working in the place, and for the art department to take measurements.
Amy and her team are sinking their teeth into the project. Initial ideas of a single feature wall which would be re-wallpapered for each of the film’s four time periods have expanded into full-blown redecoration of the room. This will create a whole different mood and palette for each period and really up the production values.
After leaving the gatekeeper’s cottage, we drove up to the lake to show Ben where the waterside scenes would take place. His immediate observation, which had escaped me on the previous recce because I was wearing my director’s hat, was that it was in the worst possible orientation to the sun: the actors would be flatly lit. We walked around the lake to a cool Victorian folly that looked like part of a miniature castle. Here the light would strike from a better angle, and indeed it was a better location in every respect except for one. I can’t tell you what that one is because it would give away the ending of the film.
Sophia and Steve on the folly overlooking the lake
This recce was my first chance to use Artemis, a virtual director’s viewfinder app which I recently purchased. At £20.99 it’s very pricey, but where it scores over other, cheaper viewfinder apps is in its vast array of cameras you can choose from. You don’t have to worry about calculating crop factors; you simply select your camera from the menu, along with the lenses you have available, and Artemis shows you the field of view you’ll get with each one. On the wide end it’s limited by the iPad camera’s lens length, which in terms of a Super-35mm sensor at 16:9 is equivalent in height to a 22mm lens and in width to about 25mm, but you can purchase an optional wide angle lens adaptor to get around this. I have yet to use the app’s more advanced features, but it’s certainly cheaper than a real director’s viewfinder, and much more convenient than carting a DSLR and lenses around, which is what I did on the first recce.
The cottage exterior seen from amongst the trees opposite, through the Artemis director’s viewfinder app
In other areas of preproduction, I’ve had initial Skype chats with the two lead actors, which led to some suggestions for little additions to the script, and I’ve been continuing to watch genre films for inspiration, taking in The Silence of the Lambs, The Woman in Black (2012) and The Innocents lately.
Everything begins with the script, and here is the extract for the Stop/Eject sequence I’m going to break down:
14. INT. ALCOVE/EXT. RIVER GARDENS – DAY – INTERCUT
KATE stands behind the alcove’s curtain with an armful of tapes.
She pushes one into the recorder – “JULY 16th 2007, 5-6:30pm” -
and hits PLAY. Warm summer sunshine steals in through the crack
in the curtain. She pulls it back to reveal the river, sunlight
dancing and sparkling in the water of the weir.
COPY-KATE cycles through the gardens on a creaky old bicycle
with a custom paint job and various doodads hanging off,
oblivious to her other self and the alcove stood in the middle
of a Victorian bandstand.
Copy-Kate spots a strange figure on the riverbank, wearing
closed-back headphones and waving a big, fluffy microphone at
the running water. She looks ahead – she’s about to run over
TWO YOUNG GIRLS. She grips the brakes tightly and the bike
screeches to a stop with a noise like a small army of warring
cats. She catches her breath as the older girl scowls and drags
her sister away.
Sophie drew the following storyboards for this sequence, based on my rough sketches:
I don’t like starting scenes with establishing shots; I prefer to reveal them gradually. So when I conceived the first shot (top left) – setting up Kate in the alcove in the shop – I suspected I would probably end up cutting it, and sure enough I never even filmed it. The audience would know by now where the tape recorder alcove was, I figured.
The next shot (top right) follows Kate as she puts down the stack of tapes. This is fairly basic visual storytelling. The audience already knows that the tapes contain recordings of Kate’s life. When we see her come in with an armful of cassettes, we anticipate her nostalgia trip.
As this was the first time Kate was to travel back in time more than a few hours, I felt it important to show the action of the tape going into the recorder in close-up (bottom), to ensure the audience understood the connection between the tapes, the machine and the time travelling.
We then return (top left) to the previous angle, following Kate as she stands back up and opens the curtain. One of my regrets with Stop/Eject was that I never shot over Kate’s shoulder as she looked out of the alcove. I can only think this is because I was trying to avoid doing “the obvious thing”. In this scene I chose instead to tease what she’s seeing, revealing first the sunlight on her face, and then (top right) an abstract close-up of a spinning bike wheel, part of the visual theme of circles I had smart-arsedly developed for the film. My thinking was that time travel was a big and unbelievable concept for Kate to take in, so it needed to be broken to her (and therefore us) gradually.
Finally the scene is revealed (bottom left) in a high wide shot to establish the geography, which then cranes down to draw us into the action. On the day, there was a bush in the foreground, which began to obscure the action as we craned down, so we decided to crane up instead, rising up over the bush to reveal the action.
Next it was necessary to show the place of Kate and the alcove in the geography. I wanted to echo the formality and symmetry of the bandstand’s architecture by framing it flat-on, dead centre (bottom right).
Then Copy-Kate sees Dan, her future husband, for the very first time. I wanted to show an immediate connection using an over-the-shoulder shot-reverse. Since Copy-Kate was on a moving bike, this meant panning with her for her angle (top) and then tracking with her for Dan’s angle (bottom) in order to keep her shoulder in frame. I left Dan’s shoulder out of Kate’s shot since he hasn’t seen her yet and so hasn’t made a connection.
The editing podcast below from summer 2012 explains the various iterations I went through with this sequence. (I later brought Miguel Ferros on board to re-edit the film, and his final version is far superior to all of my attempts.) You can see in the podcast some of the problems that my linear shot planning approach caused, notably my failure to cover the whole scene in the crane shot, and the restrictions which that placed on me in the edit.
Despite these minor quibbles, I’m very proud of Stop/Eject and its visual storytelling. It’s recently received a couple of glowing reviews on Unsung Films and The London Film Review, the latter praising its visuals, and both quite rightly lauding Georgina Sherrington’s brilliant lead performance.
How does a filmmaker decide what angles to shoot from? Speaking for myself, it’s a hard process to analyse, as many of the decisions are made without much conscious thought. Often I just sit down and imagine the scene playing out in my head. Since childhood I’ve been pretending to be a camera – closing one eye and moving my head to mimick a crane shot, for example, as I pushed my Lego car along – so in imagining the scene I automatically create shots and edits in my head. Then it’s just a case of writing them down, or sketching them as storyboards. I suspect that some of the time – perhaps a lot of the time – I’m subconciously recalling similar scenes in other films I’ve seen and copying their shots.
Sometimes it does require more thought to choose between a number of options. It’s about picking the angle, the lens, the movement that has the right feel for that moment of the story. “If I push in on a short lens, it will feel more dramatic and intimate, but maybe a cool, detached look would be better, using a long lens and remaining static… What do I want the audience to feel?”
Throughout my career, I’ve always shot-listed or storyboarded in a linear fashion – “I’ll be on this shot, then I’ll cut to this one, then this one, then back to the first one, then to the second one which has now dollied in closer, etc….” It made perfect sense to me, because that’s how the film would ultimately appear to the viewer. Knowing the order in which angles would be seen, I could choose to transition between two angles with a camera move, rather than a cut. I could be sure that I wasn’t wasting time on set shooting extraneous material.
But of course, this linear approach to shot planning lacked flexibility. If the action changed on set when blocking it with the actors, I often struggled to integrate this into my plans. And if I needed to change the sequence in the edit, it was often challenging to make the shots work in a different order, because I hadn’t covered the whole scene from a particular angle, or I’d built in a camera move which was now redundant.
Storyboards by Luis Gayol for The Dark Side of the Earh
Other directors plan their shots more in terms of coverage. They might do this via a floorplan showing the camera positions. They’re making sure that, across the sum total of their camera angles, all of the action can be seen clearly and with the appropriate tightness or wideness of framing. They’ve not decided where each angle will be used, only that these are angles they will probably need somewhere in the edit. They’re giving themselves options.
I used to think of giving yourself options as a weakness in a director. Surely you should know now what you want, rather than figuring it out in post? But as I’ve come to realise, particularly in my experience of working with a separate editor for the first time on Stop/Eject, until you’re away from the baggage of the shoot and you’re actually putting the stuff together, you simply can’t know for sure what the best way to edit it is going to be. You can’t predict every nuance of a performance in preproduction, you can’t predict exactly where the pace may flag and need tightening, and you can’t predict which shots or pieces of action will be unsuccessful due to problems on the day with the execution.
So in writing the shot list for A Cautionary Tale last week, I’ve tried to lean much more towards the coverage style of planning. Inevitably the result is a halfway house, or more optimistically perhaps a hybrid, between the linear and coverage styles. I look forward to seeing what impact this has on the editing process.
Continuing this theme, in my next blog post I’ll break down how I chose the shots for a sequence in Stop/Eject, and look at how those decisions ramified in production and post.
With the casting for A Cautionary Tale fresh in my mind, here are a few tips on running auditions.
Send all your auditionees the full script and/or audition sides in advance. Whether they read it all and how much they prepare will tell you a lot about their attitude to their craft and their enthusiasm for this particular role.
Bring an assistant. If actor #2 turns up while actor #1 is mid-audition, it helps a lot to have someone to greet them.
Make sure that the venue you’re using has an anteroom or corridor for people to wait in.
Take signs (and Blutak) to direct people to the right room within the building.
There will be no-shows. C’est la vie.
Introduce yourself and the project before the reading, but don’t waffle because the more you keep the actor in suspense, the more nervous they will be when they finally get to read.
If you’re filming the auditions, which I recommend, you should have a separate person doing that, so that you the director can watch and judge the performance with your naked eye.
Check the actor’s ability to take direction by having them read a second time with a different emotional emphasis or motivation.
Use an improv or two to gauge the actor’s creativity and get a sense of what they can do outside the confines of the sides.
Take the time to answer any questions the actor may have about your previous experience. Remember that it’s just as much about whether they want to work with you as it is about whether you want to work with them.
How do you like to run auditions? Any tips you could add to these?
On the advice of my friend and mentor Carl Schoenfeld, I’ve just read Lajos Egri’s The Art of Dramatic Writing. Penned in 1946, it’s a manual for playwrights, but it drills to the core of what’s important in drama, and as such is just as useful a read for a screenwriter or filmmaker.
