Filmmaking 101 - Bootcamp Section 1

Recreating a scene from a movie

Our first task was to find a scene from film that we like and re-shoot it, shot for shot. We all went home over the weekend and tried to find a scene that we could re-create. Sam showed us a steady shot from the shinning of the child on the tricycle. We then did the storyboard of the shining scene so we could get the scene perfectly.

We had to find an alternative for the tricycle, so James brought in the skateboard and we used that.

To get the steady shot we first decided to put the tripod on the movable wheels to get the shot really smooth. The tripod was a bit too wide to go around the corridors, furthermore the shot was a bit too high compared to the original Shinning scene. The struggle that we had was it is all one shot so we had to get it perfect without any cuts. We then decided to use a fig rig to get a lower, smooth shot. To make the steady shot even smoother we put my on a movable chair and Kai pushed me to get a smooth steady shot. Whilst we followed James on the skateboard. Another struggle we had that the corridor was never empty, so we had to carry on and ignore people in the corridor. I was the main camera man for this project and I really liked how steady the shot looked overall. Sam and Kai was the main director for this and James was the actor.

Creative Shot from Film

Our brief was to get a creative shot from a film and work out how it is done and try and repeat the style ourselves. Sam found a interesting shot from Jaws it is a dolly zoom shot. The shot is were the camera zooms in on the mans face but the background looks like it is getting further away. We did some research and found out that this shot is called the dolly shot. You do this by having the camera on the dolly and the camera is already zoomed in on the mans face but you move the camera on the dolly whilst zooming out on the camera which gives a good illusion of the background moving away. We tried to recreate the scene with a dolly and the camera.

180 Degree Rule Scene

For our brief we had to research what the 180 degree rule is.The 180 degree rule is a filming technique with two characters in a scene that should keep the same left/right side. 180 degree rule is often used for over the shoulder shots and is used for conversations in a scene. We had to put together a scene using the 180 degree rule. This would demonstrate that we understood what the 180 degree rule is. So James wrote a script for a game show idea, the game show is a comedy and the idea was the game show would go wrong. Once we a script we began to figure out ow to do a 180 degree rule. The main problem we had was that there was more than 2 characters. To fix this issue we did the over the shoulder between the game show host and the contestant the host is talking too.

Once we recorded everything we began editing, the one problem we had was James kept moving the microphone so in different shots the microphone was in a different place. I tried to edit around this problem so the microphone was mainly in the same place. I was the main editor on this project so I had to perfectly time the over the shoulder shots. Overall I believe the 180 degree rule went well and we all understood the 180 degree and how to use it.