Link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/162bVv90QB2DA7tnzNcHCJ6rL4ocMg_FU/view?usp=sharing
Pre-production
This is the first time for me to shoot a video professionally. Our group got the script, gears, actors., and we all got a crew role. To be honest, before we picked the crew role, I hadn’t thought about being a director in this shooting task. Because I think my personality is not the leader type, I prefer to be the one who works for the leader and get my job done well. While a director needs to lead the whole crew and make decisions on almost everything. It seems like my members have decided their roles, and Bonnie asked me If I’m ok to be the director. So I just took the role, even though I was still unclear about what we gonna do next.
After we got the script, we had a short meeting discussing about the sound and the location. Abi is a good location-finder, all the scenes we shot are from Abi. The indoor location for scene three is good, it is quiet, and has a corner. But its space is limited, it would be a little bit hard to shoot wide shots from some angles. When I was drawing the storyboard, I was trying to construct the 3D location in my head and figure out the position for camera, and drew them in the bird view picture. In the next class, we brought our storyboard and discuss the shot we gonna use. The final storyboard is the combination of mine and Abi’s. We didn't design many shots for the first two scenes. For the scene three, we applied multiple shots since it has dialogue and many physical movements, so that we can present the interaction between two characters.
Production
We began to shoot in the afternoon. At the time the sun was going down, we were unable to shoot the first two scenes under the good light condition. We did do the white balance adjustment before shooting. But maybe something went wrong, the footage of outdoor scenes looked so blue. To save time, after finishing the scene one, Steve (Lenny), Bonnie (1st assistant director) and Frank (Boom operator stayed for the sound recording, me, Abi (Camera operator) and Yuchen (Van) headed to next location to prepare for the next scene. But now I think I should stay to supervise the procedure of sound recording since it’s one of my works. What’s more, we spent so much time shooting the scene two. It doesn’t have dialogue but demands Yuchen to do the facial expression. While she failed to give natural performance when acting, I had to instruct her on how to act. We didn’t success until the take 7. I know Mackendrick said the director need to inspire actors rather than instruct them, but we are all new to the film production, I think the inspiration thing only works when both director and actor are experienced.
I think we didn’t do a great job on over-the-shoulder shots. During the dialogue between Lenny and Van, Lenny was sitting and Van was standing, they also kept a great distance between each other, Which brought some difficulties to shoot over-the-shoulder shots. Despite their wide distance, in Lenny’s over-the-shoulder shot the position of the camera was great, they look close to each other and show a sense of intimacy. While in Van’s over-the-shoulder shot, Lenny looks smaller and far from Van, which makes him less important than Van. If we zoom in the camera and put the camera a little to right in Van’s over-the-shoulder shot, I believe it would look better.
Post-production
When I was learning editing from the class Sound and Image, Paul taught us to make all the footages in the premier project nice and organized by creating many bins and sequences. To be honest, I am not an organized person. Before taking this class, I just imported all the footages (including sounds and clips) into one bin, and just edited them in one sequence. So when I was editing the version cut for the scene three, I linked up every clip and further cut them so that the movement of actors are fluent between shots, I just habitually did it. After that, I realized that’s what I need to do in the rough cut rather than the version cut. I should get used to being organized in editing so that my editing would be more efficient.
Due to the problem of white balance happened to the first two scenes, I need to do more work in the color grading, I have to say that it was quite difficult to make actors’ skin tone look the same in the indoor scene and outdoor scene, and I don’t have professional knowledge about color. In this editing I depended on my experience of editing photographs on my phone to do the color grading, and compare with the color of other clips to see if their skin tone and the color of the image are close enough or not.
We forgot to record the Atmos for scene two and three during the shooting, so I haven’t done any change to their sound in the editing. We recoded actors’ footsteps sound and the case’s shaking sound. When I drag these two footage into the sequence, I found that those sound couldn’t match the movement of actors and the case. I just gave up and used the sound of the merged clip. I think if we need to record the matched sound, I need to hire the sound team, who uses lots of props to create the sound as they are watching the video.
I made two versions for the Lenny cut, and I put a simple title on it. These two versions don’t have many differences in the editing, I just changed the length of a clip in the scene two and change some shots in the scene three. By writing this reflection, I noticed the mistake I haven’t realized before. These mistakes taught me a lot and I believe there’s more room for me to develop in these three stages of Lenny exercise. Thanks for bonnie, I took the role of director in this exercise, and I have learned a lot from this experience. To be honest, I didn’t do a great job being a director, but it gives me enough confidence to be a director or even a leader next time.
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