Chris Wood Narrative

Overall the making of this film has been a very steep learning curve for us all. It is the longest piece of drama we have made and certainly the most complex. This proved a problem for me as director initially because the sheer scale of the task was very daunting. Turning the script into storyboards and shot lists seemed to be an uphill struggle but I also felt it was necessary with my tendency to get lost within the production.

Our first day of shooting ended up being more of a rehearsal. We had not made some vital decisions about lighting and shooting order and I felt somewhat out of my depth being the final word on things. We did not end up getting great performances and reshoots were needed because of this.

I had been reading Film Directing: Shot by Shot by Steven D. Katz and I had specifically looked at the section on storyboarding in which Katz cites Hitchcock's attitude towards storyboarding, "For Hitchcock, who began in films as an art director, it was also a way of making sure that he was credited with the design of his films. He liked to say that his movies were finished before they were ever made, before the cinematographer or editor touched a piece of film." I tried to take from this, in a decidedly less fascistic way, the idea of storyboarding and planning the film so that as little could go wrong as possible and so we would always have something to go off. If we weren't sure what was next on shoot we could consult the storyboards and shot list.

Again, in Katz's book he says, "Even Jean Luc-Goddard, who throughout his career discarded or subverted the continuity devices shared by comic strip illustrators and classical Hollywood films, used storyboards at times to work out the connection between shots." This was a major part of planning for me so that I could figure out the logistics and physicality of shooting and getting from one shot to another, all this being said, the storyboarding did not go exactly to plan.

Immediately after the first day of shooting I went away and amalgamated the storyboard, shot list and script into one document so that there were clear points at which the shot, shooting method, action and dialogue (if there was any) were given. Initially I had thought the three documents separately would suffice.

These are a few pages from the new document

I also spoke with my producer and we agreed to be much more hands on with the actors, not be afraid to give them constructive criticism and to go ahead with more takes if and when we need them. There were certain sections such as the date scene between Tom and Samantha that we filmed we ended up filming numerous times through from numerous angles, which was necessary to get the shots but we then went back and filmed the scene in smaller segments so as to get exactly what we needed from each performer. One of our actors did not have the experience of the others and so we would do shot some bits two or three lines at a time so that Paul and I could give much more detailed performance direction.

As a team I feel we worked very well in this circumstance. On account of the time lost on the first day we had to really pull together to get everything we needed, not to mention the time constraints with actors. After the first day we reviewed the footage and decided that we had to be technically sound from then on as one of the major problems with our two minute piece was the loss of quality when pushing the ISO. I did some research on what were the best shooting settings for DSLR cameras and we tried to keep to this as best we could. We also acquired two new lenses, a 24mm and an 85mm. We made a lot of use of the 85 when taking close-ups to get a shallow depth of field and I think this upped the production value of the film greatly

After the second day of shooting I started to worry that there was no distinct style or directorial mark to the film and felt that the narrative needed spicing up a bit. The film seemed to be shaping up as a very British piece about somewhat of a loner who finds himself in a strange relationship-based predicament and although I knew how I wanted the piece to look I was still worried that it could become boring if the situations just simply played out one after the other. I decided to look at the film Submarine (2010) by British director Richard Ayoade, as this is a film where the director really wears his influences on his sleeve I felt that I could do the same in referencing it. I had the idea that as we see Tom watching Sam and Dale's date seemingly go brilliantly we could be transported into Tom's imagination where he dreams of what could happen with Samantha if he won this competition. For this I was inspired by the short section in Submarine where the main character Oliver talks about how he see his first week with his love interest as a romantic video shot on Super 8 film.

The Super 8 section from Submarine (2010)

I found that in my role as director the most consistent inspiration for shots and sequences came from music. For instance I had always liked the idea of someone walking, possibly reluctantly, down the street to the song I'm Going To See You Today by Joyce Grenfell which we ended up using for the walking sequence. As well as this I had, for a long time, wanted to use the track Sad Sweet Dreamer by Sweet Sensation in a scene and when it came to it I saw it as Tom and Samantha dancing in a dimly lit room while the camera spins round them.

A still from the imagination sequence

I feel this imagination sequence is one of the most successful parts of the film because it really helps establish Tom's character as well as his want. It also gives a break in the forward motion of the narrative to amp up the emotion. This scene was one of the last things we shot and to me it represents how comfortable we were with the actors and how comfortable the actors were with each other by the end of the shoot because Josh, playing Tom, who had previously been very reserved improvised the nod towards the camera and he and Rachel, playing Samantha, choreographed the dance between themselves having only been directed to dance.

The cast

Some of the crew

After shooting I learnt that in edit it is preferable to have quality and quantity. I think in the end our film flows quite well and avoids being boring and I would say we achieved this through coverage and time taken looking through footage to work out which shots and performances were best.

In the book In the Blink of an Eye the American film editor and sound designer Walter Murch says,

"An ideal cut (for me) is the one that satisfies all the following six criteria at once: 1) it is true to the emotion of the moment; 2) it advances the story; 3) it occurs at a moment that is rhythmically interesting and "right"; 4) it acknowledges what you might call "eye-trace"- the concern with the location and movement of the audience's focus of interest within the frame; 5) it respects "planarity"- the grammar of three dimensions transposed by photography into two (the questions of stage-line, ect); 6) and it respects the three-dimensional continuity of the actual space (where people are in the room and in relation to one another)."

He then goes on to put these rules into a "slightly tongue-in-cheek" list in order of importance:

1) Emotion                                                      51%

2) Story                                                           23%

3) Rhythm                                                       10%

4) Eye-trace                                                     7%

5) Two-dimensional plane of screen               5%

6) Three-dimensional space of action             4%

In the edit I would say that initially we focussed on story, then followed by fine cutting and focussing on the emotion of the piece and then honed the whole film down with time and rhythm in mind. I think we tried to do our best in sound with the three-dimensional space of action by adding in off-screen footsteps to get characters from one place to another (something which we worried about too much in the two minute film when we should have been thinking more about emotion, rhythm and story) and much of the two-dimensional plane I tried to address in the storyboarding and shot planning.

Overall the goals of the film seemed to change slightly throughout production, as the director my original goal was to create a working film with some style and substance and although I kept with this I feel I lost sight of it at times. At points I felt my role could have just be damage limitation because I was getting overwhelmed and the task seemed too big but thanks to my team I came back from this and we had the chance between shoots to assess how things were shaping up and add more to the next day of filming. I feel I was afforded the luxury of thinking specifically about the new imagination sequence to make the run of the film more interesting (something which, again, I already should have done) when the main focus could easily have ended up just being to create a film that functions. The practical goals of the production were changing as the production went on also we originally wanted to achieve an aesthetic in the style of A Changed Man (2003) by Jens Jonsson but having tried to work with the lighting we realised we could not quite get the dark look and had to start to think how best we could work with a much brighter film. Therefore we made the piece much more about colours. Tony's art direction and the location added so much so that I feel that the room ended up being another character. Some things really added to and reflected the feelings of Tom like the amount of empty chairs and the awful buffet. Other things such as the red curtains and balloons simply took up a semiotic role.

We also tried to use more creative ways of exposition than in the two minute through visual metaphors, a better written script and more performance. Performance-wise I was helped greatly by the actors, especially Danica and George playing Margaret and Dale because they were the most comfortable to do improvisation. I think the only way that Josh's performance could be low key was if others were really going big with theirs and George and Danica achieved that really well.

Going back to planning for the two minute I referenced the film Election (1999) by Alexander Payne, inspired by this I wanted to try and use freeze framing and in the final film we eventually did although this time it was not my idea. Paul wanted to shoot small sections of each character for the credits to go over in a Dad's Army esc way and having done this put forward the idea that the clips would freeze when the actor's name came up.

A section like this had also been suggested to me by George as a way to introduce characters in the way you might see in a western which really brings me to my point that this film, to me, ended up being a complete collaboration between us all as it should be, but even the actors were working with us to help progress ideas.

With regards to the specified technical elements in the brief I would say that we used synch dialogue where appropriate and I would say we made quite good use of off screen space. This came almost accidentally through a desire to cut back the run time. Our used of natural and staged lighting ended up being somewhat of a battle but as shown in the imagination sequence, there were some distinct changes, from natural to unnatural light, which helped to convey emotion. The use of exterior and interior locations was there but we didn't need to stray from the script. One of the things I thought we could have done better was to make more of the interaction between three characters. I would have liked to have tried to create a sequence like in a Woody Allen films like Manhattan (1979) and Annie Hall (1977) where people are speaking over each other and where sometimes there are two conversations going on at once.

Although we did consider character positioning at times, like when the results are being announced and when the two male characters are looking across to the woman, I feel we could have played with these scenes more than we did.