Andrew organised a scene recreation for us to do. I was in a group with Megan Banyard, Callum Booth-Lewis and Steffan Kirkpatrick. I arrived late to class, so I didn't think I would get to direct, but Megan didn't want to, so in the end I did. Megan did production design and Steffan DPd. Callum just helped out in pre-production because he couldn't make the actual shoot itself.
We played around with lots of different ideas for scenes to do, but in the end we decided on the following scene from Memento:
I liked this scene because it doesn't use any dialogue and I thought it would be useful for Radio Underground to study this type of performance. The scene was incredibly simple.
I drew up this floor-plan and wrote up a script for the scene.
There wasn't a great deal of time for pre-production, because Radio Underground was still my priority.
In the end, I think we did a pretty good job. Leon was fun to work with and he made a solid stab at the character. He didn't recreate the performance exactly, but I wanted to direct him more through character intentions rather than trying to directly replicate the scene. Maybe that didn't follow the rules of the exercise, but it was much more useful to me as a directing learning exercise.
I think much of Steffan's cinematography looks great, it's not 100% right, but I think a lot of it still looks pretty nice. Megan's production design looked good too. I think I'm most proud of the single of Leon sitting on the bed. It's the most accurate. We probably spent to the most time on that shot though.
The final shot we did was also easily the most rushed. It was the one of the letter coming through the door. We also didn't have the right type of door for it, so we somewhat had to improvise. It looks pretty bad unfortunately, to be honest.
One of the main lessons I took away from this exercise was time-keeping. We had about two hours to get absolutely everything, which probably really wasn't enough time for it. However, it forced me to say, "Right, it's good enough. Let's move on." I have a habit of spending a long time on the same shot, making sure I'm totally happy with it. However, it really forced me to evaluate which shots were worth spending the most time on and which shots were good enough.
Here is the final exercise edited by Andrew Harman:
Comments