Shot In Ten Planning – Yearning

Yearning

A young man sits at a old table surrounded by darkness with a single floating window above him. The man looks at a old Polaroid of his lost love in his hands as autumn leaves start to fall around him. The man starts to think of a number of small details about his lost love and we cut to extreme close ups of these details, her hair, eyes, hands etc. It ends with the man sitting at the table looking at the photo with leaves all around him, they have stopped falling and now just lie lifeless surrounding him as the world slowly fades to black.

Shoot Date: Wednesday 24 June

Location: Unitec Studio

Crew

Director: Shelton

Director/DP: Matt

1st AD: Veronika

Art Director: Simone

1st AC: Simon

Gaffer: Mitchell

Grip: Nick

Editor: Cameron

Visuals/Themes

The strong emotional themes that Shelton’s wants to create is the ideas connected to the passing of time and the human nature of wishing we could go back and change something or in this case go back to be with someone. Also the idea of how we remember someone we love or care about and what physical attributes of a person we remember or associate with a particular memory. The theme of time and memory are the two strongest themes that Shelton has discussed with me. It’s through these ideas that we introduce the theme of Yearning; a concept that is defines as longing for something or someone. Our character is yearning for a lost love and we are going to depict this through the ideas of memory and the desire to change the past.

In terms of the visual environment, Shelton has spoken to me often about how we are showing the character’s subconscious space or mind and are not depicting a proper location. He wants this space to be very dull and colourless without being total black and white. It is in this visual space that autumn leaves start to fall connects to the following memories. Therefore Shelton wants visuals that show this without making it seem too dream like or drug induced. In one of the following shots a leaf will swipe the lens and this transitions to the memory sequence, for the shots depicting the memories Shelton wants to use extremely close lenses to highlight the physical attributes of the person being remembered while this space to be more vibrant and have one strong dominant colour within the frame that is connected to the physicality being shown. So overall we have two very different visual environments that we are going to depict.

 Cinematography Plan

The subconscious space will be depicted as an infinite black room with an old table and a floating white window. It will be lit simply with a one or two casters being used as a spotlight directly above the character with some slight diffusion to create a bit of a soft touch to the light and the orange warm glow of the tungsten bulbs will be taken out in the colour grade creating a slightly colder gray look while still keeping the brownish earthly tones of the leaves. We will also be shooting at 50 frames per second and then playing back at 25 frames to half the speed of the falling leaves and all the movements to reinforce the theme of time passing by. I am also going to use Blondes and red heads as rim lights to further bring the characters and props out of the background as of right now we do want our lead to will be wearing darker colours but it is TBC. During this sequence all the shots will have slow deliberate movement either with dolly and tracks or the small jib. Our first and last shots will have a very slow tracking out/in movement that reinforces the slow passing of time and also makes the space seems more surreal but delicate, conveying the mind of our lead character. For the leaf swipe transition I plan on just having a crew member standing right next to the lens and just swiping on my cue while I will rig the Dedo ledzilla lamp onto the camera to keep the leaf from just being a black swipe and instead giving it some light and colour. In terms of our shot list for this sequence, we are currently putting together shots that are quite simple but portray the emotions we are trying to convey. We are using simple framing and composition to put the focus our lead character while always connecting him the Polaroid that shows his lost love.

For the memory shots we have tested a reverse macro adapter with the Nikon lenses and both Shelton and I like the results. For these shots we are using this adapter to create an extremely close shot while adding a fuzzy faded look to the images that convey the idea of old memories coming back to you. For these shots we again will be shooting in front of a black space with a very strong ambient soft light. I plan on using the 6×6 silk for this shot and blasting several castors and/or blondes through it. For the dominant colours in each macro shot we have chosen simple strong colours Red, blue, gold and brown. All these colours will be generated by something physical in the shot. For example our lead actress is year 3 actor Amber who happens to have vibrant Redish hair which will be present within one of these macro memory shots and is a physical attribute that would be remembered by the former love. The other dominant colours will be present in her costume and her surroundings in the Polaroid. I also plan to bring out these colours further in the colour grade.

References

COSTUME IDEAS

I want to make the MAN look beaten up and shabby with ruffled clothing. Rolled up sleeves,
tie undone sort of thing. I do feel like maybe perhaps he should have a jacket of some sort. (words: Shelton)

MAKE UP Ideas

I really want to visually convey a story through the make-up in this film. I want to show that he is a troubled character that is finding enlightenment in reminiscing about his loved one.

He needs to look worn out and possibly a bit of sweat so maybe bring some glycerine.
Best example. Not too much blood. This plus a bruise/graze on the mouth would be perfect.(Words: Shelton)

LIGHTING/CAMERA

This top lit figure surrounded by a black back ground is exactly what I am going for. My character will be at a table but I like the small spill on light on the floor around the figure.

This image shows what I want to do with the window. Have it look like its floating in the blackness with light blasting through. This effect will be a lot less prominent in our shoot as we will also have a top light on the figure but this is a good starting point.

This is another example of how the figure will be completely surrounded by darkness. Hopefully I will be able to separate the figure from the background more successfully than this example.

These are examples of how extremely close our macro memory shots will be. They are also examples of how will be use one dominant colour in each macro shot, Red Blue and gold are shown here.

Reflection

I am quite happy with the footage we got on the shoot day and I was pleasantly surprised at how little we had to change in our plan during the shoot. We achieved all our planned shoots and I believe we did most of them to the best of our ability.

In terms of planning I feel like I really pushed myself in this assignment to plan more and to frequently test things more. Shelton and I created a shot list quite early on and I spent a lot of time on figuring out how to set up different aspect of a set up, jib, lighting, placement of tracks etc. This extensive planning wasn’t shown too much in the pre production meetings, as Shelton and I didn’t want the meetings to be bogged down and run longer than needed, this was perhaps for selfish reasons. I am very thankful that I did push myself to plan more than I have before because the shots we got in the can are almost 100% exact to our original vision (the only significant change from our plan was the rotation aspect of the bird eye view shot wasn’t used in the edit). One thing I did overlook in my planning however was the amount of leaves we needed to achieve our quite lengthy shots. Thankfully Veronika and Shelton managed to find a large amount of dry leaves while I was on another shoot.

However I did find this project to be quite challenging in the fact that we had a small crew and we were one of the last shoots so many crew members were tired and less enthused about the shoot. I honestly think I did a competent job of setting up a shot while letting my gaffer and grip know what I wanted them to do and how I wanted them to do it. I believe I was very straightforward with my crew and got them to do what I asked without adding useless or unnecessary waffle to my directives. A aspect of my on-set performance that I could say was lacking was my constant communication with my director, sometimes we were moving so fast that I didn’t take the time to have a short conversation with Shelton about the shot we were getting and how we could make it better or push it more towards our overall vision.

I can honestly say that after watching a graded cut of the footage that we achieved what we planned to do and the vision we thought up weeks ago made it onto the screen with few hiccups. Perhaps if I were to do it again I would do even more test with the leaves falling, blowing, being thrown etc to really find a leaf effect that worked for us in every shot.