Shooting a Dialogue Sequence

In order to learn the way around camera rules and  become comfortable with the camera we shot a dialogue scene. 

 A little while ago we all were given an assignment to shoot a dialogue sequence for later use, I was in a group with Saskia, Sienna and Danny and we shot a good amount of footage from different angles each angle we filmed for the whole scene. What we were filming was a girl coming and sitting down next to a boy and after a second the boy compliments her to which she rejects, we did this will a number of shots. Then to add more time and add another person we created another sequence in with the girl does exactly what the boy did to her to the new character and the new character rejects her as well, essentially showing karma.  I did sound and was on film as I wasn't hear during the camera workshop so Sienna was in charge of that while the rest of us were on film as she didn’t was to be on camera. When filming we made sure that we were capturing wide, mid and CU shots in order to create a well fitting dialogue shot while not breaking the 180 degree angle, we also shot some over the shoulder angles and extreme close up’s. A problem we ran into on set was setting up the camera as it was slightly time consuming every time we wanted to change angles which was a lot, but with time this got much easier and we were able to capture everything we needed to. As I was doing sound i had to put the boom as close as it could get until it was in frame but that was still very close and easily achievable. 

For today we were put in those groups again for the purpose of editing the dialogue clips we had filmed, I was partner separately with Danny when editing. We started this process by going through the rushes bin and looking through all of our footage to see what’s good and that we had achieved all of the angles we wanted to and that they were successful, we also noted which was the best shot of each angle when doing this. As we haven’t been on editing for a bit I went over each section to make sure I knew the knowledge such as top left is where you watch initial footage from rushes and bins and cut the clips, the bottom left is where you can select from the rushes and bins, the top right is where you can watch the final product and the bottom right is where the main editing takes place. There where other features like the ‘I’ and ‘o’ feature as well as the cutting feature that I also had to refresh before we started properly editing. 

The composition fo out shots was how we had wanted it but we had a Lot of extra footage that we didn’t need which made finding the clips we wanted a bit difficult but overall we achieve enough to make everything work together smoothly. Next time when filming though I would like to get more over the shoulder shots as they make editing dialogue go much smoother and more natural as we only really had over the shoulder for the second sequence we shot. 

When editing we were stopped multiple times to check and add new functions to our work which was very helpful and Danny and me achieve a good amount of edited footage that I feel fits smoothly and has enough different angle to keep the dialogue interesting. We didn’t have Tim to try editing more than 9one way which I wish we had done so we could experiment with different and odd ways of ordering the angles. When editing we wanted all of the characters emotions and motives to be very obvious so we used many close ups of there faces and we also looked for other ways to show a character feeling such as a close up of their foot shaking to show them nervous. We came across some problem when trying got add to mangy angle to our sequences but after pulling some of those out during editing we achieve a basis of what we wanted. 

Below is our edited sequence:

When it comes to shooting the final sequence I think it will be really important for my group to keep the bigger picture Ain mind and also to get enough establishing shots so we have multiple things to cut to to keep the audience engaged while still creating a visual interesting composition. A task I believe will be hard to do on the day will be sound as there is so much moving in terms of action that we have to capture with sound but after the this workshop I know what I can and can’t do with editing such as stripping background noise or shooting transitions so it will take on the room of sound. I will also be editor so I know what is needed from sound and what is not, we will also have a small soundtrack so if anything does go wrong during filming I will be able to easily solve this. But during editing on the day I will definitely need to constantly check with the other so I am capturing the right image between all of us.