A Reworked Shot of the feet as the actress gets out of bed

At first we found that this shot was quite effective and gave us a good feel of the surroundings. But something was wrong as it did not look right, the lighting was a little dark and the way Steph puts her feet on the ground looks really posed in the way that someone in her situation wouldn’t normally get out of bed like that. This shot would have emphasized her movement out of bed and also show the audience the state of the room she is in, it creates suspense as you are not quite sure what the purpose of the shot is for.

I t was interesting to see what we finally shot after our planning as it differed quite a bit. We made the lighting a bit darker so its more apparent that it is night time and made her feet touch the floor in a more unplanned way. We felt that this shot was also a good waypoint to start our slightly more upbeat sequence of music as it would match her pattern of movement after getting out of bed. This worked well as it really helped to build up tension leading to the next shots. There was no camera movement involved as the shot was to plainly focus on the movement of the actress.

I think in the end we created a very effective shot which helped to hold the shots in one sequence very nicely, its purpose was for continuity and it worked well in making the sequence more enjoyable to watch.

Zen

Example shots that needed to be re-worked

We originally planned to do this:
The first shot set inside the girl's room (the pan from the glass of ater to the open sachet of Alka-seltzers) was originally intended to be a long, smooth opening [scene-setting] pan/track, with the camera moving from the glass to the Alka-seltzers, and then tracking smoothly forward to the framing seen in the actual following shot (of the cigarette packet in the foreground).

However, this happened during the test shot:
We tried to achieve this by mounting the tripod on a skateboard, sliding the skateboard along the floor. However, as moving it in a 'curvy' direction in order to manoevre around the table and towards the bedside cabinet was difficult and compromised the smoothness of the shot, we decided to instead use a pan from the glass of water to the Alka-seltzers [the camera being mounted on the skateboard and stationary at this point], and then to move the skateboard forward in a straight line towards the cigarette packet, and finally keep the camera stationary with the cigarette packet in the foreground of the shot and have her dragging it out of shot.

We also tried to use a 'DIY steadycam'; the camera was mounted on the tripod and we held the tripod at the top and bottom [in a similar way to a boom mike] and moved the camera free-hand, in order to create a somewhat smooth motion through the weight of the tripod. This didn't work, however, as I think the camera was too close to/the framing was too tight on the 3 foreground items [glass, Alka-seltzer packet and cigarette packet], and so any small jerking or shaking movements showed up very clearly and made the shot actually look handheld; not what we intended.


Was this successful?
This worked better, but took a long time to set up and practise. Also, on being able to more closely review the shots during the capturing process we discovered that no takes of this shot were smooth throughout that also had the correct framing.



For the final sequence we did this:
As you can see we decided to put the beginning of one take and the end of another take of the same shot together. We also used a dissolve to give the impression that she had been on the phone for some period of time and emphasise the slow pace of this scene. It was also effective at preventing the cut between the shots look like such a jump.

Angela x