An adventure through the film world by this award winning director and all round fool.
Sunday 6 November 2016
WorkshopCraig: INDIE FILM TIP - Is your Location Limiting you?
WorkshopCraig: INDIE FILM TIP - Is your Location Limiting you?: As an indie film maker it is a fair bet that you will not have the money to hire a studio such as Pinewood or Shepperton and build that pe...
INDIE FILM TIP - Is your Location Limiting you?
As an indie film maker it is a fair bet that you will not
have the money to hire a studio such as Pinewood or Shepperton and build that
perfect set where your characters can play out that perfect script you’ve
written.
As a poor indie the truth is you will have to use real
actual places to make your film and most likely as a result you will be limited
to what you can beg, borrow or steal to create the world of your film.
Now sometimes this can feel like a hindrance but really it’s
nothing of the sort. Like everything else about film making it really is only a
matter of compromise and adaptation. And actually sometimes these perceived limitations
can actually lead to creating a much more truthful world than a studio ever
would have.
On my first film THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS for example I
needed an attic room to double as an artist’s studio and living space. Although
we were shooting the whole film in one location, a massive stately home called
Compton House in Dorset, ironically all of the attic rooms were far too small
(being servant rooms) to accommodate everything that we needed in the film space.
This created something of a dilemma; should we make do and settle for a smaller
space or should we try and find a different location? However, we didn’t have
the money for another location so we were stuck with our small cramped attic
room and that was that.
After much head scratching there was an alternative to trying
to fit everything in one small cramped attic room – why not fit it all into 3
small cramped attic rooms and pretend it was one big space.
By filming in 3 different rooms, one as the art studio area,
one as the bedroom area and one as the kitchen area we managed to convincingly
portray a single space and yet never show an establishing shot of the entire
space and the funny thing is you never ever miss that shot. Because of the way
the film is edited by our amazing editor Claire Pringle the audience are
encouraged to feel a sense of claustrophobia and disorientation. This is a
great example of not being constricted by your location but actually enhancing
the film thanks to the location limitations.
Now admittedly we were helped by the style of the film here
as we were creating a sense of disorientation in the audience by never having
big establishing shots of the place so that you couldn’t quite get a grip on
the location. This was to unsettle the audience by taking away one of the
things that we grab hold of while watching a film, namely a sense of place. By denying
this the audience would feel disorientated, on edge and that is just what we
wanted them to feel.
Due to the nature of the shoot we had many shots where The
Artist would walk out of shot in one room and then walk into shot in another
room and it still meant to be the same space. Logistically this meant a lot
more thought had to go into each shot and how this part of the room would fit
together with that part of the room. We even had one room that needed to be
completely flopped in post so that the layout felt right but all of this was
planned so there were no problems.
We had to think about where the camera would need to be so
we didn’t cross the line from room to room, how to keep consistency of
lighting, movement, wallpaper and a myriad of things to help make the space
convincing. We even had a painting hanging on the wall creeping into shot in
separate rooms, on different sides of the camera frame to help make it seem the
same room. Everything was storyboarded and rehearsed beforehand and all the
shots worked out on a camcorder before the shoot. It also meant a lot of moving
furniture from one room to another which at 3 o’clock in the morning you can
probably do without but those are the joys on indie film making on a budget. It
is the attention to small details like having the end of the bed creeping into
shot even though you’re in another room that helps tie the space together and ‘sell’
that it’s all one big room.
Using multiple location to convincingly seem like one space
is not a new trick but it is a great one to have in your back pocket if you don’t
have the money to build a set. You will often see it used with exteriors of
buildings being shot at different locations to the interiors. The principle is
the same but you are just using several rooms to create one. It allows you to lose bits of a location that
do not look good while keeping the bits that look great and helps you create
the sense of a place that looks fantastic within your film world.
I hope this helps you with your film. Let me know.
Cheers
Craig
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)