Assignment 5 – Scene Recreation

For this assignment we were tasked with recreating a short scene from a film as closely as possible, down to location, acting, lighting and sound, whilst ensuring the scene is identical in terms of framing,camera positioning, script, shot number/length and scene length. After our first production meeting we settled on the naming scene from Reservoir Dogs and chose our roles. Having already worked as a camera man and director on previous assignments, I settled for sound.

The Crew

Director – Arielle Alverez                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                Producer – Matt Emons                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    Camera Operator – Paulina Janukowicz                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           Sound Operator – Karl Cross

We used Facebook to co-ordinate and plan, as well as cast our actors, which was one of our biggest hurdles, given the number of actor’s in the scene.  During another production meeting, we managed to break the scene down in terms of shots and other requirements such as costume, location, etc. Aside from casting, location would be our biggest pre-production headache as we required a fairly large open space to film in and it was not until our production meeting with David that we were able to secure a spot in one of the television studios. The space was not ideal but with the deadline closing in we decided it was the best possible option. With location handled, we sourced what few costumes we needed through charity shops, as well as asking our actors to wear anything that even vaguely matched their on-screen counterparts.

The Set-up: Getting ready to shoot

We arrived at ten in the morning to begin setting up before our actors arrived, but found that the studio was in somewhat of a state, which set us back by a good half-hour, meaning that by the time our actors started to trickle in, we were still setting up. As boom operator, there was little for me to do at this point aside from helping to set-up the equipment and greet the actors. However, with a little help we were able to get everything ready for our first string of shots, beginning with the close-ups.

Lighting Mr Brown

We used a three-point lighting set-up throughout the shoot and continually adjusted the set-up throughout in an attempt to mimic the lighting in the scene, however this proved to be more difficult than we had initially imagined as the original scene heavily utilises natural light whereas our set was entirely closed off. Adding in our relative inexperience with the lights, we (in my opinion) heavily over-lit our subjects in several shots with a fairly hard light. I believe this may have been because our strongest light was also our fill light, rather than our key light and was quite close to the  subjects in certain shots.  As shooting continued, time began to become an issue. A certain line from Mike Figgis’s  Digital Film-Making  seemed scarily appropriate at that moment; “It’s only the last hour into a four hour shoot that people begin to realise they’re in trouble.” We had just less than an hour left, with still quite a bit to film as well as pack away our equipment. It was only by all pulling together that we were able to quickly run through the last shots.

The Crew (Minus producer)

Post-production proved to be equally fraught with difficulty, largely due to conflicting schedules. Editing was very much a piecemeal process though the fact that we had decided to edit as a group gave us some leeway, as well as the fact that our job was to simply copy pre-existing work, rather than make our own artistic decisions. Below is the finished product, as well as the original scene itself.