I am learning so much in that class. And also it's a lot of fun. The problem is school doesn't wait for me to learn it before moving on.
In class for several weeks we were working on developing story ideas for scenes that we would shoot later in the semester. It was a challenging and often frustrating exercise. The job of the director is to tell the story. In order to do that you have to know what the story is and you have to be able to articulate it very clearly and very concisely. You should also be able to say why you're telling the story. What's the point and what do you believe about it. And we would practice this with these stories we were developing in class. I found it really difficult because we were doing stories that all started with an original set of ideas that Ian (a classmate) came up with. So it was hard to say what I believed about it because for a while I didn't believe anything.
But we would just do it over and over and over. Once upon a time there was a young woman who is returning to school after attending the funeral of her beloved uncle, etc etc. And I would paint myself into a corner and we'd back up and do it again. Always it was what is happening? What are they doing? How do we know this or that? Until eventually I came to believe something about it.
What was reassuring about the whole process was that the more Jan would dig and push and prod us about it the more I would practice answering those questions for Take Out while it was someone else's turn to answer those questions in class. And I had good answers. I knew what it was about and I knew why I wanted to tell it. And I could use all that figuring out to talk to the actors about it. Which I did and I think they all were with me trying to tell the same story.
I shot Take Out over two days during spring break which was the midway point of the semester. We've had a couple of classes since then. Tonight we had actors in class. Not for the first time, we've been practicing how to audition people using these same folks. And we took 2 of them and Jan started blocking the scene that was the inspiration for all the other scenes that we wrote. And we went back not to the script, but to the story. And it suddenly became really obvious that how you tell the story informs how you'll need to shoot it. Up until today we had never really talked much about camera placement and lens choices and stuff like that. In fact we didn't really today even. It wasn't so much at this line use a 20mm lens, and at this line use a 100mm lens. It was more if you start your story Once upon a time there was a young woman... then you want to chose a camera set up that makes the audience feel like they're with her. If you start Once upon a time there was a young man... then you choose set ups that make you feel close to him and far from her. Basically every sentence in the Once upon a time version needs to be seen when you shoot it.
I never wrote down the Once upon a time version of Take Out, though I was thinking a lot about Jan's class when I was writing that script. Now I wish I had. Or wish I could right now and then reshoot it. Not that I think what I shot is bad, but that I fear if I did write the Once upon a time and then mark that up I wouldn't necessarily find that I had shot something for every sentence. Maybe I should try it anyway though so that in editing I keep myself focused on the story I'm trying to tell.
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