Exercise: Shooting a Short Sequence - the alcoholic

This exercise was to shoot a short film as though I am an alcoholic:

First off - visualise the following sequence

• you look around your empty room
• nothing interests you
• you notice a bottle
• you hold the bottle and unscrew the lid
• something attracts your attention, you look round
• nothing happens
• you look back at the bottle and pour yourself a drink.

It sounded easy until I started!

I decided not to look at other students work before I started in case it influenced my way of thinking too much. That might have been a mistake. As I have looked at their sequences since and seen what I should have done! Oh well - it's all part of the learning!

We had to sketch out some basic storyboards

 1. my knees and hand on my knees, in an empty room. Note bare floorboards.

 2. There are curtains pinned up over the windows. So the room is dark, but there is a stream of light coming through into the empty room.

 3. Pan slowly across the room. Close up of floorboards as though counting time. Boredom.

 4. Follow the light to the other side of the room. Note v. empty room.

5. I'm not sure here what happens to the light. Camera moves up to the mantelpiece where there is a bottle of wine.
Reach over to get it.

6. Close up. You unscrew the lid.

 7. Something attracts your attention.

What? a bee buzzing agains the window?
the phone ringing?
it stops.










8. You pour a drink.
















This was much harder to shoot than I had expected. Very difficult to get the footage looking good. A combination of my lack of ability and technical issues!

1) I think I got a little bit hung up on the 'empty' room. I cleared out the railway carriage to shoot it, as this is the only relatively empty room in the place. Luckily it was  a bright sunny day, so I could get the lovely stripe of light coming in - though of course it makes a stripe through the door not the window! But to get the stripe being effective, I had to blacken all the windows which meant that the filming was problematic in places.

2) Getting the first image as a subjective view of me in the room meant pointing the camera over my shoulder on a very wobbly tripod in a very small space. This took a few takes, and I'm still not sure that it gives a subjective view.

3) The shot where I pan across the floorboards wasn't as effective as I had envisaged it would be! Perhaps i should have added a sound effect of a clock ticking or something to show time passing slowly.

4) When I filmed the light coming up the other side, the light did something quite beautiful though unintentional, in that the wall lit up as the shot approached the alcohol.

5) Timing. I had no idea how long to make the shots and ended up cutting whole shots in half or more, and speeding others up, as I had over estimated how long it should be!

6) the bottle of wine took several takes. I zoomed in too close at first. Even now I don't think the zoom works.

7) 'something catches your attention'. I wasn't sure what it was going to be that caught my attention and had decided to leave it up to the moment to decide. Sadly there was no bee as I had crazily hoped, and the ringing of the phone didn't feel quite right. My character as becoming a lonely person in an extremely empty house. The place felt as though someone had left, or died even, so I picked something up that I did actually find on the floor and chose that to be the thing that attracted attention  - a small heart wedged in the mantelpiece. This is undoubtedly NOT what a filmmaker is meant to do! Learning point - planning is v. important! I also added a final shot with the character holding the heart while drinking. (also not sure that was a good idea).

Technical problems:
1) the LIGHT!
2) tripod. too unstable, and fiddly to use.
3) blurring of the camera. Is this the camera or is this me?

Here is the video: 

http://vimeo.com/39067562

Other people's work:
I've managed to look at Paul's, Margaret's, Vagg311's and Richards sequences.
I especially like the way Paul & Vagg311 bring in the character of the alcholic - the shaking hands and quick, unstable moves. I like Paul's rushed panning around of the room before he focuses on the drink. I found Richard's phone ringing - and not being answered - very effective, and quite unnerving. I was impressed with the way everyone stuck so well to their storyboards.