Studio Shoot - First Meetings

by Tarald K. Tvedt 1:17 pm 0 comments Cinematography Director of Photography Professional Toolkit Research Studio Shoot Year 2

Our brief and first couple of meetings - what worked , what didn't

Thus begins pre-production. We are to make a 3-5 minute short film, using only 5 words of dialouge, and a photograph for inspiration. The photograph will be our inspiration for the film and should spark some sort of narrative. These are the photgraphs we were given:

Blind Twins (1980) by Jane Evelyn Atwood, King and Queen (1970) by Diane Arbus, Untitled 1997 by Hannah Starkey, and Untitled 1962 by Ralph Eugene Meatyard. 

Sadly I was ill in bed on the day of the brief, but I kept in contact with my group over text, where we discussed possible ideas and narratives to explore. As a group we decided that we preferred "King and Queen", and "Untitled 1997", and these were the images we wanted to use as inspiration. 

"King and Queen" by Diane Arbus

"Untitled 1997" by Hannah Starkey

As I was ill the day of the brief, I sadly lost out on a lot of the discussion around the different ideas and so on, but when the idea did reach me, the group had arrived at a dystopian narrative where food and essentials are limited and scarce. I found this to be a really interesting concept, that can birth numerous narratives, and I was looking forward to our first meeting the day after. 

During this meeting we didn't get very far. A lot of people had a lot of ideas, and a lot of people felt very strongly that their idea was superior, this lead to a lot of discussion without anything actually being decided. We did agree that we liked the slightly dystopian setting with scarce essentials, but we had a lot of different ideas about how to show this. We discussed everything from mannequins, tadpole soup, shots of water, and insanity, but ultimately we had to scrap most of it because of our limited budget. We finished our meeting with a lot of half baked ideas and no set sketches, as our set designer was ill. This in turn made it very difficult for me to start designing visuals, as I had no idea what our restrictions and limitations were. In the end Preston (Assistant Director) and Natalie (Director) sat down and created a narrative that was practical and creative. Natalie wrote a rough draft of the script which she shared with the group, and after minor changes we decided to make this our film. 

A world were words are a money, and when you run out of words you die. One of our main characters would have an illness that would force them to almost run out of credits (as we could only use 5 words), and the film being centered around their relationship and their final days together. 

After this we could finally start designing the set, and working on our storyboard. I had some creative input into the creation of the set, and where our light sources would be, but other than that I focused on creating the feel for the film in cooperation with Natalie and Preston. 

-TJ