During the production of our main film I have had the opportunity to develop these techniques further as well as incorporate some additional skills that I had acquired from photography. Some examples of these techniques and other camera-work skills can be seen below:
Here’s an interceptive pedestal shot. Much like a shot-reverse shot, this clip has been split either side of another clip, except the middle clip is not a camera-subject, it’s the beginning of the opening credits. I did not have access to an actual pedestal so slowly lowered the neck of the tripod, relying on the friction of it to slowly bring the camera down.
Here’s an example of me using Smith’s ‘Rule of Thirds’ to help create tension and show a relationship between the subjects in the shot. As you can also see from this shot, most of the film was very low-key. This dark, gloomy atmosphere adds to the verisimilitude of the scene and creates suspense as the viewer has to concentrate to accurately see what’s happening.
I considered the relationship between subjects in every shot, with all mise-en-scene (including actors) having some connection with each other; this concept relies on the use of ‘concrete’ and ‘imaginary’ lines. Below is an example of a concrete line, where real objects are shown at a particular perspective hook the viewer into the scene.
Here I considered how, in our society at least, people naturally look at things from left-to-right. We can see that this left-to-right tendency, as well as the given perspective we have of the keyboard and hands, makes the viewer look around the entire scene, making the most of this shot.
Below is an example of imaginary lines being used for effect. The most common imaginary lines used in films are lines of sight and lines of movement: for example, somebody looking towards a screen and somebody walking across a road; the path their eyes or body takes is the imaginary line. Shots where the imaginary lines are interrupted or are framed poorly disrupt the whole scene. For example, if somebody is walking across a road from left-to-right and you are using a static camera shot, you should have the man on the left and empty space on the right for them to move into. Here there are two main imaginary lines: the light from the screen and the line of movement the stalker makes as he stands up. Like in our ‘crossing a road’ example, I purposely planned to leave space for the stalker to walk into and for the screen light to shine toward.
Here’s an example of me using match on action to create a smooth, visual bridge that helps prevent the viewer from noticing the cuts between shots.
Of course, my video-editing skills also developed. Here are some examples of what I have learnt:
Here is a simple fade-to-black and fade-from-black editing transition I have used. For this particular shot I chose a short elapsed time for the effect to help build suspense.
Here is a ‘constant gain’ sound bridge (AKA sound transition) that allows our spooky, incidental music to be looped smoothly without the audience hearing the classical silent gap between the end and start of looped sounds.
You can see here that I have added another layer with low opacity on top of the Facebook screen recording. This additional layer was recorded and put on top of the other video to give the impression this is a point of view shot where the stalker can see his own reflection.
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