12 Steps to Shooting, part 2 of 2
Penguin August 1st, 2007
Here’s part 1 of 12 steps to shooting.
- Shoot master shots. A master shot should cover all the action. Depending on how much movement is in your scene, you may need to have your camera pretty wide. Sometimes, it’ll be sufficient to do a medium-wide to cover all the action. You want to shoot a master shot because you want at least one good take. The weather may change or something may happen, and you may not have an opportunity to shoot coverage. At least you’ll have the scene, even if it doesn’t look the best.
- Call cut only when you have to. Let the camera roll a bit after the scene is “over”. You’ll be surprised at what you can capture on film. Sometimes, the best performances come when the actors think the cameras are off. Conversely, keep rolling even if you think the scene is messed up. There might be something salvageable.
- Shoot coverage. Now you have the master shot, shoot each individual actor. These should be medium-close or close ups of your actors. This should provide you ample footage to really tell the story and capture the emotion from your actors.
- Shoot cut-aways and reaction shots. These shouldn’t be full runs of the scene. Rather, they should be really short clips that you may need to cut to in order to piece your coverage together. It may be a shot of fingers tapping on the table, a handshake, different reactions from your actors, make sure that you capture enough variety that you can choose from different cuts during post.
- Shoot B-roll. Now that you’re done with all that, you can shoot your location. In many ways, this is similar to shooting cut-aways or reaction shots. But instead of using it to show something about the character, you’re using it to show something about your location.
That’s a wrap! Time for post, or editing.
-Penguin
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