Shot list, storyboards and attempting a tricky shot!

I met with Aisling and Gery today to discuss the shot list and storyboards. I had some ideas for shots myself and I knew Aisling would too, as she was pretty well organized in that department on the last film.

Whilst I was on location shooting my own film over the past week, Gery had drawn storyboards for the first act of the film, which was a great help on two fronts – (a) storyboards are a very clear, illustrated way to help understand the shot grammar and (b) I simply can’t draw them!

I had an idea recently for a particular pair of shots that would involve some camera trickery and I was looking forward to putting it out there to the girls at the meeting to see what they thought. I saw a little known modern western from the 1990s about a year ago called Lone Star (1996). It used an interesting device to take the story into flashbacks that relied on camera movement and hidden cuts instead of the usual ‘narrated cut’ or ‘dissolves’. In one scene for example, part of a wall in a bar is used to block the frame so it appears that an unbroken panning shot takes the audience into a flashback that happened at the same location 30 years previously. In another scene the camera tilts up from a character’s face to a night sky, which then acts as an edit point to begin a new shot that tilts down to the same character when she was much younger. Again, the effect is that one continuous shot takes us into the past.

There is a scene in Colour Blind in which the father in the story takes down a wind chime from a hook that belongs to his daughter and it pains him because she is moving out. My idea is to film the wind chime moving downwards and then continue the shot passed it, stopping at a black object that completely fills the frame. Then at a later stage we would film the reverse shot, starting in black, and then tracking the same wind chime passing into a young girl’s hand. The desired effect in the edit will be to give the impression that the wind chime passes directly from its hook into a memory of when he first gave her the chime in one continuous fluid movement. I just hope Aisling and Gery like the idea and that it works.