Tricky Shots

There were a number of difficult shots used in our film, I will evaluate them in chronological order.

The first difficult shot we undertook was a focus shift. In this shot, the back of the photograph and Damian's face are both in the shot. We wanted to perform a shift of focus from the back of the photograph to Damian's face. This was difficult because we had to do the shot handheld due to the tripod not being small enough to get a low enough angle on Damian as he sat on the bed. Not only this, but it took us several attempts until we got the shift in focus just right.

The second shot that was tricky to shoot was the track in, zoom out shot (trombone shot) we used as a transitional shot for Damian's flashbacks. We wanted to create a sense of confusion and portray Damian's mindset as being hectic with the images on screen, so we thought this shot would provide just that. Again, we had to film this handheld when tracking in while simultaneously using the zoom function on the camera, but after a few practice shots we were able to get one that looked good.

Another tricky shot to film was the quick pan seen in a flashback of Damian and Lily arguing. In this shot, Damian pushes Lily into the wall, and to convey the shock and violence in this scene, we thought that a quick pan would get the appropriate response from the audience. It was difficult to shoot this because quite a few times the pan speed was out of sync with the push, we'd either pan too fast or slow, but we managed to get a perfect pan after a several attempts.

Our next difficult shot was The dissolve of Lily, showing her fading away. This was to represent Damian's realisation that Lily was in fact dead and that he had killed her. In this shot we had to make sure that the camera remained perfectly still, and that Damian didn't move as to avoid a 'jump' or 'glitch' in the scene.

The most difficult scene to shoot was the fight scene where Damian kills Lily. We wanted to make this scene look as real possible in order to shock the audience. We used fake blood on Lily, and actually used contact in some of the shots, an example is when Damian throws Lily to the ground. To make the punches look real we shot them in slow motion and then sped them up and added sound effects with editing. We had to shoot most of this scene handheld because of the low angles, for example the shot where the audience sees Damian punching downwards from above.

The last tricky shot we undertook was the hanging scene. This was difficult because we wanted to avoid hurting the actor but achieve a realistic looking scene. The technique we ended up going with was a shot of Damian's upper body tying the noose to the bar, and then another two quick shots of him kicking the chair over and then his feet shaking before coming to a stop to show him dying. This was difficult because the actor had to suspend himself in the air for just long enough in order for the shot to be filmed.