Interesting and helpful research - After Arcadia

After our group discussion today, I was reminded of some rather interesting quotes and information that I had come across early in the week from my research.

With the prospect of our shoot day being rather cloudy it reminded me of a quote from cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond (Deliverance) from the book More Contemporary Cinematographers on Their Art by Pauline B. Rogers. Which I had been reading because of the connection with director John Boorman who Joe has listed as one of his main influences from his 1968 film Hell in the Pacific. And from a cinematographers standpoint I thought that Deliverance (1972, dir. John Boorman) was an interesting piece because of it’s cinematography within a natural environment.

“We were very lucky with the weather” he adds. “The sky was cloudy most of the time.” For Zsigmond, this was the simplest way to shoot the picture. He didn’t have to wait for the sun and the lighting matched all day. (Rogers, 2000:179)

Looking at the forecast for our shoot day it is due to be very cloudy and a strong possibility that we might have 100% cloud cover, which would be great for matching up the lighting, though I’ve still got a Sunbouncer and a large reflector booked out for the shoot day just in case the forecast is wrong. This quote really stuck with me because even though you expect professional cinematographers to be meticulous with their attention to detail in regards to lighting especially it seems that even the professionals get lucky in regards to lighting and weather when shooting outdoors and can concentrate more on all the shots they need.

After the group discussion when everyone seemed to be really keen on the idea of shooting a montage scene I also remember a couple of quotes from two books I’d been researching this week, the first is the same book as mentioned above and on the same page as the previous quote.

“The challenge was how to make the trip down the river exciting,” Zsigmond says. “We shot different tests on the river, like shooting from boat to boat. We also tried different angles, different camera moves. (Rogers, 2000:179)

This made me think that I myself should walk around the area once on location to find interesting and believable areas where I can portray our character traveling across land in the montage for the film; though because of our time constraints this might have to just be done by framing scenes just in the camera without our actor playing out each scene as we have an already very tight shooting schedule and too long spent on this will see our light source soon fading fast. I will look to envisage the montage shots as we walk through the shooting location and whilst I’m setting up the user preferences in the camera before shooting commences.

The other quote that came to mind after our group meeting was from the book Cinematography: Theory & Practice by Blain Brown. I had been reading this early in the week as it looked like it might be a good source of information for those looking to develop themselves as upcoming Cinematographers.

Montage is generally only useful for short sequence in narrative storytelling. It can be useful informational work such as documentaries or industrials but most often just for short sequences to establish a mood or give an overall impression of a process or situation. (Brown, 2002:27)

This I thought was a very interesting quote and one that was key in my decision in looking to create a montage scene on our shoot day as looking to establish our character and his setting and situation is actually really key to the overall aspect of the short film project as a whole. And the reference that montages are prominent in documentaries just adds to my overall vision of the film as my idea initially was to have this film have a realistic feel to it and hopefully the inclusion of a montage would subconsciously have that effect on the viewers mind, that the film would seem more believable and feel very realistic.

There was another quote from earlier in the same book that made me think about a certain shot in the opening scene of ‘After Arcadia’ the quote is in reference to Hitchcock’s Rule, that was actually brought up in a recent morning session with Andy James after the screen of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1948 film Rope.

The size of an object in the frame should equal its importance in the story at the moment. (Brown, 2002:25)

This made me really think about one of our scheduled scenes for the shoot day when our character is speaking directly into a mirror; as the mirror is actually a really important object and matter in the film, we could try and apply this rule to our film and have a very close up of the mirror as our character is speaking to it as at this point the mirror is extremely important to the film; and also I have an idea for the montage, so that at the end of the montage our character can find an object that signals previous human existence which again is a massive part of the idea behind ‘After Arcadia’.