"Pre Vis" shoot day (Recce)

An early pre visualisation shoot day was organised after receiving our first draft to move things forwards quickly. Having only just having the first draft of the script before we went to the location i did not really have the appropriate time to conjure up a shot list/storyboard as i needed to understand the emotion and feeling of the script first to decide how i would like to approach this visually and also this would be my first time seeing the location having not had a recce yet so i felt somewhat unprepared. After discussion with the director and producer, we agreed that this would be more of a recce day and a chance for the crew to go the location, decide if the location was appropriate for the story, help for creative vision with the lighting and camera options for the shoot at the location and play through the initial script to see if the plot and character progression could work.

The first thing that i wanted to make sure we sorted out once at the location was the specific areas of the house we would and could use, so i could aim my attention directly towards these when focusing on framing, movement, composition and just generally understanding the space we have to work with.

The first main space was the living room (where the scenes with Thea and Perlah take place)

The second main space would be "Yanna's Bedroom"

The third and fourth spaces were not main spaces but were found to be useful for the script. That being the Staircase and Kitchen/Diner. 

From this recce i was able to analyse each of these spaces for their potential with visual imagery in our film. We took Tamara's 7D with us and working the our director Al we went through the script and shot the first draft script that we had. Though this will definitely not be our pre visualisation it gives me and the other members of crew a fantastic idea of how we could potentially use the space. We tried a variety of angles, abiding by the rule of thirds, experimenting with symmetry and though only shooting photographs we had an attempt at looking how movement could work to the advantage of the script.

Once the final draft of the script is complete i will be referring to the photographic video that is being edited together to build the storyboard and shot list. Actually getting my hands on with camera in the location provided some fantastic inspiration and sparked creativity for the visuals that we can use.

What i learnt from this day from a DOP point of view is that first of all we definitely do need to progress the script and think more intelligently how we are going to go about the death of Yanna. There are certain limitations that i may have to work around in order to provide the film with a realism that the audience will take in, such as not actually showing Thea's pregnant stomach skin. Not having that much budget means that in order to sell the illusion of a non pregnant woman being pregnant we want to avoid seeing the stomach itself unless it is under clothing so i was trying to think of angles to make this work. Also letting the audience in on a clue that Yanna's death is imminent (suggested by the director) such as showing a halo above her in certain scenes. We noticed that there are times when we could compose the shot so a light is above her head and this may be initially missed by an audience and upon second viewing would speak strongly realising what this symbolism meant. When Yanna does die on her bed i saw that it was possible, though the technicalities of this would have to be figured out, to shoot from a god's view perspective, implying the ghost of herself is looking down on her own body and creating again strong visual imagery.

The next step from here is to talk closely with the director and scriptwriter to move the script along with our input and talk about how we would like to style this film visually, knowing the location that we could potentially be shooting in. I will start to create a mood board of images from films, pictures and paintings, keeping adding to this as time goes on.