This month’s article looks at the production process: it’s all about doing it – bringing the preproduction plans together. The great British filmmaker, Alfred Hitchcock, said: “For me, the cinema is not a slice of life but a piece of cake.” With this analogy in mind, we can consider what needs to be done next; throwing the ingredients into the bowl and mixing it up! Some of the ingredients will have been prepped during the preproduction stage, but there are still some that need to be added: equipment check, lighting and logging.

Equipment check
While you will have looked at your equipment during the preproduction, it’s worth stressing here that before you shoot (especially if you are shooting outside) that you check that all batteries for the equipment are fully charged, you have all the MiniDV tapes you need and that (if possible) you have spares. Lots of film shoots have floundered when, having got all set up to shoot, a vital component is missing, or the power runs out mid-scene. Be professional and be prepared.

Lighting
A consideration of lighting is one of the factors that will begin to lift your work from the realm of the amateur who just films weddings and christenings, and into the zone of the professional. The French painter Manet was in no doubt as to what’s most important: “The principal person in a picture is light.” The lights you use in a production can be anything from professional film lights to an angle-poise lamp. However, what’s more important than the type of light is the consideration of light. In filmmaking, the common lighting set-up is to use between one and three lights:

Light 1 (Main Light) Placed so as to illuminate the front of the subject. This light flattens the shadows on the object.

Light 2 (Fill Light) This light fills in the shadows created by the main light and starts to give the subject shape.

Light 3 (Back Light) This is added behind the subject and is used to separate the subject from the background.

Not all lighting is done with actual lamps, which is why you’ll often see, mainly in larger productions, the use of large white plastic reflectors to create ‘fill light’ in the scene. The Dogme95 manifesto offers an alternative slant on lighting (and the whole of the film production process). When using film (eg 35mm, Super8), adding lots of additional lighting is essential. The advance of technology has changed this dynamic. The introduction of video (eg Digital Video, VHS) empowers the filmmaker with the ability to shoot good quality footage in poorly lit conditions. A filmmaker using such technology can be less static in their direction of the action, so if the scene has two people having an argument, and an actor improvises and decides to storm out (as may be considered natural), the camera can easily follow the action without too much concern about the change in lighting conditions.

This doesn’t mean that a filmmaker can abandon any consideration for lighting, as the principles still apply if using natural lighting (in other words, the lighting you’d expect to find in the area you’re filming in), so the positioning of the camera and the subject of a scene must still be carefully thought out. It’s also important to consider the quality of light that your scene is using: indoor bulbs give a yellow tint to footage shot under their glow, strip lights add a pale green hue, scenes filmed outside in the morning light will have a pale blue feel, while those produced in the evening will be darker – you may not see these subtle differences, but the camera will. These changes are important if you’re planning to move from once scene to the next, rearranging to follow on from each other as a continuous scene. It’s also a consideration for the mood – the pale green hue of a striplight may not suit a scene intended to be a bedroom.

Logging footage
The process of shooting your film will produce lots of footage, probably not in narrative order and with multiple takes and spread across several MiniDV tapes. To manage the shoot effectively so that the footage is accessible to you, the process of logging footage should be adopted. It’s preferable for you (or another person) to do this as you’re shooting. As well as ensuring you know what’s been shot and where it can be found, this is important when producing films to be edited on a PC, as it enables you to batch-capture all the footage and make the process of getting from the MiniDV tape onto your PC’s hard drive much easier. Furthermore, it’s very important that, prior to filming, you ‘stripe’ the MiniDV tapes you’ll be using. This involves simply putting the tape into your camera and pressing ‘record’, then leaving it to record anything until the tape has ended. This puts a continuous timecode track on the tape all the way through.

If you don’t take the time to stripe your tapes, you may find that the timecode will re-start at zero each time you record a scene. When compiling the log, technology can be used to help you in this process; a laptop or PDA on-set with you is the prefect place to record this information. If you’re shooting in your own house, your PC could be used (as we’re making a pop video, any potential pollution to the soundtrack from the PC’s fan is not such a problem). Furthermore, if you use a spreadsheet to store this information, you’ll find it far easier to order and search for shots and data when you come to edit. We used OpenOffice.org (free to download from here to record the information. The log is a list of all the shots taken, and it should include the following:

Tape number You may require more than one MiniDV tape.

Shot number This figure comes from the storyboard you’ve already created (you have done that haven't you?)

Timecode start/stop This is the start and stop time of the shot you’ve just recorded, and should appear in the viewfinder or screen of the camera you’re using. If it doesn’t, you should consult your manual.

Description This is about what happens in the shot, to allow you to identify each shot, especially if something happened during shooting that isn’t on the storyboard.

Take number This is the version number of the shot, which is important as you may have done several takes before getting it right.

Comments This records whether you, as the director, felt that the shot was good or not. This judgement will help you decide which takes/shots to use in the final edit.

The view from the director’s chair
Production can be very difficult – you may have an idea as to how the scene should look, but become frustrated with the reality of the scene. If this is the case, you may decide to take the Stanley Kubrick point of view and re-take the scene until you’re happy with the final product (the infamous director once demanded 127 takes from Shelley Duvall in a scene for ‘The Shining’). Another route is to follow the path of Mike Leigh (director of the Oscar-nominated ‘Secrets & Lies’) who favours a more improvised approach. Either way, at the end of the production stage, you should have one or more MiniDV tapes containing the expertly-lit raw footage of your music masterpiece-to-be.

A fiming log details the contents of the MiniDV tapes you’ve filled, and it’s this output from all of your hard work that we’ll be taking into the more complex postproduction stage next month.