Reenactment Shot Shoot- Quiet Riot

After our film shoot last weekend, I realized how important it is know your footage, actors, and location before shooting a shot as detail heavy as our recreation shot. I also learned that it is extremely difficult to find actors if you are not organized and ambitious. Despite all of our efforts we could not find enough actors to do the original shot we chose and had to change our shot at the very last minute, creating a source of stress within the group. I also learned that it is important to know upcoming events and activities dealing with your location to prevent conflicts in scheduling. Because we filmed in the commons for our original shot, we were unable to shoot there for the recreation shot due to a community activity that was taking place on our scheduled shooting day. It was also very difficult to film around the public and to capture the natural state of people with a  camera  present.

For the actual film shoot, I was the Director of Photography and we decided to use the Sony FS-100. I have not really used the camera before and it was much easier to achieve the look of the original shot by using picture profiles. Using profile pictures, allowed me to view the shot through several types of settings and help me achieve the perfect look for our recreation shot. It was also a great challenge to frame the shot the same as the original. I found it to be very beneficial to study the location of the actors in relation to their environment. I used physical attributes of the location, such as lines on the wall and staircases, to frame the shot within the camera.

As far as the directing was concerned, it worked the best to provide our actors with countdowns  for their actions and used verbal cues to move the actors forward in the shot. Using a countdown was very beneficial to our actors. In the end we got a shot that was almost identical to the first shot, concerning the physical and facial expressions of our actors. It was also very important that we used similar wardrobe choices and actors with similar physical features.

Overall,  I am really impressed with myself and my groups's ability to overcome the difficulties we faced during this project. I wished that our shot was much longer than it ended up being but I think we did an excellent job on our recreation shot. This was a very challenging experience but was a great learning experience and tons of fun.