TheLastQuestBlog

When Shakespeare wrote his plays he left out descriptions of costume, actions and even settings. This is why Shakespeare’s works can be set at anytime or place and the characters can be dressed in whatever fashion the production deems acceptable. When being taught screenwriting it is much the same. You only give the most essential of information. The reason for this is to leave the interpretation of what is happening in the script up to the director. The director needs to create their own images associated with the story that the script reflects. This is what directors usually mean when they reference the word “Vision” when talking about a film. So how does the director translate their vision into actual shots that the Cinematographer and crew know how to set up for?

A shot list.

This is a list of the shots that need to be captured in a particular location. Each shot should include shot framing, actor’s actions and any camera movements in the shot. A good shot list is like gold for all the people behind the camera. It is the blueprint for all production work.

Here is the shot list for the animatic of The Hot Dog Cycle:

Our next blog post will be watching our animatic.

Tags: Behind the Scenes, Brad, Scene 1, The Hot Dog Cycle

On Tuesday March 3rd Morgan and I will be speaking in front of a class full of college students at Seattle Central Community College about film making. In an attempt to make the experience as valuable as possible we are posting a series of blog posts detailing how we planed and executed a scene from The Hot Dog Cycle.

So where do you start? Well first comes the idea. The idea is meaningless without getting that idea into some kind of understandable form for people you are going to work with. This is not true of all forms of media making.This only applies to forms that resemble traditional narrative story telling . One thing you will learn quickly while making a narrative is that, it is one of the most resource intensive of all media forms.

So how do you get the idea down? Well for The Hot Dog Cycle, Morgan decided to follow a very traditional form… the script. He went through several drafts but really what you are going to read here is pretty close to what he first wrote down. This is a good place to start when analyzing any film, because usually the script is where the idea becomes a much more tangible and translatable artifact.

Here are the first three pages from the final shooting script for The Hot Dog Cycle:

This script was written using the free software Celtx.

So in the next post we will talk see our shot list.

Tags: Behind the Scenes, Brad, Scene 1, The Hot Dog Cycle