Seminar 5 - Directing Exercise

In this week's seminar we looked at the role of a director and how to professionally handle shoots with actors and locations. We were in the workstation for this seminar and we started out by being given a script that we had never seen before and asked to read through it in our production groups. Then we were told that the producer and director from our group would be taking the role of the actors whilst the rest of the production team would be doing the directing. This meant myself and Luke, the post-production team, could be directly involved in the pre-production side of filming a drama piece, and have more of a say and get our contributions across. This exercise was also to allow the whole group, regardless of role, to understand the importance of being clear with your ideas to the actors to get them to show exactly what you want from your script. We were told we could change the script in anyway we wanted to make it more interesting or better suited for the environment we were working in. Myself and Luke decided to change a few things in it, to make it into a more comedic and less dry script.

After editing the script, we started to explain to Ellen and Chris (who were the actors we were using) what we wanted them to do, where we wanted them to move and how they should deliver certain lines. After doing this preliminary briefing, we started doing a few run-through's so they would be comfortable reading the lines and knowing when to speak. Finally we directed the last member of our group Matt, the cinematographer, as to where we wanted him to be filming the scene and collaborated with him, seeing what he thought was best.

Set up for filming

Filming the scene

This seminar has been very useful as it as allowed me as an editor, to see what has to go into being a director as well as being clear on my own ideas whilst listening to others. The group has benefited from this as a whole as it allowed the director and producer to experience first hand what it is like to be an actor, which will hopefully reflect and make it easier for all of us to deal with actors when using them in our films.