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THE MOVIE

MAKING
MARATHON
DIRECTING TIPS &
TECHNIQUES

By Elisabeth Benfey
February 2, 2007
Shooting your short film: a step-by-step
approach to designing a scene

Below is a step-by-step guide that is designed to help you identify and


successfully managed the tasks a director must accomplish before, and
during the shoot. I tried to address the particular challenge of
shooting a short movie with a non-professional cast and crew on a tight
schedule.

You will also find here practical tools that will help you to visualize
the design of your scene, communicate your creative choices to your
cast and crew, and organize your footage prior to editing. Those visual
tools include examples of floor plans, storyboards, marked script, shot
list, and a printable log sheet. The sources for this section of our
website (books and links materials) can be found at the end of this
document.

Challenges you will face as a director–and


solutions
A short film (5-12 minutes long) can contain two, maybe three main
dramatic scenes. As a director, you start with a screenplay –words on a
page. How do you transform the text into images with meaning? How do
you make the characters on the page come to life on screen?

This process should not take place at the last minute, on the set, when
constant demands on your attention risk to derail the shoot. You may
have the time to work with your actors and to rehearse the key scenes
with them; you may be able to have access to your location hours before
you start shooting, but be aware that those are ideal circumstances.
You must consider the possibility (the strong likelihood), that you
will not have that luxury. In other words, you need a PLAN, which will
keep you on track, confident, and available for your actors and your
crew on the set.

Although he is the hub at the creative process, the one who provides
and carries out a vision, the director must learn to use the ideas and
talents available to him on the set. Therefore your plan must also be
flexible enough to let the creative energy flow between you and your
collaborators (cast and crew) during the shoot. Respecting the balance
between adequate preparation before the shoot, and open collaboration
during filming, is the secret to creating a rich, complex, memorable
movie.

Acknowledgments
The following material is based in great part on Nick Proferes’ book:
FILM DIRECTING FUNDAMENTALS: FROM SCRIPT TO SCREEN (Focal Press).
Nick
was one of the teachers who influenced me the most when I was in Film
School at Columbia. His short book is full of insightful comments, and
offers a clear, succinct overview of what an aspiring director needs to
know to shoot a short film. If you only buy one book on directing, buy
this one! At the end of this document, you will also find a list of
reading materials, and links on directing short films, directing
actors, and editing your movie. I will add more materials (about
directing actors, editing, etc.), as we get closer to the MMM event.

PREPARING THE SHOOTING PLAN

I- ANALYZING THE (SHORT) SCREENPLAY


A scene that has not been thoroughly examined by the director before
the shoot will always feel superficial and flat. Your first duty, as a
director, is to familiarize yourself with the screenplay, particularly
the dramatic scenes (meaning the ones that advance the narrative) in
the script. You should count on spending a few hours alone with pencil
and script. What will you be doing?

1) Read each dramatic scene through by yourself


Do not force this process. It is Okay if you do not come up with
anything concrete yet. The script is making an impression on you. You
have a sense of pace, maybe, or of the mood of the piece. Let yourself
daydream. Let the images forming in your head guide the creative
process. What do you SEE in your mind’s eye when you read? Are specific
moments emerging as particularly strong and clear? Do you see
characters moving in space? What are they doing? Can you see a gesture,
a specific prop that will play a key function in the scene? Can you
think of specific locations at your disposal that would work for the
scene? For instance, if you are shooting a scene where two people are
breaking up -one is packing, the other is following her- you could
visualize the scene as some sort of chase from room to room. In this
case, do you have access to an apartment, or a house that has
communicating doors, rooms that open onto other rooms, or hallways,
etc. which would allow you to choreograph the scene?
2) Break the scene into beats
What is a Beat?
Writers, actors, directors all use beats, but the word is used with a
slightly different meaning by each. For our purposes, we will focus on
acting beats, and of course, on directing beats, which we will call
dramatic beats.
An acting beat is a unit of action committed by a character. To
reprimand is an acting beat. Each beat takes place after another beat.
The next actor’s beat starts when there is a change in action of the
character they are playing. Let’s take, for instance, two lovers who
had an argument. In our scene, the man (character A), hoping to make up
with his girlfriend (character B), shows up at her doorstep. Character
A comes into the scene wanting “to get his foot in the door”. The
second beat could be, “to open his heart”, the third, “to put himself
in her shoes”, etc. There can be hundreds of actor’s beats in one
scene.

What is an action?
Characters perform actions to get what they want (a “want” is also
called an objective). They never take their eyes off the prize. A
character performs one action at a time. (To ring the door bell; To
peek inside; To get a foot in the door, etc.) Always choose a verb to
describe the action, which is in the “now” and contains the immediate
intent of the character in the moment (ex. To stop him)

The director’s beats


Although directors must obviously be aware of the actor’s beats in the
script, his job is to divide the script into larger dramatic blocks, to
indicate when the narrative significantly shifts, or progresses in a
different direction. For the director, a beat is like a paragraph in
prose. It is a unit containing one overriding idea. It encompasses
several acting beats. For instance, in the example above, all the
acting beats could be included in a directing beat we could call “to
get in”. The next directing beat could be “to ask for/to refuse
forgiveness”, the next could be “to argue”, etc.

Once you have identified your directing beats (let’s just call them
beats from now on), take a pencil and physically draw lines to separate
one beat from another. Now look at the pages of your script. Each scene
(let’s say a two-pages scene, the most common length in a short script)
will be divided into clear dramatic paragraphs, separated by a
horizontal line. Now write, at the beginning of each paragraph, its
title: “To get in” would be the title of the first paragraph.

Function of the beats


There are two main reasons why you will want to break down each scene
into beats. The first one is purely practical: smaller sections of the
script are easier to work on in detail with your actors and easier to
rehearse and record when you are on the set with cast and crew. The
second reason, and the most important one, is that identifying the
beats of each scene will help you design your scene.

II- DESIGNING THE SCENE


You are still at home, alone with your script. You have divided each
dramatic scene into beats, which appear on the page as paragraphs. Each
paragraph now has a title that is simple and clear enough to give you a
sense of the main action the characters are involved in.

The beats -dramatic paragraphs in the script- will now be used to


render the text into spatial paragraph on the set. The beats will help
you not only stage, or “block” the actors on the set. They will also
allow you to determine your choices for camera placement.

Designing=Blocking+Camera placement
Please remember that designing a scene is a rigorous, TWO step process.
Do not rush it! First, you must stage, or “block” the movements of
your actors (A). The blocking must spatially reflect what is happening
dramatically between the characters in the scene.
Once the movements of your actors is clear -and only then, should you
think about introducing the camera and setting up your shots (B).

A- Blocking (or staging) the actors


Ideally, you should save time to rehearse the key dramatic scenes of
your movie with your actors on location. This is not, even on
professional shoots, often going to be the case. Given the tight
schedule of the MMM, you will probably have time to work with them on
the set only moments before shooting. Again, prepare yourself ahead of
time. You will probably need to adjust (and here is where flexibility
comes in) the blocking once you are on location with your actors, in
function of the real space at your disposal, and of the suggestions and
dramatic choices they make during the quick rehearsal on the set.

Blocking must accomplish at least one of the following jobs


1-Capture the action.
What is going on between the characters? What are the circumstances?
What do they want? What are they doing to get what they want? No
movement of the actors should be arbitrary. You must justify the
motivation for the movement of the actors. Your blocking of the scene
can never be arbitrary. The choices you make must clarify the dramatic
moment that is unfolding. Drama is told through the actions of the
characters. Their actions must be conveyed clearly, and unambiguously
to the audience in order for them to understand what is happening in
the scene.

2-Make physical what is intellectual or mental (allow the audience to


get into the head of the character).
Where should you position the actors to accurately translate the
dramatic units of the scene? How can you make the essence of the
moment more palpable? When they start arguing, it makes sense for one
of the characters to stand up and move away to the kitchen. After they
move to the kitchen, the second character may follow. Would it make
sense to position one of the people behind the table, creating a physical
barrier between the two characters as they argue. The separation
visually clarifies their attitudes toward each other for the audience
by heightening the physical distance between them between them.

3-Create or Resolve separation


There are only main two staging patterns. The characters are separated
and come together; the characters are together at first, then one, or
both, move away. (Remember, when you think of distance for your
staging, that movement always appears slower on screen than on the
set.)

4-Familiarize the audience with a location (expository information)


Sometimes it is important to make the layout of the location clear to
the audience if the environment plays an important role in the action.
For instance, you may want to establish, through staging, the distance
and the objects separating two characters at the beginning of the
scene. That distance may speak volumes in terms of what they feel
toward each other.

5-Prepare the audience for a lengthy scene.


For instance, a character settles in a big chair, preparing the audience to
a long explanation.

6-Punctuate actions
Movement can be a way to suggest a change of pace, or of mood. One
character may become absorbed in a task, which gives him time to think.
The movement acts as a pause between two beats.

Changing the stage within a scene


You can save a particular part of the location, or stage, for this
particular part of the scene. In the example of the two characters
above, we isolated three main dramatic blocks: To get in, To ask/refuse
forgiveness, To argue. Let’s imagine that the scene is taking place in
a house. The first beat, “To get in”, could be taking place on the
doorstep, in the lobby. You can imagine one character talking, even
pushing his way in, and the other resisting.
You could block the second beat “To ask for/to refuse forgiveness” in
another space –on another stage- for instance, in the living room of
the house. They may sit down, or one of them does and the other, still
keeping her distance, stands facing the other. The third beat, “To
argue”, could take place on another stage, in the kitchen, for
instance, or in another area of the living room. Each beat is taking
place in a different space. By creating clear, geographical paragraphs
for the action, you make the progression of the action visually clear
to the audience.

Tools to visualize blocking


Use a floor plan, or overhead diagram (picture #)
This will help you choreograph the scene. Where do you start? You can
start at the beginning of the scene or start with what is the dramatic
turning point of the scene to guide you through the design. In our
example, you could start designing your scene from the moment the first
character rings the door-bell, Or you could choose to start
choreographing the movement of your actors with the moment when the
two characters start arguing. This might be the dramatic core of the
scene, the one you visualize most easily. Either way, you should draw a
sketch of the location you will use, and mark the movements of your
actors from space to space, following the beats you identified in the
script. On the floor plan, you should also include any props (couch,
counter, table, etc) that may be important in the action.

A few notes about directing actors


Our goal here is not to give you a crash course in acting, or in
directing actors. If you are interested in finding out how to get a
great performance out of your actors, you can start by reading some of
the materials I suggest at the end of this document. Here are a few
tips, however that should be enough to help you get a believable
performance from your actors, even if you never directed before.

Casting
You have only a few hours to cast the parts. Make sure that the people
you cast not only resemble the characters as you imagine them, but that
their general demeanor, their behavior, what they tell you about
themselves, is as close as possible to the characters in the script.
You are not in a position to work long and hard with them to “get” the
part and create a character, so don’t hesitate: Type-cast!

Communicating with the actors


Learn the vocabulary to communicate with your actors. At the end of
this document, I will give a list of definitions for the terms that you
will use to communicate with your actors in rehearsals and on the set.
If you have the time, read a few books on acting (list below).

Actors do not “act emotions”


The emotional life of the character comes from actions (wants) that are
contextualized. Emotions derive form actions that are embedded in
relationships and circumstance of the scene. You cannot tell an actor
to “act sad”, or “act upset”. Be sure to use an active verb that gives
your actor a sense of what he would be doing (not what he is supposed
to feel, which is only a result of what he does), of what his behavior
would be under the circumstances. You can tell them, instead, that they
want to “hide in a corner” or “punch him in the face”.

Difference between action and activity


Suppose you are sitting in an office waiting to be called by your
dentist. You are reading a magazine. What is the action –reading or
waiting? As soon as the dentist calls you, you will drop the reading.
The reading is the activity that accompanies the action of waiting.

Dialogue is action!
If I say “Hello” to you, it may be a greeting. If you are late, it
might be a reprimand.

Silence is action.
A character’s silence, a glare, a mournful glance are all acting beats.
They advance the drama as effectively as words. Once you are done
drawing the positions and movements of your actors on
the overhead diagram, you are ready to bring in the camera.
B- Setting up the shots: working with the camera
In the beginning of the movies, the only function of the camera was to
record the action of the actors as the director bellowed to them what
they were supposed to do. The camera was placed in a proscenium
position, like an audience in the theater. The only dramatic tools the
director had at his disposal to tell the story were the actor’s
blocking and the quality of their performance. Once he was done
directing them, as he would actors in a theater, he would shout
“Lights, Camera, Action”, and that was it: one Master Shot covered the
whole scene.

W.D Griffith, in Birth of a Nation, had a revolutionary idea: he moved


the camera in the midst of the action. Suddenly, the camera had a job:
it became an active participant, a narrator in the drama. The camera
had, finally, its own “voice” to tell the story. A new visual vocabulary
began to emerge.

Camera placement
Now you have blocked the movements of your actors. You are ready to
for the second step of your scene design: selecting your shots. Just as
blocking has to serve narrative and dramatic purposes in your scene, so
does camera placement. Think about putting together a visual sentence.
Each shot must have meaning within the context of other shots. Where do
you put the camera so the resulting images will tell the story you want
to tell? How can the camera convey behavior, dramatic elements, plot
elements, atmospheric touches? There are five questions to answer to
help you determine where to put the camera:

1-Whose scene is it?


Whose head does the audience need to be in to fully appreciate the
scene? For instance, you may set up the camera in a different position
if you decide that the person who opened the door is your main
character. If you decide it is “her” scene, as opposed to “his”, you
will make different choices. You may, for instance, decide to follow
her move to the kitchen, while the other character remains in the
living room. Make the behavior palpable to the audience.

2-What is the essence of the moment I have to convey to the audience?


Once you have determined who is the main character in your scene, you
may want to set up the camera in a way that reveals what is going on
inside the character’s head. In our scene (two lovers in a room),
capturing the essence of the scene would be to convey the emotions of
the woman who opened the door. You could, for instance, start with her,
and capture, in close up, her reaction to the man standing behind the
door. The image size, and the fact that she is present before the other
character suggests her importance dramatically, and allows the audience
to identify –possibly to side with her- in the rest of the scene. Watch
a great example in the first hotel room scene between Benjamin and Mrs.
Robinson in Mike Nichol’s The Graduate.

3-What story points, location, character or props must be introduced or


kept alive?
What essential elements must be introduced and reinforced to show what
is happening in the present and what might happen in the future?
In our simple scene, did the man bring flowers to make peace with the
woman? Did he bring a gun to threaten her? In this case, the prop will
have to “make an entrance”, and be kept into play throughout the scene.
You may want to reveal the gun before you reveal the man himself, for
instance. If he puts it on the table, you may want to have a “cutaway”
of the gun, which you can bring back as a visual leitmotiv during the
scene. A good example is the envelope scene in the first act of
Hitchcock’s Psycho.

4-What stylistic elements or motifs must be introduced?


If you intend to use hand-held camera, jump cuts, slow motion, do it
early to prepare the audience for the way the narrator is going to tell
the story. It is as if the camera had a personality. It is the way you
are telling the story. If it is a comedy, you may want to shoot the
scene in a wide shot, to allow the actors to improvise and give them
ample space for physical comedy. If you want to create a realistic
feel, you may want to use a hand-held camera to give the audience the
impression that they too, are in the room. Choosing a style is not an
ego trip. Remember that style must first and foremost serve the story.
5-Is it necessary to resolve the spatial separation between the
characters, or otherwise orient the audience to location or time?
By keeping characters in a separate frame, the psychological separation
between them is highlighted. A pan, for instance, is an effective way
to resolve the distance (spatial and psychological) between two
characters.

Note: Coverage is a term you will hear a lot. It is used to express the
number of camera setups to render a scene, usually, wide, middle and
close. Although you should definitely consider this time-effective
technique when shooting under a deadline, you run the risk of creating
a generic design that has little meaning.

The narrative elements of cinema


In the first films –filmed plays- the audience knew where the actors
where at all times because the action took place within a single camera
frame. When DW Griffith moved the camera into the scene the action
became more dramatic and engaging for the audience, but it also created
the potential for confusion because the geography of a location, or
parts of a character’s body, or a spatial relationship, where now
framed in separate shots. This is called fragmentation of the action.
The director must recreate the visual and dramatic coherence of the
action by connecting the shots.

Shots are the sentence of the movies. The significance of the sentence
only becomes clear in a context. Ex. If you show a watch on a table,
the sentence reads: “wristwatch lying on a table reads three o’clock.
The significance of this film sentence will only emerge when the shot
is given a context. Eisenstein gives an example of how context changes
the meaning of the story. Imagine the shot of a man’s face. The man
looks intense, his attention focused to something off-screen. Cut to a
woman. The audience mentally connects the shots: the man wants the
woman. Now use the same close up of the man, looking off-screen. Cut
to a plate of food. Now the audience thinks: “This man wants to eat”. It
is the connection and mutual relationships of shots that yield meaning.
Context also applies to camera angles. No camera angle (extreme low or
high, tilt, pan, etc.) contains in itself any inherent dramatic psychological
or atmospheric content. It has to be put in context of other angles.
The audience is constantly engaged in an active process of matching
chains of shots.

The Rules of Film Grammar


Every time there is a lapse in logic of the choice and articulation of
the shots, the movie stops making sense. As a result, you jolt your
audience out of the world of your movie, forcing them to figure out
what is going on on-screen. Therefore, the main concern of a director
is clarity. The four rules of film grammar help maintain the visual
logic of your film by keeping the audience oriented at all times.
Film grammar has only four rules. Three deal with (A) spatial
orientation as a result of the audience into the action. The fourth has
to do with Space and Time.
A- Spatial orientation
- The 180 degree rule
This rule deals with the sightlines of the characters-where they are
looking. When two characters face each other an imaginary line or axis,
connects them at the tip of their nose. Character A will be looking
camera right, and b camera left. If we shoot them in separation, their
sightlines would be correct. The audience would understand the spatial
relationships between the characters. What happens if we jump the axis
with the camera? The audience will become disoriented. You can jump the
axis if you then cut to a two shot from the opposite angle. Usually
jumping the axis is used for dramatic effect, on a heightened dramatic
beat.

-The thirty three degree rule


If we are going from one shot of a character or object to another shot
of the same character or object without the intervening shot of
something else, the camera angle should change by at least 33 degrees.
The idea is that, by doing so, you do not notice the leap. You break
this rule for dramatic effect (Hitchcock in The birds-used to punch up
the discovery of the body)

-Screen direction
*Left to Right; if a character exits screen right, he should re-enter
it screen left. Again you can break the rule to create dramatic
tension, but the shot should be varied in length and duration. The
last shot of the series should respect the grammatical rule.
*Right to Left and Up: since we are used to reading from left to right
anddown, more tension is created if the characters moves from right to
left and up.
*Approaching and receding: a character approaching the camera and
exiting frame camera right (bottom) should enter camera left (bottom)

B- Film time:
A story unfolds in time as well as space. We can shorten what is
interesting (compression) and lengthen what is interesting
(elaboration) in a single scene.

Compression: To shorten the distance a character has to cover, we can


compress the distance traveled. In the first shot, he starts walking
and exits it. In the second, he enters the shot and is already at his
destination.
Elaboration: we take a moment and make it larger, you stretch time by
through variation of angles to cover the same action, and by repetition
of familiar shots. (Ex. Staircase scene in “The Untouchables” by Brian
de Palma.)

If film is a language, What is the vocabulary at your


disposal?
There are five things you can do with the camera to change what is in
the frame. You, as a director will integrate and manipulate these
elements to create the sentences to write the cinematic story.

-Cut to another angle: low angle, high angle, overhead shot. The most
neutral shot, which mimics what a person would normally see, is at
eye-level.
-Change image size: master shot (covers the entire scene), Long Shot
(LS), medium shot (MS), two shot, over the shoulder shot, Close Up
(CU), etc.
-Put it into motion: pan right and left, tilt up and down, tracking
shot (moves with people in motion), a zoom shot (no actual movement.
Just an electronic adjustment of the lens), crane shot (camera rises
above the actors’ head) -Change the focal length of the lens: wide
angle, long lens, etc.
-Change speeds or stop motion with a freeze frame
A little more film vocab:
-Objective cam: What the camera sees: it can be playful, distant,
static, use extreme Close ups etc.
-Subjective camera: The camera allows us to see what a character is
experiencing (Ex: the frame becomes blurry to convey the fact that the
character’s vision is impaired, as in the climactic fight scene of The
Cinderella Man).
-This is different from a Point-of-View (POV), which is an
approximation of what a character sees.

Coming soon to the MMM Website…


More about the tools you can use to visualize the shots and communicate
your vision (storyboards, shot lists, marked script) and to edit more
efficiently (log sheets).

For now, here are a few useful books and links:


From Word to Image Storyboarding and the Filmmaking Process by
Marcie Begleiter (Michael Wiese Productions)
For the relationship between storyboards and overhead diagrams, take a
look at
http://itp.nyu.edu/~sa1222/BLOGGER/03_01.gif
also,
http://www.exposure.co.uk/eejit/storybd/ts9.GIF

I recommend that you download a storyboard (framing) sample. Make


sure you indicate the Shot #, the Action (ex. Frank picks up the envelope
from the table), the size and angle of the shot (Medium Close up.
High-Angle on Envelope), dialogue exchanged over the shot you are
drawing (Ex. Frank: “I’m going to the post office”). Indicate if there
are any sound effects (FX) –the Off screen sound of a keyboard,
children playing, etc.) that will be needed in post-production.

Example of marked film script:


http://www.ryerson.ca/rta/handbook/tvpaperwork/tv_paperwork_forms/
efp_master_scene_script_marked.jpg

A few books worth reading


On directing:
Film Directing Fundamentals From Script to Screen by Nicholas T.
Proferes (Focal Press)

Total Directing Integrating Camera and Performance in Film and


Television by Tom Kingdon (Silman James)

Producing and Directing the Short Film and Video by David K. Irving and
Peter W. Rea. Third Edition (Focal Press)

Thinking in Pictures The Making of the Movie Matewan by John Sayles.


Houghton Mifflin.

On acting and directing actors:


Sanford Meisner on Acting by Sanford Meisner, Dennis Longwell, and
Sydney Pollack (a really great book – DVD also available)

Respect for Acting by Uta Hagen. With Haskel Frankel (Macmillan)

The Stanislavski System The first simplified Guide to Stanislavski’s


teachings. Second Revised Edition. by Sonia Moore
On editing:
The Converstations (with Walter Murch) and the Art of Editing Film by
Michael Ondaatje (Knopf)

This Directing Tips & Techniques Packet was created for the
Movie Making Marathon at Duke University.

For more information concerning the Movie Making Marathon, please visit
www.duke.edu/web/mmm.

Copyright 2007.

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