Task 1.

For my first task for this module, I had my present my initial concept to the rest of my group, informing them which script I had chosen to recreate, as well as how I may go about changing it. This includes some example pieces of work which may inspire my final look when I come to the realisation task. The tutors made it abundantly clear that this was just an initial idea, and we weren't expected to have already planned and nailed down exactly how we would want it to look.

As it says in the presentation, my chosen script is from the dinner scene from Django Unchained, where Django disguised as a slaver, Dr Schultz and Calvin Candie are discussing slaving and the possible sale of one of Candie's slaves - Django's wife, which Candie is oblivious too. The reason I chose this scene is purely from the variety of emotion that the scene has; humour, tension, nervousness. I wanted to focus primarily on the tension, and if possible enhance it even further with my recreation.

One of my favourite shots in cinema is the long take - I love seeing how scenes play out naturally without cuts. Furthermore, long takes tend to give a feeling of the scene dragging out and somewhat a sense of realism - like you are there experiencing it with them. That's just how I see it personally. How I could really imagine this scene playing out, is a long take dolly shot, moving up the table towards Candie sat at the end, as I've drawn in a rough sketch on page five of the presentation.

To even further increase the tension, on top of the long take dolly in, I would like to change the lighting from Django Unchained, to something more along the lines of Inside Llewyn Davis, as I cover on page four of the presentation. The low key lighting increases the shadows and silhouettes in the frame, which for me increases the element of mystery as a result, as we cannot see the characters' faces - how do we know if we can trust them? This relates back to the lighting section of my Conceptual Tools of Cinematography post. In addition to performance, lighting plays a strong role in the determination of who a character is. If we cannot see that character, we don't know how they are at all, we cannot judge them on based on appearance, just by what they're telling us - this is something I would like to emulate in my realisation task.

FEEDBACK

Overall, my idea was received fairly well. It was somewhat different in a way that I was focusing more on long takes in comparison to other people in my group. Which for me was a good thing, because I wanted to try something that no one else really was, as difficult as that is, it would be nice in the end to have a unique piece of work. I was praised for my discussion of colour and how to drives the narrative forward cinematically - whilst it is quite a dialogue-heavy sequence, the audience can gauge what is going on and how to feel from the visuals and subtext alone.

There were, however, a couple of things I was picked up on. Firstly, I didn't really go too much into production design as I wasn't particularly sure which time period I wanted to set my sequence in. As I decided purely on the basic concept alone and a rough style I would like to achieve. Fortunately for myself, one thing I was sure on was changing the context from a slaver meeting, to a drug meeting between rival crime families, which gave me a lot of flexibility in choosing my time period, because it could literally be set any time, so my decision would be based on what I could make look the most realistic. The second thing I was picked up on, was how I was going to fit a long dining table into the set I would eventually be shooting in - as the set itself is a fairly small space, so this would prove difficult. This was just given to me as something to think about and consider when coming to properly planning my realisation, bringing everything together.