American psycho
CDM 348
Recreating
Movie Scenes
In this unit we were tasked with planning and carrying out a single camera shoot in the form of a scene recreated from a well known Film or TV series. here is the process of picking and executing a recreation of a movie.
some of the other scenes that we could of chosen
American psycho
To begin this new project , I first looked through some scenes from movies that I liked .Then as a group we collectively chose the best one . The scene we decided to go with was "hip to be square" because it was atmospheric and looked quite technical, but not too hard that we could not recreate with limited resources, was the 3rd of the 12 murders that Patrick Batemen does in American Psycho. Mary Harron is the Director of the film and what happens in the scene that we have chosen to depict is where Patrick has pre-meditated the scene and has a drunk Paul Allen in the front room. While Paul is incapacitated, Patrick puts on a coat in the bathroom grabs the axe, enters the room backwards, whilst distracting Paul by talking and lowers the axe down out of range from Paul. He then talks about a song could 'hip to be square' Patrick then murders Paul and acts like nothing has happened.
the scene that I am doing
HOW THE ANGLES AND SHOT SIZE IMPACTS THE SCENE
Shooting Script
Shot list
Risk Assessment
Kit List
Shooting Schedule and call sheet
Recce Doc
Production
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EVALUATION
I found the process really interesting especially where we picked apart the scenes and to try and analyse what they were thinking about when they created the atmosphere, lighting and which shots would work best and camera direction. I thought the filming went well and followed the original in the same clinical and clean manner.
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What didn't go so well was that the editing proved difficult because most scenes were either the actions were well timed and the dialogue mis-matched, which proved an issue as we chose a very dialogue heavy scene to re-create which caused issues in the long run, meaning I had to slow or speed things up to match what was happening in the original and made it quite a lengthy process to get right. The other point that did not go so well was the camera ratios should have been wide angle. We did have the camera set, but when we returned later to film the camera had reverted back to its original settings and had lost its guidelines, which we did not realise or know how to set up, which were not wide angle and this meant that editing was very hard. If we changed to wide angle on Premier it would have either chopped people's heads off or made a black box around the entirety and we would have lost the width of the shots.
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I have learnt that you should always check if it is filmed in wide angle you must double-check before starting to shoot to make sure it is correct. When editing if you are trying to match up something to audio, put the audio in before you start editing so that you can find exactly where it starts.
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I have definitely improved in my camera skills usage and also working well in a team to make sure everyone is working well together and that nobody is left without a job. We all took a turns in Directing, but Keira and I took a more director role in watching the clips back which I have not done before and really enjoyed.
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If I was to do this again I would take more time to block out the scenes so it would then become easier to imagine when practising and making sure that the aspect ratio of the camera is in the correct setting. Be more prepared and take opportunities to find the best location, instead of trying to make a space fit, which we did. I would also have shot a couple of the scenes again because they were either too slow or too fast which made it harder to edit and two scenes were slightly out of focus, which in the original was so sharp, so did not quite match.
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If I were to try and improve any skills needed, I would take an online course and research more on those skills so I can improve upon these for next time.
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