BSA234 (Cinematography) Week 12 : Blocking

This week in class we looked at the process of blocking a scene. This is usually reserved to the director and his actors, but the cinematographer, and other departments, need to be aware of when it's happening and what the final action will look like.

Again the note needs to be made that Cinematographers aren't always the most keen on storyboards, as Patrick recalls from his own experience, they would rather see the action first before deciding on their shots.

As DOP our job is to watch the action and find an efficient, yet appropriate way to film this.

There are two main considerations that need to be made:

1) Artistry
2) Efficiency

These are the two that are so integral to all parts of film-making, and it becomes a balancing act between them.

As DOP we need to ask "who's scene is it?". This comes back to the subjectivity of the camera, we need to decide who we are following in the scene.

On a side-note, as a director there are some important things to keep in mind when blocking the actors:

WHAT

WHY

WHEN

HOW



This video essay above is something  we watched in class, it pointed out that there are more to blocking than just the movement of the actors, the camera's movement if just as important and maybe this is where the DOP comes a bit more into play.

Which brings me to the second important part of blocking - efficiency.



An example of Spielberg's efficient blocking, here he doesn't move the camera at all and yet keeps the shot dynamic with a moving background and bringing his actors in and out of the foreground. A much better analysis than what I can offer:





I love the blocking in the trailer for this film:



It's weird that the characters don't seem to move at all, I think they make a total of five steps progress in the whole trailer. One of the first things in the trailer is Winona Ryder's character pointing out that Keanu Reeves took a step forward which is pretty ironic.

 I don't know if this is intentional in the film, but I can say that it makes the whole thing feel very sterile and I couldn't help but wonder what other dialogue driven movies do in terms of moving the characters to stop the audience losing interest.

Of course the first series I thought of was the "Before" trilogy by Richard Linklater, a series that really lacks in visual interest because of the way it was filmed and the subject matter it's dealing with, yet it does a much better job of keeping the action interesting. I would like to analyse it properly and see whether my theory holds water but I frankly don't have the time so END OF BLOG POST