Loud Silence

For our Tableau exercise, as a group, we decided to follow the narrative of an argument unfolding between two characters in a library. In order to communicate all of this without dialogue we made sure to pay more attention to the mise-en-scene and ambient sound. As we were unable to film in an actual library, we utilized a booth in our common room that had an interesting structure and appeared that of a library study pod.

Tomas created a poster to clearly establish the character's conflict. Due to printing problems, it didn't appear as large as we had hoped in the final product however this didn't take away from the professional and realistic look.

A mood board and floor plan was also a step we took in planning our final shoot in order to make sure we were prepared, saved time on set, and aimed to shoot exactly what we had in mind.

On shooting day we did run into some issues. As we arrived at the location we were obligated to postpone filming due to a meeting about to happen. We considered two choices; waiting till the meeting was over and adapting to a new location. With time to spare we headed to Merchiston library however found possible shooting locations lacking the original depth that we hoped for.

Collectively we decided our original location was the best possible choice and headed to a cafe to rehearse our scene so we likely wouldn't take as many takes. This proved true. After 3 takes, due to the limited posters we had to crumple, we decided our last take was the best due to the improvised dolly and performance looking the best. Though we didn't have the framing perfect this proved to be a problem that could be improvised in post.

The dolly out from the root of the problem (fingers tapping), was what I suggested would be the best one camera movement. As we working with limited equipment, I suggest the best way to improve this movement was to put a jacket under our camera tripod and slowly pull it down a table we repositioned. This proved to be massively effective with many impressed by the workings of it.

Once all the video footage was done we began to record extra sound with a zoom. Effects included:

-Paper crumpling

-Paper Dropping

-Coughing noises from far

-Footsteps

-Fingers tapping

-Books dropping

-Phone hitting a table

-An atmos of the space

Since we finished ahead of schedule, I brought my laptop with editing software installed and started transferring the footage. Since there weren't as many cuts to focus on, we considered the many sound options we could make use of, leaving me with just the titles and headings to finish another day.

Final Result

https://vimeo.com/764782348

To improve next time we would definitely work on enhancing both on-screen and off-screen sound. After our crit we came to the conclusion that wanting to keep it minimal to allow the loud silence to do the talking, isn't the most creative way to portray this and more layers, especially off-screen were needed as coughs and footsteps didn't come through clear enough.