Week three - Persona

The brief for week three was to recreate visually, as closely as possible, a clip from the classic film Persona directed by Ingmar Bergman.  The three minute clip features two actors in a sort of interrogation scene.  The lighting and camera angles are really important and we were told to focus on these and to note how crucial it was to make a carefully planned shot list.  We only had two hours to shoot it in. I immediately loved the look of the film.  The stark lighting, harsh black and white and use of extreme close ups I find very appealing visually.  

I watched the clip several times and tried to make some sense of the subtitled script.  It appeared very random and presumably would make more sense within the film.  I am entirely unfamiliar with Bergman, and thought it was perhaps a vampire film.  Much googling later I had learned a great deal, but was rather drowning in information as so much is written about it. In summary:

Liv Ullmann plays a stage actor who has inexplicably gone mute; an equally mesmerizing Bibi Andersson is the garrulous young nurse caring for her in a remote island cottage. While isolated together there, the women perform a mysterious spiritual and emotional transference that would prove to be one of cinema’s most influential creations. (The Criterion Collection  http://www.criterion.com/)

Script

Since we seem to be more or less taking it in turns to act and I've managed to avoid it so far, I thought I'd better write a script featuring an older woman and a younger one who would be Chloe.  After initially thinking it could be based around bitterness about aging, I came up with the idea of a confrontation between an older woman (the nurse in the clip) and the younger one who is having an affair with her husband. I wanted to write a script which would fit in as closely with the original clip as possible, so that the performance could follow it exactly, however, I replaced the part where the nurse cuts her own wrist and the other woman sucks her blood (the vampire augury), with a similarly staged shot that would fit in better with my story. You can read it here.

Storyboard & Shotlist

It would have been easier to take screen shots from the clip and print them, but my printer was broken, and anyway, I need to get some practice in at storyboarding. I roughly sketched out the placement of the actors in the frame for every shot change and scribbled down where the dialogue would be coming in and how the actors would move.  I numbered the sketches.
I then carefully went back over the clip to see which shots were filmed from the same camera position and noted them down.

So, there were eighteen shot changes in the clip which were from 6 different angles.
My hope was that if we followed the shot list and storyboard with military precision, although we would be shooting entirely out of sync, we should be able to film it all in 2 hours and it would all come together in editing.

Shooting

Monday morning began with a location problem.  All the rehearsal rooms had been booked and it was really important that we have no background action and were able to control the lighting. We ended up in the chapel, which turned out to be ideal, roomy, plain walled entirely dark and pretty quiet. 

Chloe getting ready before the shoot.  We decided she should wear a hairband so that her face was fully revealed and the camera could pick up her expression clearly.

We soon discovered how inexperienced we all were with lights.  We'd been given three and it proved really difficult to set them up to effectively recreate the scene in Persona.  None of us had anticipated how difficult this would be.  The scene would look fine to the naked eye, but the lights would completely bleach out one side of the face through the camera lens.  Or the light would reflect off the opposite wall throwing light on the side of the face that was supposed to be in darkness.  

Eventually we were happy with the lighting but time was running out and we had spent an hour perfecting the lighting.  More confusion ensued with the use of the boom, taking up more precious time, and we rather rushed through the actual filming. 
The pressure mounted further as another group had booked the room to film after us and waited patiently outside for us to finish.  Unfortunately we had no time to do more than one take of each shot, we lost dialogue along the way and didn't manage to get every shot.
We will have to see in editing whether or not the story will make sense.

Reflection on week three

Now it seems laughable to me that the thing that had given me most cause for concern was that I would have to act in the film.  I have no acting experience or confidence in front of a camera.  I'd mentally slapped myself into shape over this though, told myself to grow up and get a grip - after all - what's the worst thing that could happen?  Better to look like a bad actor who is trying their best than a person who won't take part - time to face my fears anyway.  

In fact, the importance of getting the scenes shot made me lose my unease entirely, it was such a race against time in the end.

I think that the shot list worked and would have been a really effective way of getting the film shot quickly. The storyboard was essential in the end in guiding us as to the lighting and the positioning of the actors in the frame, since we were unable to get the internet in the chapel so couldn't compare with the original clip at all.  If I'd known how essential it would be I would have drawn it more carefully and paid more attention to the frame dimensions.

The final edited film was really disappointing, but highlighted the fact that we need to get more organised, assign individual roles and stick to them.  Also, since we are a group of five, not six, it is vital that we make every attempt to be there for the shoot. I am now aware that I should also have had a list of 'non crucial' shots which, if we were pushed for time we could have done without and still kept the narrative intact.  Unfortunately, by not anticipating our time constrictions, I had no idea which shots were absolutely necessary and which were not.