A director once said, “There are many places to put the camera in a scene. Only one of them is correct.”
This post was written by Chris Cullari and Jennifer Raite.
I can’t remember who said it. Maybe it’s apocryphal. Or quoted by so many that its origin is lost to time. But I can tell you that it’s never a more daunting task than when you’re standing in the middle of the desert, surrounded by horizon and sand, with nothing but places to put the camera.
It was a realization my co-writer/director, Chris Cullari, and I came to on the first day of our director’s scout for The Aviary. We’d locked locations, shot-listed most of the script, and Chris had drawn indecipherable doodles he called “storyboards” for some of the more complex sequences, but it wasn’t until we were faced with the reality of shooting with an infinite horizon that the difficulty of the task before us really set in.
It was overwhelming. But in a way, that was perfect. “Overwhelming” is exactly what we were trying to capture. Here’s how we did it.
Author: Guest Author
This article comes from No Film School and can be read on the original site.
