Alice - Shoot 1 - Opening Scene

We shot the opening scene in the art cafe of the University yesterday. We turned up to the shoot around 3pm to set up the lighting and then to wait for the actor and actress. It was set to get dark around 5-half 5 so we gave ourselves plenty of time to set up. Due to the previous tests we had done in the art cafe, we knew exactly the look we were going for with the lighting and how to achieve it. It took us half an hour to an hour to be fully set up then we were ready to go once the actors arrived. 

The compression of the shot is down to our choice of lens. In the previous lighting tests we found a way to bring the background closer to the subject of our actress. As the entire scene is a mid shot of her, we wanted a way to make the image easy on the eye and to bring the focus into her more by blurring the background. Because of this we decided to shoot on a 70-300mm telephoto lens. We shot on a zoom of around 150mm from a few metres infront of the subject. In person, the bar behind her is at least 3-5 metres away, whereas with the use of a telephoto lens the image becomes compressed and makes the bar seem only a metre away. As director this was my way of introducing people to the close and atmospheric world of that character, where there it little room for movement and little freedom to call her own. Below is a screenshot from the film where you can see the results of our technique. 

We used a two point lighting set-up for this scene opposed to a traditional three-point lighting system. We decided against three-point lighting because it came across as overbearing, and ultimately washed the image with too much light and left the actress and her surroundings with no definition. The light which we removed was to the left hand side of this image, and was angled at a 45 degree angle from the corner of the bar in the back left of the room. The result was as I stated earlier, too much light coming from the left hand side of the room to hit the actress on the left side of her face. Combining with the key light which was infront of her to the right at a 45 degree angle, I was unable to achieve the sinister and shadowy aesthetic I was looking for. When we removed the light, as you can see from the image below, that we created shadows on the left side of the characters face. This is a subtle and frequently used technique to imply that a character has something to hide, or that there is another side to her beneath the prim and proper surface of a normal looking girl. 

As I stated often in my early research and pre-production stages, I had a shot as a primary source of inspiration for this whole scene. The shot is from Steve McQueens 'Shame' (2011). This shot of Carey Mulligans character singing a rendition of 'New York, New York' is shot primarily using one take, allowing the audience a huge amount of insight into the emotion portrayed by the character and allowing us to be part of their world for an extended period of time by the usual standards of a shot length in a film.

This is one of the parallelisms within the film that is what I would call a multi-dimensional influence. The shot above from Shame influenced me on a visual level, a performance level, an emotional level and it is a shot which summarises the context of the entire film. From this I wanted to create my own establishing shot which would do all of these things. Following the opening scene I wanted to transition into a visually stimulating and atmospheric credit sequence. At a later point in the opening scene, one character leaves, and this leaves the main character of Alice alone. I then wanted to transition into the glowing lights of the 'bokeh' effect to communicate that it is night time, and that the character is potentially driving. From that shot we then officially transition to a shot of the character driving to confirm the previous connotation of the bokeh effect. Below are a few shots from the opening credit sequence.