Reshooting the last scene

Today Ben, David and I reshot the last scene, the one with the flyers. If my car crashed, we would have lost 75% of the readers of this blog. I told Ben he had to come along since he's the one who had such firm ideas about how it should look. Ben was very good as second unit director— he knew what he wanted. In this case, this means that Ben was discerning, really wanted the scene to work and knew how to make it work. This inspired confidence. So not knowing what you want means you're not sure what the scene is supposed to do, you're not sure how to do it and you don't inspire confidence. This made me feel like I didn't have to think about the scene unless I wanted to. I could just worry about what I was doing. So knowing what you want doesn't mean that you're closed to other people's ideas. It just means that you're taking care of things and you know where we're going and how it's all going to fit together.

I was also thinking about my "shoot it twice" approach. I was trying to remember how many scenes I was able to complete without reshooting, oh wait, here's the answer—NONE. I was telling Ben and David that because we have so many props, the first shoot is the essentially the dress rehearsal. The performance depends on the entire scene, not on actors who can change and adopt when transplanted into a location. Using this kind of approach, reshooting is almost a given.

My other hypothesis is that we don't have many standard shots in the film. For example, a typical film will have dialogue scenes that you shoot in certain standard ways—over the shoulder, two shot, or whatever. Noise film isn't like that. We have interactions with devices, Ben noticing things, Ben getting attacked by mysterious non-entities. So just getting the information to come across is complicated, especially when you don't have too much experience.

Plus, a lot of what we're doing is trying to balance certain ambiguities. If you want everything to be crystal clear, I think it makes it easier. But when you're trying to create certain interactions—like how do you make a bird appear without actually showing it appear, or how do you get across the idea that Ben is being pulled into the desert by an idea, it's just harder. Or maybe I just don't know what I want.