Pre-production amendments
During production, I changed certain aspects of the script so that the story would flow better (to see the comparisons click here). The first amendment I made was to change the conversation between the protagonist and his friends in the alley way in scene 2. The conversation was jarred, and didn’t sound believable. After watching the actors play it out, we all brainstormed together to create a better conversation. I also altered the blocking of the alleyway scene which I had written into the script. At first, JK was going to be vomiting on himself, but after consideration we realised that 1) He didn’t want to vomit on himself, 2) It would prove difficult as it would mean we only had one version of his costume. In the end, we took about 5 takes of JK leaning over and vomiting to avoid all problems.
The second half of the film had many more amendments to the script. I knew I needed to shoot some B-Roll, therefore I decided to go with my motif of crime and we went to the local police station to shoot outside it. I also came across a really cool lighting set-up (red and blue) near the location, and instead of following the script completely (the protagonist follows some girls down an underpass), I asked JK to improvise some cat-calling out to girls who walk past. This worked a lot better.
The last amendment to the script was at the very end, where I altered the cop’s dialogue to introduce him to the scene. This worked better, as it was less jarring and made the story make more sense.
When I created my storyboards, I thought I would stick close to them, but after arriving at production I realised that the narrative would flow better if I had less cuts. Firstly, I added in a lot of B-roll shots to set the scene, which were not a part of my storyboards. I stuck pretty close to my plans for conversations in most of the film, instead of cutting different shots in the alleyway (inspired by Trainspotting) I did one long tracking shot.
I kept pretty close to the storyboards when shooting the underpass scene, but in post-production I added in less cuts (again) as the scene was too fast paced and didn’t engage the viewer.
Overall, I used my storyboards as more on inspirational documents rather than hard discipline ones, and through this I made my film flow without unjustified cuts and shots.
Since I didn’t stick too much to my storyboards, I therefore didn’t stick too much to my shotlist either. I did, however use the scene descriptions on the clapper board at the start of each shot and then used them to document my files see here.
The shooting schedule was our outline of what exactly we were shooting each day and what times we were starting and finishing. I didn’t change much on this document, I initially made it very broad to give us a lot of time to get everything done, and it worked perfectly. Although I got rid of a lot of shots, the schedule gave us a lot of time to re-arrange things and work around it.
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