Establishing Shots: Mapping Locations Within A Film
"A number of images put together a certain way become something quite above and beyond what any of them are individually." ---Francis Ford Coppola "When I'm shooting on location, you get ideas on the spot - new angles. You make not major changes but important modifications, that you can't do on a set. I do that because you have to be economical." ---Satyajit Ray "So much of it is the design of the shot or the motion of the character; it's the work you do so that it has the same things that are in the movie. In just a few frames it's got to communicate something clearly and dramatically." ---Dennis Muren Every location in a TV show or a movie has a layout that your audience comes to know. On Married with Children, the Bundy family had the bedrooms upstairs, a closet near the front door, entrance to the garage and a bathroom behind that and the kitchen was to the left. Their neighbors, the D'Arcy's lived next door to the right of the Bundy's. Even though the actual sets were soundstages, this map was always consistent on the show. (See this page on Bundyology: http://www.bundyology.com/9764gf.html) This consistency helps the audience get to know the environment your characters live. Without it, they will become confused and distracted. There are some basic filming techniques you can use to keep the map of your locations consistent. 1) Establish the Location: Establishing shots establish locations in a broad sense: The house, the skyscraper, the airport, the farm, etc. It's sort of like showing the audience the perimeter of your map and saying, "The action will now take place here for a while." Big productions will often shoot the interior shots on a soundstage, while a Second Unit goes out to shoot the exteriors. On a TV show, the interiors are shot every week, but once the exteriors are shot, the producers tend to use the same ones over and over. The establishing shot of the scene can also be used to establish interior locations. So you might go from an exterior of a house to the interior of the living room. Then as the characters talk, you do cutaways, but the first inside shot establishes where they are standing in the room. 2) The 180 Degree Rule: To keep your audience oriented to where everything is, you should follow the 180 Degree Rule. In your head, draw an invisible line through your set. Your camera must not turn past that line. For instance, in the Married with Children example, the invisible line runs parallel to the Bundy's couch. If the camera is facing the couch dead on, it may only swing 90 degrees left or right. So you can get a profile of Al, but not the back of his head. This keeps your audience oriented to the map. The Bundy kitchen is always on the left and the garage and bathroom to the right. The only exception to this would be a reverse angle. 3) Reverse Angle: When you do a reverse angle, you are re-establishing the map and turning the audience around. The best way to do this is to start with a dead on shot facing your invisible line and then move the camera to get a shot of your subjects from the exact opposite angle. A lamp that may be on the left is now on the right. Your audience must now reorient itself to the opposite layout. Reverse angles are tricky and multiple ones in the same scene can really confuse your audience. Just make sure the audience has enough time to get reoriented so they can still follow your map even though you've essentially just flipped it over. 4) POV: POV stands for "Point of View". It's the sort of shot that supplants a character and makes that character the camera. The audience is now seeing everything from his eyes. POV's are good for mapping your shot because the audience has no choice but to see the location in the order in which the character visits them. POV's can also break the 180 Degree Rule since characters can look a full 360 Degrees in any direction. POV's can be used to move the action from one location to another. POV's have to be used sparingly because they can be jarring and confusing. Typically, directors will use the POV shot for a dog, zombie, security camera or other non-human character or a character with an unusual view. After using a POV, you should probably eventually go back to an establishing shot of the scene to reorient the audience to the new location. Filmmakers sometimes break this rule to cause specific effects. 5) Building a Map: You don't need to have access to five different houses to make it look like your characters are going to five different locations. With a few simple camera tricks and redressing the set, you can build your "map". For instance, for the recent zombie project my friends and I have been putting together we needed a door on the side of the house we were shooting. The problem was, there was no door to the outside there. There was, however, a door on the side of the garage. That door was on a garage that was on a completely different building, but the outside walls had the same exact kind of siding. We "cheated" the door into the map. During an interior, the characters moved to a certain spot to the right of the camera. We then cut to a shot of the door in the garage opening. We kept the shot of this door tight so you can't see that it's the garage and the cut implies that the door is on part of the same building. If the action looks smooth, the audience will be none the wiser. With this technique, you can move doors, windows and rooms wherever you need them. And, in the five house example, a little set redressing and you can turn one location into five. 6) Map Continuity: But the key to all of this is, to keep the map consistent and to put out the visual cues in a consistent way so your audience can read them. For instance, in our zombie project, we used half of our available basement for the lead actors and the other half as the location for their black market dealer. Now that the black market dealer is established, we can't use that part of the basement for the lead actors. Also, when we show the black market dealer, we always show the same establishing shot (a run down house) to give the audience the visual cue of where they are. In the Bundy house, the visual cues are the couch and various set pieces (the kitchen, the steps and various doors). They also used audio cues like the flushing of the toilet to indicate the location of the bathroom. The actors knew where the sound was supposed to be coming from and their acting cues help reinforce where the bathroom is located. 180 Degree Rule http://www.solutioneers.net/cinema/axis.htm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/180_degree_rule Media College lists of shot abbreviations http://www.mediacollege.com/video/shots/ Mad Max: On Location: The Day Tour http://www.madmaxmovies.com/making/madmax/tour.html Location Shots for The Third Man (See this movie!) http://axion.physics.ubc.ca/thirdman/thirdman.html
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