Practice filming a dialogue scene (learning excercise)

Bismillah ar-Rahmaan ar-Raheem,

So far action sequences seem to be pretty easy. If the audio doesn't sync up, you can folli the sounds and replace the original audio with music.

Dialogue is a completely different story.

Some brothers came over my house yesterday and wanted to practice the filming aspect of a dialogue scene. None of us had done this before so it was an interesting learning experience. Unfortunately, we didn't have any actors so we had no choice but to do it ourselves. We made up a scene on the spot and filmed the footage ourselves with no practice, storyboard, not even a script! All of us are much more comfortable behind the camera rather than in front of it but in situations like these, you need the footage so we can learn and practice the "how-to's" of filming dialogue. With little time and no preparation, we took out the old cheapie camera and winged it.

We filmed the clip in the garage but we were constantly being delayed because of constant cars and people coming in/out of the building. One guy even stopped by to watch the clip and offered us to work on a project with him (he makes films too! Only in LA). The short period of times we had the garage to ourselves, we tried filming from different angles using once again the cheapie miniDV camera and with absolutely no lighting.

The point of this exercise wasn't to act but rather learn what type of angles that would work and not work when filming dialogue. You can read as many books as you want on filming but at the end of the day, the best way to learn is by picking up the camera. The most challenging part was trying to give the illusion that we filmed with more than 1 camera (very tough!). The problem was that we didn't have a script so our lines kept changing during the filming. Although it wasn't a issue while we were filming, it was a nightmare during editing!! At one point, I thought there was no way we could put the footage together. Last but not least, the background noise kept changing since in some scenes there was traffic and in other scenes it was quiet (street noise). So we had to film about 1 minute of traffic background noise, which we dubbed into the clip.

Nevertheless, we finish the clip. We edited it the best we could (based on what we could capture) so here it is:



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