From the course: Creating a Short Film: 04 Working with Actors

Unlock this course with a free trial

Join today to access over 22,400 courses taught by industry experts.

Maintaining emotional consistency

Maintaining emotional consistency

- When directing actors, one of the most important jobs is to maintain emotional consistency from shot to shot. Making movies is all about cutting up the script into many shootable pieces, and then assembling those pieces together in the edit to tell the story. Great films are typically made up of great little pieces. But new directors often lose sight of how the piece they're filming fits into the larger whole. I've seen directors shoot a master where the actors have kind of established how they're going to play the scene. And then when they go in for reverses, they allow the actors to improvise or to change their objectives or something else. And you know, it's an honest mistake. Often after warming up and shooting a master, the actors and the crew all feel more comfortable, and they can create some great stuff on the fly. But while those pieces may be better because of those decisions, when it comes time to patch everything together, those pieces might not fit. And so the whole…

Contents