Friday, December 6, 2013

Actor friendly locations

So, we're talking about locations for the past week or so. Mainly how they should be viewed as being a 3rd character - meaning, the right location can serve your story and it's character's wants and needs. It can create a world in which the viewer better understands the story and the emotional state of it's characters. It can put us there!

It can also be an actor friendly location. What do I mean by this? Well, I'll use my first film Sleepwalk as an example.
Most of the film is shot in one location - a very, very large loft-like space. It's actor friendly for several reasons; as for lighting, we pre-lit the entire space - had all our practicals set and most of the main keys. So come time to shoot and move the camera, we had very little tinkering to do - so this allowed us more time to shoot, which was less time hanging around waiting for all the set ups. Thus we could working faster, it felt more "organic" and proved to be very fruitful.

Other reason is simply we didn't move around all the time. We dug into one space for most of our time, which allowed us a lot of freedom and extra time to be creative. It was actor friendly in that it was a warm and inviting space. It was not difficult to work in. It served as an excellent creative environment.

Point being, not all locations are "actor friendly," so this is something to keep in mind when location scouting, and even much prior to this, when writing the script. Don't write/create locations which will be difficult to shoot in.


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