Because OUAT was always going to be a pretty big project, Jon and I did a fair bit of preproduction work, and in particular, paid close attention to how we wanted the film to look and sound.
We were originally going to do full storyboarding for it, but in the end made do with the shooting script, the log sheets, and the log summary. The shooting script you have already seen - it is just the script, broken down into a series of shots. Sorting out which shot should go where is a bit of a black art. Firstly, there's the matter of not crossing the line - something that I'd go into in more depth except that every book on cinema techniques describes it, and I'd need to do a diagram which I'm just not up to at this time of night. Heck, I'm rather taken with the fact that the previous sentence contains three two-letter words in a row.

Um, anyway, yes, I spent a fair bit of time with a diagram, which I'm not going to show you, of the room. I wanted to get a sequence of shots that would firstly, show what's actually going on, so that we can usually see the character who's talking, and occasionally who they're talking to, if the conversation is rapid or we want a reaction shot without cutting away, or if we want a bit of variety. And lets face it. The whole movie is just a bunch of guys sitting around a table. (Incidentally, I wrote the script to be gender neutral, but I just didn't know any women who were interested in acting at the time.) I figured that I'd have my work cut out for me trying to make the film look interesting.

Jon and I discussed the look of the film, and we talked it over with Linda as well, 'cause she was the Director of Photography (but had no interest at all in acting, dammit). We had pretty much no chance at all of showing the interior action - the pirates and so on - and making it look convincing. I briefly toyed with the idea of using puppets, but was suddenly overcome by good taste and panic at the thought of anyone seeing such a venture. So, we were pretty much stuck with having the four people sitting around, occasionally getting up to have a drink, and having a stand-up argument at the end. Visually, boring. But we thought we could turn this disadvantage to an asset. For one thing, within the limitations, we could experiment quite a bit. We decided to make a Dolly, so that we could move the camera around smoothly and do those lovely tracking shots. I made up a dooby-whacker from a microphone stand that would allow many degrees of freedom for the camera while stabilising it a bit, so that we could do tricky shots like spin the camera above a card being turned around on the table. We wanted to have the camera follow someone's beer from the table to their mouth, starting sideways and ending up vertical. I wanted camera themes - that the camera would move and cut slowly at the beginning, and speed up as the action sped up, and would spiral a certain direction around the table, following the changes in the active player of the game being played.

Well, it was pretty ambitious. We actually managed to get a lot of the camera tricks working, though not the way that I had initially envisaged them. The overall theme stuff was just too hard - I was so busy trying to concentrate on not crossing the line and getting all the shots of the players and the cards and the reactions, that there was no chance of getting that done at all, and frankly, I doubt it would have made the film look much better.

But I'm getting ahead of myself again... I keep doing that. I made the decisions on the script, worked out where to do the close-ups, the long shots, the pans, the tracks, and so on. It didn't really occur to me that we might want multiple coverage: that we might want to record the same lines from two different angles at the same time, just in case, y'know, it didn't work out in editing. Actually, this was kind of a blessing. Had I heard that multiple coverage is normal, we wouldn't have gotten through the shoot, as we'd be doing the same lines again and again from different angles. I've heard various reports on multiple coverage. On the one hand, it's regarded as indecisive. On the other, the editor gets rather cross in hollywood productions if they don't have several angles to work with. Producers tend to watch for that kind of thing, too, and send directors back to get an ECU of Player B reacting to Player A's announcement that it is really just a game. In the end, and I'm getting ahead of myself here, but it can't be helped, the fact that Jon and I went over and over the shot choices was good because they turned out to be perfectly decent. We still got quite a lot of multiple coverage anyway, because it was easier in many cases to film the bits around each shot, so that the actor was already delivering lines and was well into it by the time we cut to them. When I was editing I used quite a bit of footage that wasn't part of the official cuts. In fact, now that I think of it, we were short of some reaction shot footage. I ended up using a shot of Simon reacting several times, because we did a whole bunch of general reaction shots at the end of the shoot when we were tired and careless. I wasn't paying enough attention, and most of the shots were unusable because Simon was corpsing (laughing, or on the verge of laughing). My fault entirely.

The Log sheet and Log summary are in Microsoft Word format, so you'll just have to save the link to disk and find a copy of MS Word from somewhere to read it, sorry - anyway, they cover off what I viewed as the essential details for each shot. There's space on the Log sheet for the date, special requirements of the shot, a description of the camera placing, and the To and From dialogue lines. Then there is a list of takes of the shot, giving details on which DV tape we were recording on, the time that we started/stopped recording each take, which minidisc the sound was recording on, and the number of the track on the minidisc. Oh, and a space for notes on each take, very important, it listed which takes were good and which were bad, both technically and as far as acting was concerned.

I'm pretty happy with how the log sheets worked. In editing, the most useful information was the linkage between the DV tape and minidisc recordings - I don't recommend using separate recording of sound and video unless you can't avoid it - and the space for notes, because it saved a lot of time to know that I shouldn't even bother reviewing the DV tape because the sound in that take was bad. Not so useful was the actual recording of the exact time stamps for each take. It was time-consuming to do, and I found out that I could use features on the computer to prepare an automatic index anyway.

The log summary was terrifically useful to sort the shots in non-sequential order. That way we could avoid having to move the camera around too much and readjust the lighting, which was a quite time-consuming part of the shoot.