The Light Bandit: How The Love Of Video Landed Me Behind Bars (page 2)

Talk, Talk, Talk

Conversations are also a stumbling point in creating visual smoothness. The easy way, of course, is to keep both speaking actors within the frame throughout the conversation. But if you're going for the talk-show, talking head technique, you once again need to pay attention to screen direction.

In Monsters Among Us, for example, a witness to the aliens' death and destruction races to the police station to report the crime. The witness begins pouring out his guts to an interrogating officer. The witness sits on the right-hand side of the screen, speaking and looking towards the left. When you cut to the officer, he must be on the left, addressing the right-hand side of the screen. If not, it will look like witness and copper are both speaking to some unknown third person.

When shooting an over-the-shoulder conversation, keep the listener's body slightly within each shot. This establishes a point of reference toward which the speaker can direct his dialogue. It's a popular technique because the method keeps both actors within the whole scene, even though you only really "see" one at a time. If you must shoot on days when both actors are absent, a stand-in can do the trick. Finding someone with hair that resembles the missing actor is the most important factor. You can easily alter their apparent height by having them stand on boxes, and weight doesn't matter because all you'll see is the back of the person's head. Again, pay attention to sight lines and screen direction. Any mix-up in these simple cuts jars the viewer and disrupts the flow and aesthetics of the scene.

Framing alternate shots within conversations is also a concern. In action scenes, it's not vital to keep shots similar. In fact, varying the framing makes the shot more interesting. With a normal conversation, however, it may be unsettling to jump shot size. If you show one character in a medium close-up, over-the- shoulder shot, the matched shot of the other character should reflect this framing. If you jump to a full- body shot, you'll lose the flow of the scene.

Shooting a very dramatic conversation allows you more leniency. A cut to an extreme close-up of one of the subjects may actually add to the aesthetics of the production. Maybe your hero, in the course of a discussion, has discovered that his wife is a monster. At the point she utters these words to him, you might want to frame her lips or eyes in an extreme close-up to emphasize the shocking nature of the n…