Chess Film: Pawn's Rule of Thirds Line

    As cinematographer in our horror genre chess film, I decided that in order to make our film as believable as possible, I didn't want to include any fully shown dead bodies. This is for two reasons: We're in high school and not really good actors (even when we're playing dead) and I want to keep the violence to a minimum and instead use filming techniques to imply a death. One particular shot to achieve this goal was extremely difficult for us to get. This shot is quickly flashed onto the screen after our murderer knocks a piece down, to imply that every time a piece is knocked down a death has occurred. 

Our first shot idea (This was an export of the frame) 

    After shooting this five second tableau shot, we thought it looked perfect. The main struggle was getting our actress (not shown, only used for this scene) to position her body the correct way. When setting up for this shot, we first had our actress sitting down and just leaning over into a very awkward position. When she was leaned over, her shoulder was also included in the shot and it didn't make much sense because she was supposed to be dead- so how would she be sitting up? 

Our second shot idea (This is an export of the frame)

    This is an export of our final shot. After our instructor came over and saw how we we're attempting to get this difficult shot- he asked us how we could incorporate the rule of thirds lines into the frame. Once again, I was too busy focused on trying to get my actress into frame without looking like she was sitting up- that I forgot to line everything up in the rule of thirds lines. So, I first zoomed in a little bit with my camera, to get rid of the distracting concrete shown in the background. Then, I decided where the tri-pod would be and set up my actress in the lines. The idea was the have the chains lined up with the uppermost horizontal line, with the pawn and her hand in line with the upper right intersection (hotspot). To get rid of the awkward position for my actress, she had to completely lay on the floor. The reason we didn't do this in the first shot was because the floor at our filming spot was pretty muddy. To fix this problem, we laid down a bag that wasn't being used and our actress laid on that. After looking back and comparing the two shots, we decided to keep the second shot idea which incorporates the rule of thirds.