Chess Film: Post Production- Shooting with Editing in Mind

    After we finished filming, we began our post production in class. The roles of editor and sound design kick in here, leaving my job as cinematographer just about done. Even though we successfully captured our shots, I'm still assisting my editor in his editing. This is in order to ensure that the ideas I had envisioned on my storyboard are captured correctly during the editing process. We provided our editor with two different ideas when filming this shot, leaving it up to him to decide which shot he liked better with the rest of the clips added.

Clip Option #1 (walking)

    In this clip, the investigator and his assistant are seen entering the crime scene. We took this shot in two different ways, leaving the final decision up to the editor. The first shot we took (shown above) has the two actors walking into the scene, and the camera follows the actors as they walk and point at the piece.

Clip Option #1 (pointing) 

    This is the same clip as above, with the actors first walking into the scene with the camera following them all the way until they point to the chess piece. This shot was done to imply that this is the first time the investigators are seeing the crime scene. 

Clip Option #2 (pointing + walking)

    In the second clip option I provided for the editor, the actors were told to walk into frame with the camera staying still. This was done for two reasons; first to shorten the time of the clip, and second to not show the actors walking because it's boring. The camera then pans down to the chess piece (the evidence). 

Final Decision:

Deciding between the two clips

    The final decision made by our editor was choosing clip option #2. This was because we were afraid of running over our time limit of filming, and also because the second clip option looked better overall. The reason for shooting this shot two different ways was to give our editor the ability to decide which he thinks would look best when it came down to actually editing. We watched both clips together and agreed that the second would look best with the rest of the shots added.