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Business As Usual is a short
comedy which began as an Internet "joke" supposedly true based on conversation
between a bank and a surviving relative of the deceased customer.
While the joke worked as a written bit of humor it took some rearranging
and rewriting to turn the dialogue into a dramatic piece. |
| My script showed only one side of the conversation in order to facilitate
shooting . But this, of course, raised the problem of how to intercut between
the off-camera responses and the on-camera dialogue. |
I chose to shoot the scene in in three basic cuts: a wide shot and two
closer angles shot from the left and right of the original camera position. |
The side angles picked were lower at about 30° left and right of
the original position to allow for intercutting. |
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| Since a logical location for this scene would be at someone's desk we
chose instead to place our subject at a dining room table with the paperwork
spread across a table at a telephone. This arrangement made it easier to
shoot into the front of the principal subject from across the table and avoided
the obvious problem of the desk being placed against a wall either behind
the camera or in front of the subject.
To make this seem believable you need good props. The first a bank bill for
a delinquent credit card and the second a death certificate. |
To make the bank statement I copied an actual bank statement and replaced
the name of the bank with a fictitious name "City Bank" with a logo similar
to the recognizable institution "Citibank".
I scanned the logo and then inserted it on a copy of a modified bank statement
from my files.
For the death certificate I had a copy of an actual certificate and I copied
it and changed the names and dates to fit this story. |
Additional props included memorial cards, sympathy cards and other office
type props to make the set believable.
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The shooting setup was lit by a combination of natural window light
off-camera and two lights equipped with compact fluorescent bulbs which I
find work very well with video and provide a bright, soft and cool light
source. This makes the setup very comfortable for the actor and does
not strain their eyes. |
The video was shot with my Canon GL-2 camera on a tripod using an off-camera
microphone on a boom above the subject's head. We proceeded to shoot the
three sections of dialog in each of the three camera positions. |
| I chose to shoot this way to keep the movements between the three angles
as close as possible in each angle. This was the plan. Unfortunately
not all the actions matched perfectly which makes for some problems in continuity |
during editing. This of course is a major problem as I did not have any
cutaways to cover mismatches in the cuts.
The off-camera dialog was recorded on |
videotape without visuals, so that the audio could be transferred into
the editing program easily. The two actresses were chosen for their voices.
I picked for the maximum variety between the various characters' sounds. |
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| The opening of the film was shot at the end of the dialog shooting. I
was panning across the table top showing the various props as background
to the titles and establishing some of the situation.
The facsimile montage was written into the script to provide a time separation
between the two |
sections of dialog with the "supervisor." The shots were done with an
actual fax machine. The montage maintains the continuity of the activity
while reducing the time of the process to the minimum. It ended with a shot
of the death certificate feeding into the fax machine. |
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| The editing was, of course. complicated by filming only one side of a
conversation and not being sure of the exact timing of the off-screen lines
that were to be selected and used. |
When necessary the alternative side angles were used to cover the shortening
of the-on camera action to fit the off-camera phone conversation. |
Even with the care taken to have the actions match between angles there
were mismatches which prevented making what were perceived to be the ideal
cuts between angles. However I was able to complete the scene with only one
extraneous cutaway to the telephone. |
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The off-screen portions of the phone conversations were
re-recorded after applying a "phone line" filter from a parametric equalizer
in the Vegas audio effects menu. This effect reduced the fidelity of the
recording increasing the high-end tones and reducing the low-end tones. |
Filming went smoothly as my wife and I after 40 years
of marriage and surviving the production of many plays and innumerable videos
have developed an efficient shorthand when working together. |
