Writing the shooting script

When writing the shooting script, it was a strange thing to plan and try to visualise every single shot before we even knew where we could obtain filming permission, but still I tried to choose shots that indicated the dominant role between the characters sliding from Rita to Jim, captured a moment’s intensity or emphasis and also included a variety of distances and angles. I decided, if a shot type didn’t work in practice, to come up with an alternative on set with framing or distance. It was strange writing one up when we had barely even used the cameras and only had other filmmaker’s work to refer to with regards to what worked and what did not. It was an entirely different matter creating your own film for the first time. I pencilled in “ten seconds” for a two second shot on occasions so that we had enough material to edit with and would minimise the risk of needing to re-shoot anything. An issue I encountered when writing the shooting script was that the extra time needed in a shot not only to allow for each line to be said, but to show the audience a reaction or an action, was clocking up the minutes on our film very quickly. I hoped that it could all be sufficiently trimmed down to size in editing.