Sequence using continuity

This is a clip of the film Escape from New York, about 7 minutes 40 into the clip there is a scene between Hauk (on the left) and Snake (on the right) talking across a table. I chose this scene because it is very similar to our task as it keeps to the 180 degree rule, uses alot of shot-reverse shot and it has interesting lighting.

When Snake first walks into the room, the top half of him is in shadow which indicates that he is very mysterious and a bit of a rebel, it then moves to the next shot which shows both characters and the space between them so that the audience can establish the kind of relationship between the two characters. The main lighting for this scene is Chiaroscuro lighting making the room look quite dark, mysterious and intense, also Snake isn't in as much light as Hauk which again relates back to him looking mysterious.

Another thing about this clip is that each time Hauk says a line, it cuts back to Snake who is just looking around like he doesn't care and isn't interested, then it cuts back to Hauk and it continues with the shot - reverse shots. As the conversation goes on between them the camera shots slowly get closer in on their faces, especially when the offer is about to be made. There is also a small series of quick fire shots going back and forward on the two characters faces: Short line, cut, short line, cut etc. This shows that they are trying to make a deal and come to some agreement.

Throughout this whole scene they keep to the 180 degree rule with Hauk always being more to the left of the frame and Snake always on the right.

Our Ideas

After talking and sharing ideas with the rest of my group we now have a pretty good idea on what our scene will be like. We have decided to use the Photography's dark room as a setting and use a couple of the lights in there because we don't want too much light as our scene will be based on horror, so it needs to be quite dark and mysterious. Our basic idea is to have someone enter the room and sit down opposite someone else and they will be trying to realise who the 'killer' is by looking at some photos they just developed. Our scene will start with an establishing shot for a couple of seconds and then a character will walk and open the door and enter the room from the outside, this will then cut to a shot of the person walking inside the room from the other side of the door so that it displays continuity. We will have a couple of match on action shots like when one of the photos is been handed over, and we will also get in closer on the peoples faces as they get more into the conversation and near the end there will be a close up on one of their faces when they suss out everything. Like the clip above, there will be alot of shot-reverse shots between the two characters and we are also thinking on having some of the shots cut in time with a piece of music to produce more tension and a nice sense of rhythm. When discussing our shots we made sure that we took the 180 degree rule in account, especially the shots where it's over the characters shoulder.