Director

To prepare for my film, I’ve read 2 master class (Woody Allen and Tim Burton) excerpts from //Moviemaker’s Master Class//. Both Allen and Burton emphasize the importance of letting actors do their own work on set. I completely agree with this concept. I personally believe that casting the right people for a part already completes the majority of the effort in directing. Like Allen said, “over-directing gets the actors confused and lose their spontaneity or their natural talent.” Our job as directors is to make sure everything keeps on track, we over look at the whole picture of all different cinematic aspects in making a film. For our own film, I deliberately casted Alicia as Lauren because not only does she give off a business woman look, she also has the overall aura that she could be a 20 year old mature woman who is a psychiatrist and is also uptight. At the same time, I believe that she has the ability to help out Titus (who doesn’t really act normally) when they’re doing their scene. Because our film leans towards a romantic comedy, I wanted the characters in the film to be more stereotypical - in other words more clear to the audience on what he/she represents. For example, Titus represents an insecure, low self esteem, guy next door type of guy. The date ends up going bad, but eventually back with Alicia, who represents an uptight, workaholic and serious woman. These two characters were opposites who we would never really expect would end up having a second chance and potentially getting back together. By having my actors play stereotypical characters, it not only creates a more comical tone towards the film as a whole, but at the same time reveal the theme of our film: how chance and fate could bring two opposites together.

There were a few other points that I thought made sense to the lessons on becoming a director. Both Burton and Allen talked about how we don’t really know what’s going on until the day we arrive at the set. Taking experience from the first filming day, I completely agree with this. I realized that almost everything we’ve planned (how to film, how it’s going to go) were almost completely down the drain because it was nothing like expected. I had to work around the “obstacles” that we faced throughout the process of filming, and I thought that this skill was well learnt because as a director we have to learn how to think quickly on our feet just in case something goes wrong. The change of the scenery during our filming day also changed what I had in mind for mise-en-scene. Burton really relies on mies-en-scene to complete his style. I wanted our film to have a distinct mies-en-scene that could develop a straightforward tone in the film. I want the audience to know what kind of feeling the characters are getting based on where they are. For example the restaurant where the two characters meet for the last scene. I wanted the restaurant to be fire red to resemble passion to show that these two characters have a chance to try their relationship again.