Before finally editing together my work and exploring sound design I wanted to create a few shots to act as an interlude or transition between the opening and the main scene. The plan was to just have some shots showing the character walking the streets alone. I wanted to include two unused shots from my storyboard.
I really liked the idea of starting on a shot of the moon as it's something very peaceful which contrasts the starting scene set in the middle of a storm with a fairly grim shot. It also plays into the part of the calm before the storm. I wanted to include the second as this was meant to be a series of shots showing the lone character walking, though this time it was there to give only very closeup or distanced glimpses of the character. This meant the audience won't truly get to see them until the main scene. I also wanted this interlude to be relatively slow and long, this was inspired by Alien which took the risk to have a very slow start. I liked this aspect as it helps build suspsense and gives time for the audience to take in what they saw in the opening scene. That's why I was aiming for this interlude to be around 1 minute and 30 seconds, this being nearly the length of the main scene.
I was also going to mostly use cuts for these shots as it's set before the single take kicks in. When thinking about what camera angles I wanted to use I felt that it would be good visually and thematically to mimic the starting shot of the main scene. This would involve the main character being positioned in a way where they feel really small in this environment, making them seem vulnerable and without any control. It's meant to seem like anything can happen to them, especially since I want to place them away from cover of walls and such. It also gives a sense of symmetry which I feel takes inspiration from one of my favourite directors and usual sources for inspiration, Wes Anderson, who I didn't actually look at for this project.
Since this was only going to be shots of him walking I set it so the walk animation would keep repeating for the entire film. The main part to work on would be setting a path for him and also choosing where the camera would be. I chose a more crouched walking animation to play into the idea of things being slow and shows the character being cautious.
I set the character's starting location and final location as two separate keyframes, one naturally being at the start and the other being at the end. I then watched over the character walking and the speed they walked, then I moved the ending keyframe either earlier in the timeline or later depending on whether the character walked too quickly or too slowly. This was a relatively easy process but it took a fair bit of time as I had to keep checking to make sure the speed matched the animation as perfectly as I could.
In the end, due to the pacing of their walk, just getting down this one street took 2000 frames out of 2700. Here I made the choice to keep it most of this for the most part instead of opting for many cuts featuring different streets. It helped play into the plan of keeping things slow as by the end of this lengthy segment they would have only walked a short distance. I did however decide that I'd cut this segment into half and feature the second half on one or two other streets for a little bit of variation. I planned it so the character would reach the street seen in the main scene by the end of this.
In the end it left me with 3 different shots in terms of location and each was almost identical in terms of what was happening, it was just this character walking slowly down the street. Now I had to work on the camera angles and path for the scene. Since I previously focused more of shots where the camera was moving, this time I wanted to keep it on a static point where it would have to rotate from a fixed point. I felt this also could be made to seem as if it is security cameras watching this person or even something else watching them from a distance.
As planned the first shot would be on the moon until it pans down to the city, though I realised that I had to include a pedestal shot (essentially the camera moving down) as it was too high up in order to be close enough to the moon.
I noticed that the field of view was low and whilst I wanted that for my main scene, I felt that a higher field of view would help make the character seem smaller and the surrounding area bigger. Originally my focal length was 50mm but now it was 41mm.
I let it stay on this shot for a few seconds before moving the camera to an angle where it would look down on the character as it if were a security camera. I wanted to keep it very static for a few moments before it zoomed in as if the camera or whoever is watching just noticed this person. It alludes to the idea that something or someone is following this person and that they are in danger.
I felt that this would be a good opportunity to experiment with different camera angles I knew about, such as the dutch tilt. To me it seemed like an appropriate camera angle as it is often used to portray tension in the subject, in this case the soldier.
To me this looked good, it was something different but it worked. It also looked as if it were a camera that had fallen down in some kind of conflict in the area, giving further allusion to the events that had taken place sometime earlier.
I used two basic static shots from different perspectives, above and slightly below, after this to get a little contrast in view. I liked the idea of changing perspectives from looking down at them from a distance to looking at them from below so the surrounding area feels a lot more threatening than from above.
Now I wanted to use some more shots that featured some kind of movement through rotation to give some variety to this scene. Since it was nearing the street shown in the main scene, I started the next shot looking towards the empty street before turning back to the character walking towards it. I also felt now was a good time to implement the other shot based on the storyboard so i finished this on a closeup to the character's boots walking on the ground, giving more reference to my initial ideas.
And at that point I was now done with the interlude section. After giving it a watch in its entirety I felt ready to edit the entire film together. Some of my favourite shots included the pan down from the moon at the start and the camera zoom early on, these were exactly how I pictured them in my head so seeing them become reality felt great. It captured the ideas I wanted, specifcally making the character feel small and as if they are being watched. My biggest gripe with the scene was that unfortunately I couldn't include the aspects such as the danger sign or the dead body as those would have significantly added more time to the workload and I wouldn't exactly work with the newer idea of a lone soldier. However, it still was something I was proud of.