The 7 Billionth Hero

As the director of the film, my main job was to coordinate the production, supervising and planning during pre-production, choosing shots and working with actors during production and guiding the edit in post-production (Rabiger & Hurbis-Cherrier, 2013:3).

However, during the production of this film, I learnt that the most important element when making a montage is pace.

I found that pace could be controlled through camera movement, shot size, transitions, and how shots are cut together during post-production.

​

For example, I decided that our film should have a kinetic style, since it was an overtonal montage, thus cut to a tempo to fit the music, creating an overall mood (Hess, 2017).

This kinetic style was inspired by writer-director Nancy Meyers and how she uses camera movement to focus the audience. However, this had to be planned in advance so that we knew how each shot would fit together, or there was a risk there could be too much movement which could be jarring for the audience.

​

​

​

 

 

 

 

 

To plan this, I mainly used storyboards and a shooting script to see how the shots would look separately before seeing if they could fit together. Then, during production, I worked with our director of photography (DOP) to work out the speed of the movements, considering the pace we wanted to achieve.

For example, at the beginning of the montage, we decided to make the movements slow, to highlight the character's boredom.

​

​

​

 

 

 

Nonetheless, we also found that using transitions affected the pace of the montage, which is why we decided to use whip pans between locations. These made the transition smoother, which allowed the pace to not be disrupted by a cut - inspired by the film Ant Man.

​

​

​

​

​

​

However, whilst researching writer-director Nora Ephron, I also found that shot sizes, and how the director and editor choose to cut the shots together in the edit affect the pace of the film, since it can make the audience see the character's relationships differently.

For this reason, I worked with our editor to pick shots during the video call between our two characters which would control how the audience perceived their relationship. Thus, we decided to start on a wide shot, which shows the two women together, showing that they have some relation to each other, since they are best friends.

However, because they disagree during this conversation, we then decided to use single shots, before cutting back to the wide to show that the main character's reaction is motivated by the other's opinion.

​

​

​

​

​

 

Overall, because of how much planning and collaboration was needed during the making of the film, I found that it was vital as the director to have a good relationship with both the cast and crew, since this helped everyone do their best work (Rooney & Belli, 2013:132).