Arts & Entertainment

Jodie’s Short Film: Constructing a Scene

Lesson time 22:50 min

Using the short scene that she wrote with Scott, Jodie demonstrates how you can begin to visualize your story by mapping out a shot list.

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Topics include: Jodie’s Short Film: Constructing a Scene

Jodie Foster

Teaches Filmmaking

In her first-ever online class, Jodie Foster teaches you how to bring stories from page to screen with emotion and confidence.

Preview

Well, we're going to figure out how to construct a scene. It's impossible to do that without knowing it in the context of the whole film. But we're going to really-- We're going to make some decisions early on, decisions about tone, about style. I see this really more as an indie film. We're not going to have a lot of money. We're going to have to be economical. And this story is well served by that genre, well served by knowing that you have constraints, and it'll allow it to have a kind of rawness and sort of a reality, a kind of gritty reality, that really reflects that particular character, the struggle of a woman who has just gotten out of prison who's trying desperately to be a mom, the mom that she was hoping to be, but she keeps getting dragged into crime. I work a little differently, because I've spent my life in front of the camera as opposed to behind it. And when I imagine a scene, when I imagine the construction of a scene, I very often imagine it as if I was the actor in the scene. So I will imagine myself as each one of the characters. I'll imagine myself, in this case, I'll imagine myself as the mom, as Amy. I'll imagine myself as the nurse. And then, perhaps later on if we ever looked at other scenes, I'd imagine myself as the child, as the anesthesiologist, as the second nurse, et cetera. And that's kind of how I might construct a scene like this. I usually don't do storyboards, except for elaborate shots where there might be stunts or where they might be very difficult camera moves or where it's very important for the crew to understand the sequence of shots and how exactly how they will play inside the film. Don't get too caught up in controlling and manicuring every single shot. Because A, it will change. You will get there and there is such a thing as a location, which is different than what you had in your mind. There are actors there, there are other existences, whether it's lens sizes, et cetera, that you may not be able to know about. But more importantly, you will waste a lot of time on a detail that you will not be open to the rest of the myriad of things that you'll have to be connecting with. So the way this particular script is written, it comes in with a very hard cut. I mean, you're hearing something over black, and you have a hard cut of a woman's face. And then, even as it's written, even as Scott has imagined it, we pull back a little bit to reveal more of the environment that this woman is in. Her face is, perhaps, looking directly into camera. That's a device that I like to use actually. It's very connective and interesting to have a character looking directly into the camera. It's sort of almost upsetting to the audience to be stared at like that. It works very well in a scene like this where she has very few lines. She just answers huh or no. And then, we're disoriented at the fact that she's looking directly at us. So that first shot, knowing that we're going to be pulling back, we will end...

About the Instructor

Go behind the scenes with two-time Oscar-winner Jodie Foster, star of Silence of the Lambs and director of Little Man Tate. In her first online film class, she’ll teach you how to bring your vision to life. Jodie discusses her experience on both sides of the camera to guide you through every step of the filmmaking process, from storyboarding to casting and camera coverage. Everyone has a story. Learn how to tell yours.

Featured MasterClass Instructor

Jodie Foster

In her first-ever online class, Jodie Foster teaches you how to bring stories from page to screen with emotion and confidence.

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