Director's Commentary 1 2
3 4
The Pickpocket Scene
The ironic thing
about this scene was that although it was in theory the easiest
scene to shoot, (two people walking, runs into something, continue
walking), it turned out to be the an editing nightmare.
Studio movie sets have dollies that move
on tracks, and independent movies have dollies that attach to
tripods and sound like absolute crap. Tim ended up hand holding
most of the shots, and they did turn out pretty good.
We had a good 14 minutes or so of footage,
and the reason why I ended up using just a few shots during editing
was because of sound problems. We were shooting by an intersection,
and between the noise from the cars, the planes passing overhead,
the wind from the bay, and the bad connection between the mic
and the camera, something was going to give.
In a few of the shots,
I simply used a continuous audio track from one of the takes
and overlaid footage from other takes. This eliminated the back
and forth audio glitches, which is still somewhat audible in
the final product. Also, notice that the background music is
a bit loud, hopefully drawing one's attention away from the cars
in the background.
I also used a lot of closeups, just because
it helped the audio problems and any possible matching actions
between myself and Eliza.
For the curious,
we did actually shoot some closeups of Suzie picking the pocket
of the passerby, but I ended up not using any of it because it
sorta spoiled the surprise. I mean, at the end when Ben asks
about the wallet, it is already obvious that Suzie lifted from
the passerby. By sticking a closeup in there, I think it might
have ruined the pace. And the mystery. Sometimes less really
can be more, I suppose. We also had a closeup of Suzie counting
the money, and we didn't use it.
The transition between
this scene and the next is perhaps my favorite one, mainly because
you can actually see one image turn into the other. The other
transitions had the misfortunate of either coming from a dark
frame or going to one. Previewing ahead, in the establishing
shots of the brick building and the house in the next scene,
we are actually sorta visible in the scene. We're just really
small.
