Last week I debuted another two-part series blog, and this time it looks a bit more into the technical side of making The Girl in the Café. I have talked a lot about making the film from start to finish, but I’ve never talked about filming the shots until now. I hope everyone enjoyed last week’s blog, and here’s a few more of my favourite shots from the film.
You may be interested in reading: The Journey to Making...The Girl in the Café
This shot is one of my longer shots in the film, and that is for one particular reason - it’s the shot that was going to be used for the opening credits in the film. As I was writing the screenplay I imagined a sequence where we watch Jane making a cup of coffee, but it seemed like a bad idea at the time because it would have taken too much time out of the film.
However, as I was storyboarding I came up with an overhead shot of a coffee cup and decided to put the idea back in the film. So when it came to filming, I left the camera running as Nicky made a cup of coffee. The result is my favourite part of the film as it keeps the key notion of it being set in a café, and the music by my talented brother, Niall Murray, sets the film up in rather nicely.
One of my favourite parts of filming and editing is thinking of the transitions from scene to scene. In all of my favourite films there are cool swipes or fades into scenes, or music that carries over into the next scene. I wanted my transitions to be as fluid as possible without taking too much time out to wait for the story to move on. So, in order to keep my film at a decent pace I had scenes such as these, where we see the ‘present’ day version of a coffee cup on a table swiftly move onto Cathy picking up and drinking her cup of coffee in the ‘past’ scene. This is a common technique used in films with flashbacks, which was used for inspiration for a few different scenes such as this one in the final film.
I could talk all day about each and every scene in my film but alas, that would be one hefty blog post. I hope you have enjoyed reading these past few blogs which detail my favourite shots from The Girl in the Café.
Why not watch the film again and see if you notice these shots with this knowledge in mind?
Thank you for reading today’s blog!
Alex Murray, the Head of Eyesight Productions
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