Repetitive Motions and Remembering Your Marks
by Tom Jensen

A DVX 100 digital film director usually has no budget which means the director wears many film and video production hats. In many cases you’ll find that the budget won’t allot for a script supervisor to monitor continuity of your movie production with amateur actors in each scene during production. That means that you’ll have to put on your script supervisor hat.

For those that don’t know what a script supervisor does during film and video production, they are in charge of keeping continuity of every scene. In other words, they take notes and log down important facts to remember for later use. It ranges from such things as keeping track of the DVX100 settings, actors’ movements during each line of dialogue, the height and angle of a camera, or the length of a burning cigarette in a specific scene.

The purpose for this is to notate these little details so if the director wants to shoot more coverage of the scene on a later date, everything will match when the entire scene is edited together. Then, in the final cut of your digital film, the audience will be none the wiser and the suspension of disbelief carries the audience through the scene. Otherwise, if you ignore these things, you’ll be brewing up a disaster in the editing room. You’ll realize that your cuts won’t flow smoothly between your different shots and DVX 100 camera set-ups (sure sign of a novice…so beware!). But by then it’ll be too late. You’re stuck.

So you see - the script supervisor has a daunting task during any film and video production. This means that for you to be the director AND script supervisor, you may burn yourself out and cause not only your creativity, but your movie production to suffer. One way to help with this is to let your actors help out by becoming more aware of their movements.

Communicate with your actors. Let them know that they’ll be repeating their movements over and over again – identically with each and every take. 

This will be a life-saver in post-production by having different options of continuity-friendly coverage with each performance. Rehearse your actors’ blocking (their actual physical movements in the scene) in front of the DVX100 to get them in the groove of being conscious of their movements and their marks.

Help your actors to flow with the timing of hitting their marks on the right line of dialogue. Just as you should have time for a table read and script rehearsal in pre-production, you should also have rehearsal time for blocking their physical movements as well. At first it might be a challenge to keep their attention through all of the repetitiveness, but try to reassure them that when the audience sees their work, it’ll all look like one long, smooth take. In other words - a real professional film production.

Having this type of continuity in your little DVX 100 movie, will add huge (albeit unsung) production value to your film, but will speak volumes with the subconscious of the audience’s expectations of a real movie that has undergone a real Hollywood movie production process.