Ingles III

Escuela Nacional de Artes Cinematográficas

Rogelio Jiménez Osorio

The chase

During our stay as students at the national film school we shoot several exercises,
one of wich is "The chase", it was filmed in second semester . It’s abut a guy who
refuses to get caught for wrongdoing, and one of them runs faster to tries to run
away.

The first thing to do is to adapt the script. Were given once, and then we could
adapt it to an original story of our own, in order to make the work much more
motivating, to plot. I decided to adapt the story to a fake gun seller and a
unsuspecting buyer who falls into his trap. Once the script writing process is
finished, we proceed to make a Shooting script, which consists of defining camera
positions and angles. After this, the next step is to make a storyboard, which
consists of drawing the shots as we expect to be seen in the camera's viewfinder,
then we shoot and then edit.

My scholar short film was solved in fifteen shots, of which three were inserts, one
was an extreme close-up, four full shots and seven medium shots. Originally I
planned to have seven sequence-shot in which I could move from general plans to
detailed scenes, in order to experiment with the possibility of narrating as if it were
a false documentary, however I received a refusal from my teachers and I had to
rephrase my proposal.

To obtain a final approved proposal it is necessary to make templates, that is to

say a drawing of all the places where the camera will be placed, this in order to
visualize previously if there are no axis jumps or narrative problems when placing
the camera in a certain place, which is useful, because it allows to visualize the film
like the technical script or the stroryboard.
Making this film is quite fun, because despite not being a work of personal
expression, it allows you to make mistakes that with other exercises it would not be
possible to identify so accurately and mistakes are essential to learn.

In the film I shot from practically few angles that were out of the ordinary, a couple
of low angles, although I must admit that it would have been quite enriching to risk
using duch angles, in order to give a more chaotic sense to the persecution.

Practically all the short film was filmed with angular lenses, in order to moderately
perceive the movement, since mostly hand-camera was used, in addition to this
type of lens altering the space dimension as I was looking for it, because the use
telephoto lenses would have made the movement in the frame more visible and the
space flattened.

The filming was carried out in a single day, all the shots made outside and with a
great job of the photography team, light continuity was achieved in these,
something that personally as a live gives me a lot of pride for my colleagues, since
we could Work efficiently even though some shots were complicated.

Finally, in the editing I wanted to give it more dynamism, having precise cuts so
that the camera movement and characters to help to increase the dramatic and
narrative rhythm I was looking for without using any digital effect beyond color
correction and without any transitions. On the other hand, the edition of the title
and credits was what I enjoyed the most. The editor understood very well what the
spirit of the work was, so he printed a series of neon letters with Japanese
ideograms to give a characteristic aesthetic of what he looks for in the short film

It is probably not seen in the final result, but in this work I seek to have the
aesthetics of two genres, the first Japanese kaiju cinema in its early stages and the
Mexican western of the 70's and 80's as the Almada brothers, in addition to
seeking to tell a story in long shots where the movement of the characters on
camera and on the camera to the characters was the fundamental thing, and
although I know that I had several mistakes it was one of the school works that I
have enjoyed the most in my life.