Static

This short film was assigned as a project with a couple constraints in mind. First of all, there was to be no dialogue or text on screen to show character thoughts or speech. As well, each camera shot could not move and could only be shot from a tripod. While it could move between shots, no movement of the camera was allowed: no pans, no zooms, no nothing. I decided to add in an extra constraint for myself to not move the camera at all from its starting position. With this, I came up with some creative solutions.

One of the things I thought would be interesting to experiment with was having the camera from a top-down view instead of face-forward. From this, the idea of having the scene change around the camera instead of the camera changing the scene came about. With this, I had more play in set design instead of camera angles, and I had a lot of fun with the creativity that came from this. It did take a lot of planning though to make sure that we spent our time in the space wisely. Altogether, the shoot only lasted 2 hours which is a very good use of time considering we shot every scene at least twice. 

Created by:
Eric DeVore

Cast:
Gregory Wynter
Brooke DeVore
Phoebe Maxwell

Special thanks to:
Sama Waham
The University at Buffalo Department of Media Study