Film Recreation Preliminary Task

We were given the task to recreate any scene from a film of our choice, using the same camera shots, script and editing techniques. We chose the following scene from the film "10 Things I Hate About You". 

Our first task was to find the original transcript for the film to give to our actors, which was available on the internet in the public domain. 

 Michael leads Cameron down a set of concrete steps to a secret gathering
          of dating candidates for Kat.

                              MICHAEL
                    Now, I have gathered a group of guys.  Couldn’t be more
                    perfect.  Padua’s finest.

          They enter a dank room, wherein waits a very motly crew of the most
          unlikely specimens one would expect.  Cameron shoots Michael an
          unsatisfied grimace.

                              CAMERON
                    Hi.  How ya doin’?  Would any of you be interested
                    in dating Katarina Stratford?

          What follows is a truncated interview process, where each candidate
          in turn sits in the interview chair and gives his response.

                              CANDIDATE 1
                    (laughs hysterically)

                              CANDIDATE 2
                    (stares blankly)

                              CANDIDATE 3
                    No, I’ve never been that ripped.

                              CANDIDATE 4
                    Maybe if we were the last 2 people alive, and
                    there were no sheep... Are there sheep?

We then made a note of which lines were used in which shot, and the order they went in before we were ready to film. We had the original scene on our phones as we filmed so we could try and position them in the same way (or as close to this as we could achieve in a school setting). Below are the side-by-side examples of how we tried to recreate each shot.

Then we copied our film to the computers and used Final Cut Pro X to edit them. The cuts were all straightforward and there were no obvious special effects. After cropping and ordering the clips, we simply had to lay sound over the top. We looked up the film soundtrack to find the song and added that over the top as well as the digetic noises such as the school bell and scream at the end, which the microphone did not pick up. We found both these sounds on copyright free websites. 

Overall, the two pieces match fairly well. Some of the dialogue is fairly hard to pick up at the start, because we did not have access to a microphone when we were filming; for our film noir we would obviously have to find a boom mic for better quality audio. There is also a continuity as one of of actors was wearing a hat in the first shot and was not in the second; this was something we only noticed in the editing process and could not work around in order to remain faithful to the scene. When we make our film noir we will have to be stricter with our actors and more specific with our costumes to create a stronger sense of character. As we had to film in lesson time we were obviously restricted with the number of actors, so two of them had to play multiple parts, however this would not be an issue when we make our own film. To conclude I am pleased with the similarities between the two scenes, especially how the soundtrack compliments our scene and makes it much more like the original.