FREE Film School – Assignment 1: Photo Story

There are many assignments set for film students while attending film school. But they don’t necessarily need to go to film school to try them out. For the next few weeks we will be going through a series of real film school assignments to see if we can do them DIY style.

Recently, I have been going through different shots used in filmmaking. If you’ve been following, you’ll have a good grounding in the most commonly used shots. You know better how different shots work and the impact they have on your story.

In this assignment, you will get a chance to test out and experiment with your new knowledge. Because there’s only so much theory we can stomach, right? At some point we need to get a camera in our hands and start shooting something.

Photo Stories

One of the first assignments in many film school courses is the use photos to tell a story exercise. This is the perfect task to follow up on recent lessons as it’s all about composition and shot selection.

Essentially, this task requires that you take 15-20 photos which follow one after the other to tell a story. In a sense, this is like a storyboard created with photos.

But don’t skip beats or abbreviate your story in any way. This task requires you to plot out every visual moment in the story – beginning, middle and end.

Usually, this task involves sketching out a storyboard first to plan every shot. Then, you need to get some actors, locations and lights together for a shoot, just like you are making a regular movie.

But if you have to get all this filmmaking stuff together, why not just shoot a movie? Because, by removing things like sound and camera movement you make the task much simpler. And this allows you to focus most of your time on shot composition.

La Jetée (1962)

La Jetée is a film by avant garde French filmmaker Chris Marker and is often used in films schools for teaching purposes. This is probably (at least partly) because it’s virtually a masterclass in the photo story technique. The film became so well known among cinephiles it was remade as 12 Monkeys (1995).

If you haven’t seen it yet, you can watch the whole film here:

Famously, there’s actually one shot using moving film. See if you can spot it.

The whole film is tied together with a voice over narrative. You could do the same with your exercise, but that’s up to you.

If you don’t have actors…

As this is DIY film school, not all of us have access to actors. You can of course ask friends to help out, which is what I did when I made my photo story about a thought experiment called Quantum Suicide.

I shot and edited this film in one day. The subject was a colleague and friend who who worked with me at the BFI IMAX in London. He’d never acted before. I created the set in my dining room, using an old upright piano, some $5 battery powered strip lights, old bits of music kit, a computer desk and a toy gun.

I deliberately used one single main light to make the scene more moody (plus those strip lights). Of course, a science lab would not be so dark but this wasn’t to be an exercise in realism. I added blood and a screen for the quantum device using photoshop.

In the days before smartphones had great cameras, I shot this using something like a Nikon Coolpix S200. It’s all very roughly done, but the point was to practice storytelling (rather than VFX skills). A week later, this film was screening to 200 people at a Kino London event and it even went on to win an Audience Award at a short film fest in Leeds.

If you don’t have friends…

Oh. Well, I’m sure you have friends but perhaps they’re a bit camera shy. In which case, you could employ toy figures or some of those artists’ models. Alternatively, you could appear in the film yourself, using a timer on your camera. But that option might making framing yourself pretty difficult, unless you can see yourself in a monitor of some kind.

Include every beat

Going back over the recent lessons on shot types, try to include as many of the basic shots in your photo story. To briefly recap:

establishing shot – usually a wide shot to show the audience where the story is taking place.

medium shots – when the subject’s body action is more important than their facial expressions

close ups – when the subject’s facial expressions are more important than body actions

inserts – those close ups on details needed to tell the story. Eg: hand secretly dropping a sleep pill in a drink

Editing

You will need some form of editing setup to cut the still frames together into a movie. There are some free options out there, including online editors. Here’s some basic tips on editing.

That’s it for this week. If you decide to have a go at this, good luck! Be sure to send us a link to the finished film.

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