Evaluation

I chose the cinematography module because, while film-making is a very visual art-form, and I have more experience in camera operating than in any other area of film-making, I have never been particularly confident in cinematography - most of the experience I have of camera operating has been in filming documentaries and live events, and rarely have the chance to plan things such as lighting in advance, and as most of the video work I’ve been part of outside university is often hand-held and/or improvised, I haven’t been able to develop my cinematography skills outside operating camera. I hoped that this module would help me to develop my cinematography skills - particularly in lighting, which I feel I am weakest at overall (since, for improvised documentaries and live events, the best fix for bad lighting is changing exposure) - and overall I think the module has helped me achieve this. Additionally, part of what inspired me to get involved in film-making was the strong visual style of particular directors such as Stanley Kubrick and Michel Gondry.

The ‘casting’ of the group I was put into was quite fortunate - all four members of the group also chose the same theory module, meaning that the only difference between our timetables was one slot (three hours) per week for our Narrative modules. This meant that, when we weren’t committed to filming for other projects, we were all generally available at the same time, which made it fairly easy to arrange filming schedules.
    Early in the module, we had a group meeting to discuss ideas for the 5-10 minute film project. Poppy and Jacob both suggested ideas with similar potential sequences: Poppy’s idea was to follow a character suffering from paranoia, who becomes wary of any people around him and of any sound he hears; Jacob’s idea was to follow a character who is convinced he is being chased through city streets, until he discovers at the end that the person ‘chasing’ him is simply returning something that he dropped in the street. Both of these ideas would involve chase sequences, immediately opening the doors to possibilities for point-of-view and tracking shots that could create suspense and tension, and allowed room to use difficult-but-effective techniques such as dolly zooms, which are a common occurrence in suspenseful sequences because of the distorting effect they produce. The two ideas would also allow for a moody, ‘gritty’ visual style typical of British cinema, exemplified in films such as Eden Lake (2008).
    We agreed to film Poppy’s idea, as it seemed to be more developed and the psychological element of the character’s paranoia gave us lots of room to give a creative cinematic delivery, meaning we could develop our cinematography skills and to ‘show off’ these skills for the assessment. Once we had settled on the idea, Poppy wrote a script, and we agreed to storyboard the film individually and to incorporate ideas together from each of our storyboards in the final film. I think that some other groups might have given each member the responsibility of filming a different scene/sequence each, but the method that we followed seemed to be the fairest arrangement to us - while our script had four scenes (one per group member), these scenes were all different lengths, meaning that our individual contributions to the filming process would be disproportionate. However, having four different camera operators with different visual styles and varying levels of experience produced somewhat inconsistent cinematography in the film, despite having agreed on storyboard ideas and shot lists before each shoot.
    This inconsistency has helped my to learn the importance of lighting scenes to specific f-stops and colour balancing to particular kelvin values. It has also helped me to appreciate the value of having a director of photography - having somebody responsible for the cinematography, on whom camera operators could rely to decide on factors such as f-stops and colour temperatures (although having a single DOP for this project would again have made our individual contributions to the cinematography disproportionate).

As we were aware that we would be filming in Grindleford for this module, Poppy included in the script a scene set in some woods. We went on the pre-arranged recce in Grindleford, having read the script and knowing what sorts of locations to look out for. This helped us each to visualise the scene, and shortly after this recce we produced storyboards for the scene based on the locations we had scouted. Considering the psychological element of the script (the character’s paranoia) and that the woods scene was a fantasy sequence, I took influence for my storyboard of this scene from Scott Pilgrim vs The World (2010). To borrow an explanation from an early post on my research blog:

I took influence in the first shot from a sequence in the first half of Scott Pilgrim vs The World in which the character Scott is in a trance, and the editing cuts abruptly several times through time and place - in one shot Scott is playing bass at his band's practice, before his bandmate's head enters the shot shouting 'Scott!', and the camera cuts to a mid-shot of these characters in the same position only now they're walking down the street.

I used this idea in my storyboard - the final shot of the preceding scene will show the character scrunching up his face with a brick wall as the background - in my storyboard, the opening shot of the following scene will still be filmed against the brick wall, as he opens his eyes again, before cutting to the new location of the woods.

This sequence is probably my favourite contribution to the finished film, as I think it achieved the intended effect and that the contrast between the dark, atmospheric street scene....

... as we see Gary respond to what he imagines he is seeing:

Around the time we had arranged to film this sequence, it began to snow, and became heavier on the morning we went to film on. Initially, this was worrying - mainly because we were unsure whether the weather would stop us being able to get to Grindleford. However, the snow ultimately worked in our favour, as the uniform colour it provided helped to neutralise the colours of the woods, and in Western culture, the colour white connotes purity, which was in keeping with the narrative of the scene, in which the character imagines he is walking through the woods as a sort of ‘mental retreat’. Additionally, the sudden shift in weather helped to clarify on-screen that the scene is a fantasy sequence.
    After filming, I produced a camera log sheet - based on the metadata recorded by the camera - for Poppy to refer to when editing the project. In the process, I became aware that the shutter-speed used wasn’t consistent throughout. When I operated camera, I kept the shutter-speed at 1/50 - double the frame-rate - as I knew that the shutter-speed affects motion blur. Aware of this, I tried to remind other group members to keep the shutter-speed consistent when exposing different shots. I think that this is most likely to be because the processes of changing shutter speed and aperture on the Canon 550D, which we filmed on, are very similar.

We next filmed the opening scene of the film, set in a doctor’s office. Unlike the scene we filmed in Grindleford, our storyboards for this scene were all relatively similar, which suggested to me that this scene would be the most  visually-consistent of the four scenes in the film. We struggled to find an appropriate location to use as a doctor’s office, and so settled to rent a small edit room inside the University. While an edit suite and a doctor’s office are typically two very different types of room, we reasoned that, with some art direction (in the form of various posters, most of which I was able to borrow from the hospital that my dad works for), the edit suite would look sufficiently like a doctor’s office.
    In my storyboard for this scene, I included various shots that would leave room for experimenting with different techniques - particularly in terms of lighting changes. In the scene, the main character, Gary, imagines that he is receiving bad news from the doctor, who begins to increasingly use aggressive language towards him (“you’re going to die alone and unloved”). I felt lighting could be a strong element in this scene, and suggested in my storyboard that we filmed one shot twice - once with normal lighting and once with reduced ambient light allowing for a ‘spotlight’ effect to emphasise Gary’s feeling of being ‘put on the spot’ by the doctor - to cut between in the edit. However, we only realised on the day of filming that the room we were filming in didn’t have a light-switch, meaning that lighting was restricted, and the spotlight effect would be much more difficult to pull off. This was worked around and we managed to include this effect, though with less impact.
    The advantage of sharing each of our ideas meant that we could ‘bounce’ ideas off each other, and suggest additions to each other’s visions that they might not have previously thought of. In Jacob’s storyboard for the doctor’s office scene, he included a shot in which the camera zoomed in on Gary’s face. Based on this, I suggested elaborating this shot into having a dolly zoom, which, as well as difficult, proved less effective than we had hoped on the day, as the room didn’t allow much space for the perspective to distort.

The two remaining scenes didn’t require a large amount of coverage, yet we were still able to include sequence shots, such as a tracking shot as Gary walks towards the camera on the street - which took a number of takes to get smooth, and because the daylight changed mid-take numerous times - and a panning shot following Gary as he runs upstairs and into his bedroom at the end of the film. In the latter shot, Poppy and Christi shook the curtains, which were closed, to produce a swaying, unnatural-looking light, to accentuate Gary’s anxiety as his paranoia consumes him at the end of the film.

As well as through producing this 5-10 minute film, I also learned and improved my skills in cinematography through exercises I observed and took part in in workshops within the module. In particular, I became more familiar with equipment used to light a set, such as the Manfrotto Autopole used to mount lights from above. From workshops, I have also come to understand how coloured light can help to add depth and emotional content to a scene - for example, one workshop involved lighting an interrogation scene, in which a CTB gel was used to distance the interrogatee from the interrogators, producing a subtle but very strong contrast between the two parties. I have also learned both why and how to light a set according to a pre-determined f-stop, and the consistency and strength of image that this can achieve, particularly in being one of four camera operators in situations where we didn’t follow a specific f-stop or exact colour temperature.
    In addition to my work within the module, I feel I have developed my cinematography skills in my work for another University film, for which I was also cinematographer, and operated a number of sequence shots and was responsible for lighting a night-time scene from both inside and outside a house. From the module, I have learned that the best way to develop and improve my skills is to gain more experience in the field of cinematography.

The finished film

Floor plans

One thing we haven't really needed to do for this film is floor plans - most of the filming has been outside or in spaces where we've mainly used available light, and, particularly in the doctor's office, our storyboards have often been very similar, eliminating a lot of the use floor plans can have.

However, as cinematographer for my Drama project, I had to spend a lot of time debating how to film the project with my director. We used floor plans throughout the process of storyboarding, as it proved to be a very efficient way of explaining our different visions for each scene, and also helped our producer/storyboard artist to understand where we were both coming from.

The following pictures are taken from my blog for the Drama module:

This simple floor plan resulted in these much better drawings:

While I haven't used this method on the cinematography module, it is still something I learned during the module, and is a very important asset to the field of cinematography.

Michel Gondry: enemy of the cinematographer

Considering how good Michel Gondry's films tend to look, and how strong a visual style he has as a director, it's surprising to read an article in American Cinematographer with quotes from the DOP of Michel Gondry's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Ellen Kuras, which explains how difficult - not maliciously, but for technical and stylistic reasons - he made her job.

According to the article, Gondry and Kuras began the (pre-)production production process with different ideas about practical ways of shooting the film. Because the film's narrative frequently switches between reality and dreams/memories, Gondry apparently "wanted to shoot the entire movie in practical locations, and he would have preferred... to shoot everything in available light", because "he felt that the more real the film looked, the more you would believe it when the memories melted into reality" and "it was important for him not to get overburdened by the lighting". In contrast, Kuras apparently argued: "even on a documentary, I wouldn't shoot exclusively with available light" (although, from my understanding, documentaries in the USA tend to involve more film-production style techniques, such as lighting).

Gondry's films usually show off a huge amount of technical competence, as I've already suggested in my earlier blog post about his video Knives Out. Kuras states in the article that for Eternal Sunshine, he wanted to call "back to early cinema, where magicians were using live-action practical effects in order to change time and space", rather than relying on computer processing. In contrast to the modern tendency to use computer processing to produce smooth and transparent effects, in one scene Gondry "wanted [Kuras] to shake the camera so we could see it was a handheld effect in camera, as opposed to a locked-off superimposition or double exposure".

When I wrote about Knives Out, I mentioned that the video's lighting appears to have needed a lot of attention to pull off, and Kuras tells us this was also the case with Eternal Sunshine. While "most of the picture was filmed in practical locations", "some studio work was unavoidable".

This was complicated because, as with Knives Out, Gondry decided to use "two [although Knives Out only uses one camera] handheld cameras filming near-360-degree coverage most of the time" - and to make life even more difficult, while one scene in the character Joel's apartment was shot on-set, but Gondry "wanted to recreate the conditions we had encountered on location". In the article, Kuras says that, once the set was built, she was told "all of the ceilings have been nailed down, so you won't be able to light from above" - a cinematographer's worst nightmare considering that most scenes used two cameras covering 360˚.

In one way, the article terrifies me, because it's made me realise how difficult cinematography can be, even on big-budget films. But in a way, the article also encourages me, because Kuras was able to create a very strong film visually, while relying throughout the film on natural and/or practical light sources to light scenes.

Lighting - spotlight

In my storyboard for the doctor's office scene, I suggested a shot in which the ambient light of the room is replaced with a spotlight-type effect to literally make it look as though Gary has been 'put on the spot' by the doctor as he imagines hearing bad news from him.

I took influence for this idea from Michel Gondry's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, in which this technique is used frequently to differentiate between 'reality' and the character Joel's dream-world as he relives memories.

 I only realised after including the idea in my storyboard for the scene that my favourite example of this technique in Eternal Sunshine... is in fact in a doctor's office as Joel revisits the office in his dream-world:

The effect in the film is to create an unsettling, unreal feeling, which is particularly effective as a light is attached to the camera, meaning the 'spotlight' only covers a portion of the frame, leaving the rest of the scene whenever it isn't in the centre of the frame to fade into nothingness.

Filming in the city

One short sequence from the film has Gary walking through the street following his visit to the doctor. For this scene, we had to rely on natural or available light, as we mostly filmed outside.

We began with a tracking shot which I operated (to keep individual contributions even, we each operated one shot, as the scene only needed four shots in total). This took several takes, mainly due to my own clumsiness in nudging the dolly as I tracked backwards, and also partly because the Sun intermittently went behind clouds, and so the lighting changed a couple of times mid-shot.

At the end of the scene, Gary retreats to a quiet spot in the city in which he enters a 'mental retreat', leading to the scene we filmed in Grindleford. For this quiet spot, Christi suggested using a car park in the city centre, which proved to be atmospheric and exactly what we were looking for:

Notes about colour

Although, in terms of the narrative, the woods scene immediately follows the sequence with Gary walking through the streets, we chose to use different-coloured clothes for the two scenes:

The contrast between the orange t-shirt Gary is wearing in the city scene and the pale blue shirt in the woods scene reflects the contrast in mood between the scenes.

While orange is typically interpreted as emodying energy, and often aggression, light blue generally is seen as having calming connotations.

As Patti Bellatoni writes in If It's Purple, Someone's Gonna Die:

Year after year, our color investigations show that in a blue environment, people become passive and introspective. [pg. 82]

This is in keeping with the narrative of our film - Gary wants to be passive, but (as in the street scene in which he's wearing orange) is forced to be constantly on-edge by his paranoia. In terms of introspectivity, Gary has entered a mental retreat, as he struggles to find his inner peace.

Following the theoretical analysis further:

In the presence of a paler, cooler blue, they wanted to be quiet and still. [pg. 83]

Similarly, in our film, Gary seeks peace and quiet in this mental retreat, contrasting with the busy, loud and obnoxious atmosphere of the city.

The contrast between the blue of his shirt and the orange-brown of his trousers is also a natural contrast, as we can see by looking at a colour wheel - blue and orange are naturally in opposition, and this contrast is particularly common at the moment for colour grading - shadows are typically pushed towards the blue-green end of the spectrum, while the mid-range is typically pulled more towards skin tone, as we can see in typical modern Hollywood cinema, such as the Transformers films:

Filming - doctor's office

For the doctor's office scene, we struggled to find a location to film in, and ended up booking a small edit room on the univeristy's campus:

Jacob has asked me to give him credit for this photo.

I was able to borrow posters and a stethoscope from the hospital my dad works at, which helped to decorate what's obviously an edit booth to look more like a doctor's office.

Unfortunately, although we had found an actor to play the role of the doctor, he became unavailable on the day we filmed, so Poppy stood in instead.

The size of the room was less than helpful, but above all else, lighting proved to be a problem. The overhead lights in the room couldn't be turned off, meaning lighting effects had to be reconsidered - I had suggested lowering ambient lighting for one shot to give a spotlight/'deer-in-the-headlights' look, which wasn't possible due to the lighting restriction.

Instead, we shone a pair of Dedo lamps on Poppy's face during a sequence in which Gary's paranoia takes hold of him. Each lamp shone on one side of her face, and we used different coloured gels and different intensities to give an unnatural, exaggerated look of menace to the doctor.

Another storyboard - House scene

At the end of our film, Gary rushes home following his dream sequence which we filmed in Grindleford. Poppy's description of this scene in the script is a short paragraph:

...and so, as I followed the script closely, there wasn't a lot of coverage needed for this scene, and so it resulted in only taking up four frames and (overall only three shots) of storyboard:

The first frame immediately follows a shot where Gary grabs onto a branch in the woods. The intention is that the tree branch 'turns into' a door handle.

I assumed that it would be possible to have Gary slump down against the door as he enters his bedroom. However, we arranged to film the scene at Christi's house, and the pictures he uploaded to our Facebook group suggested otherwise, as there is no door to the bedroom:

This just meant that we would have to show Gary run up the stairs and perhaps into a corner to roll into a ball in instead.

Storyboard - Doctor's Office

Below is my storyboard for the scene in the film set in a doctor's office.

I suggested a lighting change for this scene to accentuate Gary's (the main character) paranoia. On the first frame of the last page shown above, I suggested changing the lighting during the shot to give a sppotlight-type effect, which would mean turning down the ambient light whilst increasing the brightness on a Dedo. The idea was to literally create a 'deer-in-the-headlights' look.


As with the Grindleford shoot, we each storyboarded our own ideas so we could incorporate an even mix of each group member's ideas into the project. This also meant we were able to bounce ideas off each other, and come up with ideas we wouldn't have thought of if we hadn't each shared our own visions for the film.

For example, while the storyboards for the doctor's scene all followed Poppy's script quite closely, meaning they all approached the scene in a very similar way, looking at Jacob's interpretation of the scene gave me an idea for a more technical shot. He suggested zooming on on Gary's face as he imagines hearing bad news, which gave me the idea of including a dolly zoom to add drama to the effect:

Another 'sequence shot', or intense choreography

The band OK Go are well-known for having exuberant music videos for their songs. In 2012, they uploaded a promotional video to Youtube of a (somewhat) 'acoustic' version of their song Needing/Getting.

According the the video's description on Youtube, 'OK Go set up over 1000 instruments over two miles of desert outside Los Angeles', and the video took '4 months of preparation and 4 days of shooting and recording'.

The result is an impressively-choreographed reproduction of Needing/Getting, of which a studio recording was released in 2010, with the band's frontman driving a car through a course set-up with different instruments, with microphones attached all over the car.

Obviously, the video was 'made in partnership' with Chevrolet, who provided a budget of 'somewhere between $500,000 and $1 million' (according to this link), but overall I think the video gives more of a 'wow-factor' for the band than an advert for Chevrolet - but that might just be my opinion.

Considering the complexity of the shoot, and that the filming took places over 4 days, it isn't exactly a long-take, or much of a sequence shot, although to watch it,  it's obviously a series of sequence shots edited together to make it look like a continuous take.

Either way, it's something else to aspire to, like Michel Gondry's 'Knives Out' video.

The video:

Lighting Changes and Sequence Shots

Through the many music videos and adverts he has written and directed, Michel Gondry has developed and/or shown off practical techniques and effects. One of the most impressive examples is his music video for Radiohead's 'Knives Out'.

The entire video is a continuous take in which the camera slowly pans around 360˚ a number of times. As the camera spins, the set continuously changes - props are added, removed or changed each time we see them.

Technically, the video must have been incredibly difficult to pull off (if for no other reason than that it's a continuous take, meaning everyone involved had to 'get it right' at the same time), and obviously took a lot of planning, both in order to choreograph the cast and crew, and also to co-ordinate camera movement and lighting changes.

Throughout the video, the camera moves freely with a level of shake, suggesting that it's hand-held. At 2 minutes in, however, it lifts to a birds-eye-view, suggesting that a crane was used for at least part of the video, if not the entirety.

What was probably most difficult to get right out of all the visual elements in the video is the lighting - the set isn't filled with sources for practicals, and the 360˚ angle combined with crane shots must have made the task of lighting the set nearly impossible. At first, I would have thought everything was lit from above to make it easier, but the crane shot tells me that at least part of the light is carefully framed out of windows.

And to make lighting even more difficult, there are a number of quick lighting changes choreographed, that dim ambient light and introduce sources from underneath bed sheets, for example, before shifting back to the norm.

Naked Framing

From person to person, framing can either be overlooked in favour of one of the many other important elements in cinematography, such as depth of field, lighting, colour, camera movement, exposure, etc., or it can be given too much attention to the detriment of the other elements.

Either way, framing is a very important consideration for the cinematographer - it can reveal or conceal things depending on what the desired effect is. Good framing can draw the viewer into the emotion of a scene; bad framing can draw away from the emotion and make a shot look cluttered and messy.

Mike Leigh's 'Naked' uses subtle humour to (somewhat) lighten up the film's gritty realism. One of the best examples of this is comes from the framing of the the screenshot below, in which the character Johnny tilts his head to produce a composition that turns a decorative wall clock into a halo.

Sensors and rolling shutter

In my last post, I posted a video which involved a lot of fast movement and panning. Naturally, motion blur is going to occur with a sequence like this. However, a problem common to DSLR cameras is rolling shutter.

Rolling shutter is when, as with a camera sensor like the CMOS used in my Canon 550D, a frame isn't recorded at an exact moment - that is, part of the frame is captured slightly before another part. This leads to objects becoming warped when applying camera movement such as panning, or when an object passes the camera very quickly.

This leads to vertical objects appearing to 'lean' to one side on the recorded image.

Google images gives a good example of this in a photograph of a train:

This article explains why this occurs with most common consumer cameras. As the article states, CMOS sensors used in DSLR cameras typically use a rolling shutter rather than a global shutter, meaning that it "actually exposes different portions of the frame at different points in time, “rolling” through the frame" - although, this is due to the sensor "telling different portions to become light-sensitive at different moments in time",  rather than a physically-rolling shutter system.

CMOS sensors using a rolling shutter system are said to be more energy-efficient, which probably explains their usage in consumer products. This makes sense, but also makes it difficult to 'pull-off' quick motion on a small budget without it becoming distorted like the picture above.

Experimenting in the garden

Using the same technique (using the tripod itself as a counter-weight) as mentioned in my last post, I experimented with this 'makeshift Steadicam'.

I tested it out at different heights to see how a Steadicam can give different effects when used at different people's eyelevels, but the most fun result I got was when I flipped the whole thing upside-down and tried to see how it would look for a guinea pig trying to escape from owners that forget to feed it.

I rotated the video back using Premiere Pro.




Running around with a DSLR highlights one of the biggest problems with this type of camera - because of the rolling shutter effect, the video looks much shakier and more blurred than it ordinarily would (although, to be fair to the DSLR, this was also filmed with a shutter speed of 1/50, which gives much more motion blur than it would if it were doubled to 1/100).

Cheap Steadicam

Because I've resigned myself to the fact that I'll never be able to afford a proper Steadicam, I've been looking around online for cheap alternatives.

A popular way of getting a similar effect to a Steadicam is to just use a tripod and try to counter-balance the weight of the camera at the top with the tripod itself at the bottom. This means the tripod has to be held at a certain point, and the balance can be adjusted by extending the tripod's legs more or less to account for different camera and lens weights.

This technique is explained more clearly in this video (which can't be embedded here, so I'm posting the link instead):

https://vimeo.com/36206229

And another video (which CAN be embedded):




During the shoot in Grindleford, Poppy brought along her tripod, which she'd attached a weight to to get a similar effect. There are plenty of tutorials on the internet that explain how to build Steadicam-like systems on a budget, and most recommend using a weight to act as the counter-weight (which seems totally illogical...). Poppy used the same technique as is explained in the below video, but just attached the weight to a tripod rather than putting together the rest of the 'Steadicam'.

Camera log - Grindleford shoot

I've compiled a camera log sheet for the two DSLR cameras used for the Grindleford shoot, which will hopefully be useful when it comes to editing the film.

Before the shoot, Poppy compiled this shot list taking different people's ideas into account:

The shot numbers in the camera log below correspond to those on Poppy's shot list above, with the exception of shot 18, which Poppy added on the day.

Storyboard - Grindleford shoot

We agreed to each storyboard the scene individually, show each storyboard to the group and then take ideas from each person's vision for the film and put together a single storyboard.

I took influence in the first shot from a sequence in the first half of Scott Pilgrim vs The World in which the character Scott is in a trance, and the editing cuts abruptly several times through time and place - in one shot Scott is playing bass at his band's practice, before his bandmate's head enters the shot shouting 'Scott!', and the camera cuts to a mid-shot of these characters in the same position only now they're walking down the street.

I used this idea in my storyboard - the final shot of the preceding scene will show the character scrunching up his face with a brick wall as the background - in my storyboard, the opening shot of the following scene will still be filmed against the brick wall, as he opens his eyes again, before cutting to the new location of the woods.

Here are scans of my storyboard for the woods scene:

Grindleford Recce

Here are some pictures I took when we went on the recce to Grindleford of places that I thought might be interesting or at least appropriate to film.

The scene we'll be filming in Grindleford is set in the woods as our character seeks peace away from the paranoia-inducing city life. The greens and the nice light provided by the sun being low in the sky give a tranquil look that translates well on-camera.

We need plenty of places where our character can be exploring in the woods.

We came across this, which on-camera looks like a cave entrance, which could end up being useful:

Last, but not least, we made a new friend (who loved posing but didn't want us to get our pictures in focus):

We went on the recce mid-morning, when the Sun is still fairly low in the sky during Winter months, which gave these pictures quite nice, gold-tinted natural lighting.

Screenplay

After we exchanged ideas we could go with for the group project, we agreed on Poppy's idea to follow a paranoid man who imagines people's thoughts as they look at or speak to him.

The film will require two actors, access to a doctor's office (or something that looks close enough), woods (which we'll find plenty of in Grindleford), streets (which we'll find plenty of in Sheffield, I hope) and a house.

Poppy has written the script for us already, so we can bear it in mind on the Grindleford recce.