ASK & DISCUSS INDEX

10 years, 8 months ago - Jeremy Willmott

I recently completed a short film for the YourFry challenge. It's a film you need to view over two screens. You connect your phone to the main film and then view the same film from two different angles. My character phones you from within the film directly to your phone giving a reason for the mechanic. I thought this would be an interesting experiment to see if you can hold a viewer's attention across both screens.

http://loveamidships.com/

Some things I learned:

1. It's hard to find a spot to shoot from that isn't in shot of one of your cameras if one of them is a mobile phone recording straight into camera.
2. Lighting is really tricky as one lot of footage looks great and the other totally blown out.
3. You need to give the viewer a reason to switch between screens. The narrative should in some way pull you from one screen to the other.
4. The tech isn't perfect so expect a bit of a lag and different devices/browsers have different lags.
5. The angles should be different enough between screens to sustain interest much in the same way a normal edit would need a significant change of angle to cut between. In many ways the eye does the editing for you as you switch between screens.

Anyway I'd love your input Shooters. It's very much an experiment at this stage but it would be great to hear what you thought of it and how it might be improved or used in other films.

Cheers,
Jeremy