For the past couple of days, I've been working on storyboarding a central action sequence, and it's really making my head swim.
The scene (without giving anything away): a bunch of (renegades? refugees? rebels?) are about to get their desert camp bombed. They're scrambling for their belongings, racing to their ATVs and roaring out of there.
The setup: The camp is nestled between sand dunes in a desert dune field. The pattern I set up in the script is that everyone hops on an ATV and drives in circles around the camp, giving stragglers an opportunity to rush to the perimeter and hop on one of the moving ATVs before the lead ATV peels away and leads the rest to safety.
The challenge: With a bunch of swirling, circling ATVs, it's very tempting (and in some cases, almost necessary) to bring the camera around in circles, too. That kind of movement is really tough to "motivate", and it constantly breaks some hard-and-fast rules when it comes to spatial continuity. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the "180 degree rule", it basically says that if two characters are talking (or are otherwise spatially related, like if a person is looking at an object), the shots that describe that relationship must remain on one side of the imaginary line that bisects the two. Here's a good video description of it: http://youtu.be/HdyyuqmCW14
With all the circular movement in the scene, the "180 degree line" is constantly shifting. To make matters worse, I'm opting to keep the kinetic energy of the scene high by moving the camera a lot. There's at least one 270 degree spin which could wreak havoc on spatial continuity if I don't handle it very carefully.
I'm actually very excited to work on this scene, even if it's complicated. It's an opportunity to play with the kind of scene that I hope will be a regular part of my work in the future. It'll be my first action set-piece since high school.
-Arnon
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