Closer look at a Director - David Fincher

David Fincher - Director

• Fincher's excessive take count tells me that he is an actor's director. He has a clear vision and is not afraid to work with his actors until he can get the performance that he wants. 

• He is also known for his impossible camera moves & lengthy tracking shots. Starting with Seven and going through Panic Room and Fight Club, each feature camera's that go through walls, through ducts, down buildings and into garbage cans. 

• These moves not only convey a wider sense of geography in the scene, they are also very stylish and show the viewer something they hadn't seen before (or often).

• Fincher's background in music videos give his films a very glossy look, but also feel realistic and edgy. He always uses a similar colour palette, muted tones and lots of darkness/ contrast.

• His use of shadows to hide character's faces is a clever way to have the character appear in the film but obscure their identity from the audience.

• Finally he is known for inserting blink and you'll miss it single frames into sequences, a technique carried over from his days directing music videos and commercials. In Fight Club he included frames of pornography (alluded to in the story), as well as glimpses of the Tyler Durden character before we actually meet him.

• He also used this technique in Se7en & Zodiac.

I'm going to write the first draft of the script now. 5 weeks to go...

Shooting wrap up and post production

Additional shooting

We finished shooting last week. We had the final scene where our main character is back home eating fried chicken after his successful hit on his target (scene 6). We also finished scene 4 where the weapons get dropped off in a bag. This was severely cut down in the final edit due to time.

 Our rough cut came in at over five minutes and required a lot of trimming. Lawrence and Shiv worked on the edit over the last week or so, choosing where to trim and sending the rest of the group various cuts for feedback. 

ADR & Sound

Our recorded audio for most of the footage we shot was unusable for various reasons; wind noise on the running scene, rustling on the one scene we used the lapel microphone, various buzzing or humming noises in the locations we shot in.

For this reason we decided to seek permission to use the recording booth in Jennison to loop the dialogue. We sought the assistance of one of the technicians to show us how to operate the equipment and after some technical hiccups we were ready to start. Unfortunately our sound man couldn't attend this session due to other commitments.

I suggested to the director that the actors needed to watch the playback of the scene in the booth on the laptop while they tried to match their lip movements, however he thought this unnecessary so the actors repeated their lines sans playback.

We did try recording sound effects in the booth such as the wallet opening and other sounds that we needed due to the originals being unusable, however I don't think the right type of microphone was set-up as the subtle noises weren't getting picked up. It was agreed that we would use library sound effects where necessary and concentrate on re-recording the dialogue.