Digging Deep- "My Shoot'

Day 10

I was directing today and Hindol was my 'Best Buddy' for today :) Which is he was my Camera man.
As Tanmay Sir always refers to the camera man as your best buddy. Among the other crew members Himel was doing the sound, Soumee was doing the Production, Kirti and Jubraj were the actors. At 10am everybody was collecting the props for the shoot including furnitures, costumes. since I had some exterior shots where there was a requirement of street lights  Hindol tried to arrange lights for that. I wanted some warm lights inside the the room shots so the Keno was put up there.

The Shoot started at 11am. After taking our first shot inside the room with Keno. We moved to the exterior shots where the light boys have arranged a 2K for the street shots. By this time it was already 12p.m and Sir also had arrived on the set. he observed the proceeding for some time. then he asked me to just stand at one corener and observe the shoot as a director. The same thing which he had been saying from the first day that a director is not supposed to go behind the crew. But I as well as others are so habituated with the this that it's difficult to control yourself from going near the camera and checking the frame yourself. Though I tried to follow which was instructed but I think to do that also one need to first learn how you see the frame without the camera in your hand. that is as a director one should have a clear idea of Lenses. I was confused about how to see your frame without the camera and lenses in front of your eyes!. Then he make me understand the idea of seeing the frame with your fist's thumb distance to little finger distance in front of your eyes, one can use both their hands also or one can take a stick and accordingly check the frame. 

while I was away learning this, I asked Hindol to take the two exterior shots.

After that we had a short discussion with Tanmay Sir about the lights and actinng on the set itself. He mentioned about instructing the actions to your actors. how one should go about it. 

• Active actions- where you give concrete actions to your actors which are doable, visible and simple.
• Passive actions- where you will tell your actors about the emotions you want to convey through his actions. here you don't really give exact actions to the actors. the actor himself has to interpret and do the actions.

To me it's upto the director and the actor. If any of these works with the Actor then he should be instructed in such way. There should not be any hard and fast rule about this. in the end you need the shot to be good so whichever works for your actor.