Casting trick #5: Look at one person at a time.

Funny thing about dialogue: you need two people to have one. That means if you're shooting a conversation of any kind, you're going to have to cast more than one person.

This sounds terribly remedial, I know, but it's important.

So let's say you're running a casting session for a scene that requires dialogue and you have two actors come into the room together. They slate –– one at a time, of course –– and then they go through the action.

Which one are you looking at?

See where I'm headed with this?

If one of them sucks and the other one's great, what do you do?

I'll tell you what you do. You go back in time. Before you even begin working with your actors, you take your video camera and point it at one of them –– doesn't matter which. Frame the other person completely out. Then as you're watching the performance, you make notes only about that one. And since you're a conscientious person and don't want to give one of the actors the impression that you're ignoring him, you tell him that once you're done working with the one guy, you're going to concentrate on him.

When you've got the first person's performance to a place you like, tell your first actor to keep things right there and turn the camera on the second actor. Then work with him.

There are a couple of benefits to doing things this way. First, you only have to keep your mind on one performance at a time. More critical, if you're like most directors you don't get the final say on casting. Other people are going to have to discuss your choices, and they can't discuss what they don't see.

Which brings me to a rule I try to apply, not just with casting, but with every aspect of production: Never submit anybody or anything you wouldn't be 100% happy to work with. I guarantee you that if you give somebody a choice, they're going to choose the one you don't like.

Everything you need to know about crossing the line. Mostly.

Back when I was in film school, a lot of breath was expended on something called "the line." For those of you who have a better use for $80,000 than shoveling it at blowhards like me who are happy to tell you how to do what a lot of them can't seem to make a decent living doing themselves, here's a quick recap:

The line is an invisible boundary, beyond which the camera is never to venture. If it does, all sorts of bad things will happen, most of which involve an editor shaking his or head sadly and claiming there's no way to save your film.

There are a lot of complicated explanations for what the line is and where to draw it, but as with a lot of things, I find the simpler explanations better. So here's how I think of it.

Most scenes involve an interaction, and most interactions are conversations. Two people talking. That's your line.

If the camera is looking at Bob and Jeff in the wide shot, with Bob on the left and Jeff on the right, then when you get to the medium shot, guess what? Bob stays on the left and Jeff stays on the right.

When you go in for a close up, even if Jeff isn't in the shot, he's kept spatially consistent. So if Bob is looking at him, he's looking to the right.

What messes up a lot of people is that they misunderstand the concept of interaction. The apes in at the beginning of '2001, A Space Odyssey' are interacting primarily with the black monolith. So the line is between them and it.

Where this gets tricky is when there are multiple interactions in a scene. The thing to figure out is where the main interaction is and let that drive the line.

Let's say Miss Rutkowski is confronting a room of unruly third-graders. One end of the line goes straight through Miss Rutkowski, while the other end goes through the room of 8-year-olds. When Billy and Steffie pass a note, their line is between them. But you know how the line falls between them because you've established their screen relationship in the wide shot with Miss Rutkowski. So if Steffie is on the right of Billy in the wide shot, you keep her on the right when you come into the two-shot.

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, "But Brian, I want to cross the line. I want to shoot Steffie and Billy passing the note from behind, with the note in the foreground and Miss Rutkowski in the background."

So do it.

This whole line thing is just a way to keep from jarring your viewers. Keeping the main interaction consistent makes it easier for your audience to follow the story when you make a cut. If you have someone looking to the right in one shot and then to the left in another, your viewers are going to have a harder time following what's being said.

So if you want to shoot the note close up in the foreground, it's probably because you want to emphasize the note. You instinctively feel that the image of the note being passed is more important than the dialogue being said.

I'm okay with that.

Work against the light.

Provocative headline, huh? You’re probably wondering how I’m going to get out of this one.

Well I’m not. Because I’m not talking about emotional content. I’m talking about spacial relationships.

But before I get into that, a disclaimer: this entire blog is a generalization. If you know what you’re doing, you know that there are as many exceptions to the rule as there are episodes of ‘Star Trek’ in which Spock showed emotion.

Okay, on with the blog.

I can sum up the most important rules of cinematography in three words: Backlight, backlight, backlight.

Backlight, in case you’re not familiar with the term, means that the light is coming from behind your subject toward the camera. I’m talking about the implied source of all the light in the environment. When you’re outside, it’s the sun. Or moon. When you’re inside, it’s a window. Or a lamp. There can be more than one source of light, but generally, thinking of light in terms of a single source makes your film prettier and your life easier.

Two things you need to know about light: It travels in a straight direction and it bounces off of stuff. The reason those things are important is because light hitting an object will cause it to cast a shadow. And since one of the fundamental conceits of film is its voyeuristic nature, it’s a lot better to see the shadow of an actor than the shadow of a camera.

As for bouncing off of stuff, that’s what gives you ambience. Ambient light fills the shadows so you can see actors’ faces even if the source of the light is behind them.

One of the neat things you get with backlight is separation. Foreground objects don’t blend into the background as much as they do with front light. One of the things you lose is saturation. I like saturation, but I like separation more.

And I really hate seeing my own shadow in the shot.

When you’re inside, the direction of the light won’t change but its quality can. That’s why you’ll see DPs putting black tents over perfectly good windows, then blasting light in from under them. When you’re outside, both the quality and the direction of the light changes because Mr. Sun moves across the sky.

You need to plot out your day so that the direction you’re shooting in is generally toward the sun. Where I live, that means you turn to the right over the course of the day. After a while it becomes second nature, which can be a problem. The first time I shot in the southern hemisphere, I forgot that the sun goes the other way in the sky there. I worked out the order of the day in front of the entire crew under the presumption that we would turn to the right. And nobody said a word.

It was only after I noticed the DP gnashing his teeth that I took him aside and asked what was wrong. We’d never worked together, and he didn’t know whether I was simply being an idiot or had my own particular style that he was going to have to live with.

Turns out, to his relief, I was just being an idiot. And once I realized it, I rescheduled the day so that it made more sense.

If I’d been an asshole--as lots of directors feel the need to be--I would have reamed him for questioning my approach and stuck by the order that I’d established. But the way I see it, I lost less authority by admitting I’d made a mistake than I would have if I’d stuck to an idiotic path, pretending that I knew what I was doing.

Work against the light. Work with the DP. That’s not too hard, is it?