Figuring out how to script the songs effectively has without doubt been the hardest aspect of my role. I had plenty of hints and tips from all different directors, and spent lots of time researching how to do it properly online, with the BBC guide, but I think I'm going to need to use aspects of all of them and create my own, in order to figure out the way that best suits me and my camera team.
First of all I started by getting all of the songs we are having in the show, and getting a good recording of each of them with the correct lyrics. Each song took me a day and a half to break down ( A lot more than I thought) The process started by listening to each song a few times to really feel the music. I then broke the song down with bars in between each of the lyrics, so for example The Soundcasters opening looks like this:
12 3
1 + 2 + 3 + 4 +
1 + 2 + 3 + 4 +
1 + 2 + 3 + 4 +
1 + 2 + 3 + 4 +
Who do you think that you are,
cause your boy mate has a car,
does it mean that you can flirt with him
1 + 2 + 3 + 4 +
I come to see you one night,
Its like your wanting a fight,
By pinching and poking at him
1 + 2 + 3 + 4 +
I don’t think that you know
That we had propositions too
1 + 2 + 3 + 4 +
This helps to show me the breaks we have to show other instruments, whilst the singer is not singing, and how long this will last for. Abbi my PA will be counting the bars throughout the song, so I can hear the beats I need to work too, and inform me what section is coming up next.
I then needed to create another collum, with the seconds breakdown, so I could listening to song, pause it when I heard a drum solo, and correspond that to the time on the script so I knew exactly where to script in a CU of the drummer, as counting the bars for this is impossible.
I listened to the song over and over again, and wrote in another column at each bar what was happening in the song, i.e. Singer? Bass? Guitar solo etc. From this I worked out my camera floor plans, and figured out which camera could cover what.
Then I assigned a shot and camera, to each piece of action for every bar. After practising with this in rehearsals, it became clear, that scripting a shot for every bar, with the best will in the world, simply does not work. Here's a video showing the first attempt of working to script of standing on giants, and you can see that the timings change, which could happen on the record, so we needed to figure something else out;
This is a video I used of Standing on Giants to help me script
It was impossible for me to look at the script and cut and change positions of cameras every couple of seconds, therefore I decided to leave in the script exactly what the action was, and only script the opening and closing of each song, and the rest As Directed, with a few scripted segments in between.
However on the record day everything went out of the window, and I felt more comfortable, standing up dancing, cutting to the beat, and directing the cameras with what I was feeling at the time. This created a lot more energy, and creative freedom. I felt confident just concentrating on the song, and listening out for sections in the song and creating how I wanted it to look visually. I felt this worked the best and although I did so much prep before, I'm glad I learnt the best way for me. Here is the script I worked from on the day, but as I said, the songs were completely AS DIRECTED in the end :)
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