Direction Unit - Book Research

I was able to go to the library after a lecture and get some books on directing as well as how to film within a budget. The books I took out were 'Changing Direction: A practical approach to directing actors in film and theatre', 'Directing Actors: creating memorable performances for film and theatre', 'Directing: film techniques and aesthetics' and 'Beginning film making: 100 easy steps from script to screen.'

I found that 'Directing: film techniques and aesthetics', was very helpful for this unit, especially on cinematography and sound. There is a list of what is within cinematography, which helped with writing my directors statement, as I found this section quite difficult to write about. The section in this book that was very useful was the sound pages, as it went into depth with multi-layering and how to match dialogue, etc. Multi-layering was something I definitely wanted to look into, because when I did a rough copy of my film some of the scenes seemed to have more going on then others, so I wanted to find a way of adding separate layers in to even this out.

Beginning filmmaking, was my favourite book out of the lot I took out. It was useful throughout the process of filming. It is a great book for students who are starting to make films, and gives so many tips on how to use lighting, to help create different moods as well as guidelines on how to achieve different shots. The pages I looked at the most were the ones on camera angles and shots, as it gave me ideas on what I could shoot before I started filming. I like how this book went into detail on the different ways of using shots and angles, i.e. by using a low angle it gives the effect of the character looking more powerful.


Overall I was able to find something within each book to help out with my filming process as well as communicating with the actor. I will definitely be taking out the 'Beginning filmmaking' book out in the future I feel this will be very handy when creating my own short films out of uni.