Scene Study: There Will Be Blood
14 July 2008 in Blog | Comments enabled

Josh and I have mentioned several times on this blog the film There Will Be Blood. This was my favorite film of 2007. We both were blown away by the storytelling and filmmaking in that film. There wasn’t anything flashy about the movie. Just pure filmmaking.

It’s been a while since I’ve directed anything and from time to time, I like to do an exercise to keep me sharp and to add to my directing bag of tricks. Today I pulled out There Will Be Blood and did a scene study of two scenes. This is something I was taught to do in Film School. I find it an extremely useful tool.

After I pick a scene to study, the first step is to watch the scene. The second step is re-watch it and time it. The third step is re-watch the scene and count the number of cuts.

Then I divide the number of cuts into the length of the clip to get the average shot length.

(The typical action film made today has an average shot length of 3 seconds. The Bourne movies are much less. Spielberg’s shooting style is probably around 5 seconds and Shyamalan’s films are like 8 seconds per shot. We tend to go at Spielberg’s pace.)

After that, I start to dissect how the director covered the scene - the camera angles. At this point, I’ve watched the clip 3 or 4 times so I’ve stopped watching the story and acting and I’m taking notice of the angles. So I watch it again and try to spot which cuts are cutting back to shots already seen in the scene.

Then I make a list of all the setups and try to spot exactly what they do. For example, shot 1 could be - MS on Daniel -> Pans down to his shoes -> Dollys back.

So after spotting all the shots, I count them and compare that to how long the scene is. If it is an action scene or a scene where there is a lot of moving around, the scenes typically have more setups. If it is a dialogue scene, it will have fewer setups.

The last step is to draw a diagram of the set (from what I can tell based on the scene.) Then I’ll draw letters on the set marking each of the characters marks and their blocking. Then I’ll go back in and place a number and an arrow indicating a camera and what direction it is looking. So now I have a bird’s eye view of where each camera was in the set. This helps me to grasp various ways of shooting scenes.

On a side note, this is a great way of seeing the 180 degree rule at work. Most of the time, you’ll see all the camera angles on one side of the set looking the other way.

(Josh and I did a scene study of a dinner scene in The Aviator to help us understand how to shoot a table scene in Dangerous Calling. Spielberg did the same while filming Jaws. He had so much down time, he just watched old movies all the time and lifted scenes from them. If he can do it, we can too. Eventually you learn to make those scenes your own.)

The final step is to do an evaluation of what I have just discovered.

So here is an example of a scene study I did today.

(See the film before you read the rest. There aren’t any spoilers but you won’t know what’s going on.)

Scene - Daniel Plainview beats Eli

This scene takes place 1 hour and 12 minutes and 18 seconds into the DVD.
Length of the scene: 2 min 27 seconds
Number of Cuts: 17
Average shot length - 8.6 seconds
Number of setups - 10 setups

So this tells me the pacing of the scene is slower than most films. It also tells me that it took 10 setups to shoot, so they could have shot it in an afternoon as long as there weren’t too many logistical problems. The biggest problem I could see was the mud. If I were shooting the film, I’d have saved the last two messy shots to be the last two shots we shot. It seems intuitive but sometimes you have to shoot the end of the scene first. The final thing it tells me is that they cut back several times to pre-existing shots.

Shot list:
1) WS - Pipe - Eli walks in frame - pan up to reveal Daniel in distance
2) WS - Dolly with Eli walking left to right
3) WS - POV on Daniel - rough dolly forward at an angle
4) MS - on Eli - Dolly backward
5) MFS - POV on Daniel - rough dolly forward at an angle - dolly stops
6) MS - low angle up to Daniel -> Eli walks in -> dollys back as Daniel hits Eli -> pans down on Eli as he crawls away saying “You owe the church…”
7) MS - low angle up on Eli -> Eli gets slapped and falls -> camera pans down -> dollys forward as Eli crawls away - ends at the mud puddle.
8 ) MS - Daniel - low angle - dollys back - (Could be alternate take of 6 - looks like same setup that just didn’t pan down to Eli)
9) 2 Shot - ground level - workers in background - Daniel and Eli in foreground
10) WS - Eli in mud as Daniel walks away - still ground level

And my diagram of the scene:

Observations:

*The low angle looking up on Daniel makes him seem scarier and in control.
*The reverse starts as a low angle up on Eli. He’s a man on a mission. But before he can get going, Daniel knocks him out of the shot. The camera pans down as Eli takes his place on the ground. That’s exactly what is going on in the scene - Daniel putting Eli in his place. A beautiful way of telling the story with the camera. I usually don’t think that way. (This is why I do these exercises.)

So that’s how I do a scene study. I also did the scene directly following that scene where Eli beats up his father. But, I’m going to let you do your own scene study of that one. Post a comment and let me know what you learn.

And I couldn’t do a post on There Will Be Blood without saying - “I Drink YOUR MILKSHAKE!!!”