Scouting locations (and reflecting on their meaning)
The preproduction process includes many tasks, and one of them is scouting and ultimately securing filming locations. In this blog, author Leslie Grossman talks about her experiences choosing locations as well as the meaning of cinematic spaces in connection to the article Cinematic Landscapes by Chris Lukinbeal.
More than just spaces to film in
by Leslie Grossman
Lukinbeal (2009) breaks down the concept of cinematic landscapes according to J.B. Jackson’s metaphor, explaining that there are four functions that landscape can play in narrative film: “…place (an ‘organized place and time’), space (as ‘a well-defined space’), spectacle (as a ‘spectacular environment’), and metaphor (as a ‘dramatic production’ and ‘coherent action’)” (Lukinbeal, 2009, p.5).
As space, landscape is where the action takes place. The landscape is “minimized” and captured by the cinematic shot, so that the viewer’s attention is focused toward the social space of the actors (Lukinbeal, 2009, p. 6). Landscape as a place provides a sense of realism and grounds the film to a location’s regional sense of place and history (Lukinbeal, 2009).
Landscape as a spectacle can simply be something beautiful and visually appealing. It can introduce a sense of voyeurism and “encodes power relations within the gaze” (Lukinbeal, 2009, p. 11). The spectacle brings into question who constitutes beauty, who is gazing, and what is being gazed upon. As metaphor, meaning and ideology are appropriated into the landscape most commonly through attribution of human and social characteristics to landscape. In essence, this means trying to pass a cultural narrative as natural. An example of how to achieve this would be through stereotypes that link assumptions about cultural and behavioral characteristics to particular places (Lukinbeal, 2009).
I am a producer and camera operator of the Crestwood production team. We are producing a mockumentary pilot about a shift in power at Crestwood Gym when protagonist Kathryn vies for the role of General Manager after her father’s retirement.
Securing filming locations was one of our group’s greatest challenges because finding places that were free and accessible for our use was difficult. Since we are producing a mockumentary, the functions of landscape we have focused on the most have been place and space. We wanted to find locations that felt natural and not staged. This is primarily because one of our camera angles is supposed to be from the perspective of a home video camera that is operated by a 60-something year old man, the character of Kathryn’s dad. I think a more cinematic approach to the landscape during dialog-driven scenes would have taken away from the humor of our project. That said, the montage of Kathryn and Keith on the gym “adventure tour” and of Keith playing golf outside are two moments when landscape briefly becomes spectacle, adding variety to the filming style and inviting the viewer to momentarily look away from the characters’ faces and visually explore the cinematic landscape on screen.
During production, we focused on securing locations such as “the office” and “the gym.” We did not focus on setting the story in any one location; we filmed in Philadephia, but Crestwood is not necessarily set in any specific place. The one function I wish we would have focused on more, however, is metaphor, because I think it could have added another element of humor if we leaned into some cultural politics and local slang. In conclusion, I think we can use the information I learned from this article to understand the role of landscape in our Crestwood production. We have approached the landscape very realistically and viewed it primarily as the functions of space and place thus far. These functions work in the context of our pilot because we wanted the landscape to read as if all of the scenes were filmed in different rooms within the same building. By keeping the landscape a secondary focus of our project, we were able to establish this sense of cohesion without drawing attention to the fact that we filmed in three completely different locations.
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References:
Lukinbeal, C. (2009). Cinematic Landscapes. Journal of Cultural Geography, 23(1).
Image credit:
Photo by Paul Skorupskas, courtesy of Unsplash