 Hey, what is up? My name is Rubidium. Got something a little bit special for you today. We made a short film. Remember when we were at the lab there was all that craziness and there were these green vials. I remember the fire, the explosions, broken glass everywhere. Well, there were these green vials. Something that the madman was working on. They were glowing, almost breathing. I think they were alive. Stick around to the end of the episode to see the rest of that. The reason I went to all the trouble of writing, directing, and editing a short film is that I wanted to talk about two-person dialogue. How to shoot it, how to make it look good, how to make it work for you. So two-person dialogue makes up a huge portion of most films. I would say 70 or 80 percent of the typical feature film is two people talking in amongst all the action and car chases and explosions. It's information, it's exchange, it's character and story are revealed through dialogue. As a filmmaker, you spend a lot of time getting this kind of shot. Now, the kind of gold standard of two-person dialogue is to do an OTS on the single, meaning you have one person's face and in the foreground, you have just a little piece of the other person's shoulder. This gives depth to the shot because not only do you have background, but you have foreground. So your subject is sort of sandwiched between two other planes. It just adds a lot of dimension and adds a lot of polish to your final product. But there's an issue with this. The difficulty is that people never sort of stand or sit exactly where they are when they talk. The relationship between the two people in conversation changes radically as people sit or stand or move in or move out. And this creates all sorts of issues. The best way that I've found to solve this problem is to use a slider to have your camera mounted on a slider behind the second person. And it gives you the freedom to adjust your shot slightly as the actor acts and the distance between the two actors change. So let's jump to set and see what we got up to. We have the two actors staged at a kitchen table. I picked this location because I thought it had different type of background, books for JD and the depth of the living room for Rainer. We have a six by six half grid tape, a gaffer tape to the outside of the window with a big fresnel and super panel punching in to illuminate to basically give us this key. And I'm going to capture it from JD's side first. Then we're going to probably cheat the table over so we have more room behind JD to shoot Rainer's single. When she leans forward to make a point, she then blocks out JD's frame. So as the guy in the tripod, I would kind of have to be like either move the tripod over in mid shot, which doesn't work. Or sometimes you find yourself kind of like pulling the person in the frame back to try and get them out of your shot. The only real alternative with this is to have the camera hand held say on my shoulder or in my hand be allowing for her movement by just moving back and forth. But that adds unless you're really stable, you don't want to be doing this all day because you're going to add movement to your shot that you may not necessarily want. Rather than doing it that way, we're going to get rid of the tripod, bring in a slider and see what that gives us. Now I have the camera on a slider setup. It's the move over slider from Benro. It's carbon fiber. It comes with in a kit two flat packed tripods. It also has a flywheel, which adds inertia to your shot and makes the move and the slide smoother. So I'll roll on this again on the C200 till then. So now I can be on James, Rainer can move in and I can just slide across here very innocuously in a way that doesn't interrupt the flow. And then when she leans back, I can slowly drift across and take my OTS again. So I had each actor do about three or four takes of each side. There's a choice you have to make when you're shooting dialogue like this, either the person is quite choreographed and they do exactly the same thing each time. So that you as the operator can predict each move or you let them do whatever they want and do each take different and then try and find matching takes in post, which is riskier, but gives the actor more freedom and should give you a better performance. There's no right way and no wrong way. One one way just gives more emphasis to the final image and the flow of the cut. And the other way gives more emphasis to the performance and each director has to choose what they think is the priority. Now we're doing our master. So we have somebody cut to I originally had it locked off, but I realized that with the slider on the kitchen bench here, I can slide back and forth and sort of like get a little bit more dynamicism in the master. If I move the lights out and and light it in a slightly different way. So that's what we're going to do. Try try a moving master and be that have the camera move moves motivated by who's talking and where the where the attention is. These actors that we worked with absolute pros rena Guthrie and JD Brown, they were able to give really great performances that were subtly different each time and they were alive and fresh and really engaged. But they were similar enough that I was able to sort of work with them and kind of anticipate their movements forward and backwards. So there was lots of shots that I could use or couldn't use. But the reason I got them to do multiple takes was so that I was sure that I had at least one good take of each move. Once we had all the footage, I brought it into DaVinci Resolve, graded it with the crimson engine lots that I like to use that I developed for the C 200. And I sort of did a few little tweaks on their faces. I put a couple of power windows on sort of lighting in post. I put a couple of vignettes on to bring the background down. Once it was done with the footage and the grade, I outputted from Resolve into Premiere, which is where I put together my edit. And like I said before, it was a real joy to work with this footage. There was plenty of versions of every moment and it just sort of flowed. It's an awesome situation to be in to have good choices. You know, often when you're editing, you really have to edit around all the mistakes. So you have to find the one or two takes that you can get away with and that don't jar the audience. When you shoot like this on a slider and you're not having to cut around camera shake or bumps, then you have a lot more choice to pick the best take and not just the take that works. Hi Tom. Do you have a second? Sure. A second. Can I sit down? By all means. Remember when we were at the lab, there was all that craziness and there were these green vials. I remember the fire, the explosions, broken glass everywhere. People were shooting at us and we were running for our lives. I didn't exactly have time to take inventory. Well, there were these green vials. Something that the madman was working on. They were glowing, almost breathing. I think they were alive. Okay. They were alive. But they're gone. Everything burned. Yes, about that. Did the police ask you afterwards if you took something from the lab? I do remember. They were thorough in their search. Very concerned, as I recall. Fear of contamination. Yes, I do remember that. And? What? You asked me if I remember the samples and about how the police asked me about them. No, that's good. I'm really glad we got all that figured out. Why would you ask me about something if you didn't have something else to add? Yes, I do. The police asked me about the same thing. I lied. I hope you guys enjoyed that. I hope we showed how, by using a slider in your two-person dialogue scenes, you can get more control, more fluidity, hopefully making for better shots that up to better scenes and then, at the end of the day, a better film. Thanks very much for watching. I hope to do a bunch more of these time and resources permitting. Leave your comments below if you liked what we did. Hit the notification button so you get more videos from us. And we'll see you next time.