One thing I find invaluable in our productions is a Shot Angle Sheet, created in pre-production. It's sort of like a storyboard but not. On a live action film set, you would have a full crew that includes a cameraman and script supervisor to ensure you get all your angles covered and that they will match up appropriately in an edit. But for us machinimist's, we gotta do that ourselves, and a shot angle sheet helps.
We create our sheet by going in world and setting up the rough shots we're thinking of using: a closeup, medium, medium wide, two shot etc, take stills of those shots and then bring them together in Photoshop or Word. We lay them out side by side so we can get a feel for how the shots could potentially work together in the edit as we cut from one angle to another. Such as from a close up of one character looking camera right, to a close up of the other character who is looking at them camera left.
During this process, we usual end up tweaking the shots a bit and adjusting the eyelines, and shooting new stills until we get a set of shots that we know will work (we'll cover eye lines in a separate post).
You could even go a step further with your stills and bring them into an edit and create animatics, but we find this shot angle sheet works just fine. Once it's time to shoot, we open up the shot angle sheet and use it for our shot reference for the day.
Here's a sheet I worked on recently, for one of our clients, shot with machinimist Ariella Furman. We had two characters sitting at a table in the company cafeteria. We decided to have them both sit on the same side of the table, as they were not eating lunch but working together, reviewing resumes of potential hires. We had a few more shots than what you see here, but for the most part, these were the major shots that needed to match.
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