ABSTRACT
In film, you can also create a composite space by editing shots from different locations together to look like one place. In Book of Days, my featurelength film shot mostly in a medieval village in southern France, one scene took place in the cave dwelling of a “madwoman” who lived outside the village. When we originally storyboarded the scene, I thought it would be effective to shoot everything on location in the real cave as a medium-shot, in contrast to some of the extreme close-ups in other parts of the film. Back in New York after the French shoot, I realized that the cave scene lacked intimacy, so we built a facsimile of the cave wall in my downtown loft and shot matching closeups of the action that we had filmed in France. We also shot additional footage in a tunnel in Central Park, to create the transition between the cave entrance and the cave itself.
