MEST4 Preliminary Exercise: Recreation examples

A shot-by-shot recreation is a an excellent test of your imagination, planning and technical skills. 

You need to choose an appropriate 30-second scene, plan out each shot carefully and then shoot and edit it exactly the same as the original. There are plenty of examples of shot-by-shot recreations on YouTube... here are a selection:

Fight Club 'Hit me' scene recreation:



Original scene (poor quality):




Friends opening titles recreation:



Original Friends titles:

 

Michael Jackson Thriller recreation:



Michael Jackson Thriller original:




You'll also find plenty of examples online of comedy or parody shot-by-shot recreations. It's unlikely your recreation will be a comedy (unless your Critical Investigation is on comedy or similar) but they are very entertaining and quite useful in terms of seeing how each shot is recreated faithfully.

Here's an excellent parody that followed someone losing a Fantasy Football bet. The screens are side-by-side to give you a great indication of how a shot-by-shot recreation needs to include perfect mise-en-scene - particularly location, props, costume and actor movement.

Sia – Chandelier recreation (lost bet parody):



There are also plenty of 'homemade' trailers and clips that also follow the shot-by-shot recreation model. These take big-budget Hollywood scenes or films and recreate them at home using puppets or budget costumes and locations. Again, it can be useful to see these to get an idea of how the framing of shots is the most important aspect of the recreation.

Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1 homemade trailer:




And the original Hunger Games trailer:




Print recreation

If you are planning to use print for your linked production, you need to recreate one page of A4 from a professional media text that is similar to what you will be creating. You will need to arrange a photoshoot to produce the original photography and then design the page on Photoshop. Here's an example from Amrit who recreated the front cover of Vogue magazine last year.

Recreation deadline: Wednesday 31 January