Something that I have been struggling to fully grasp during my work under Hassan Mohammed Enany is the art of effectively staging a dialogue-heavy scene so that it looks natural. This piece was motivated by a sudden revelation I had while rewatching the movie adaptation of Avatar the Last Airbender, one of my favourite animation series of all time, for improvement ideas. The production is almost universally reviled both as a failed attempt at recreating the charm of the original and as a terrible movie in and of itself. However, one thing that drew my attention was how odd some of the dialogue scenes were filmed, which only served to make the interaction even more wooden. So, without further ado, this edition of the Hassan Mohammed Enany primer to filmmaking will tackle editing and filming techniques for dialogue.

One of the thing most specialists emphasise is the fact that, due to the nature of the often tight framing you’ll be working with, there is a lot more direction needed than you might think. Though these are the ultimate character moment, where your actors have their chance to shine, every single movement has to be contained within the frame and to convey the point of the scene accurately. Under the Hassan Mohammed Enany production label I have worked on a variety of documentaries, where the aim is to let the people talk freely so this amount of micro management does not come naturally to me. However, in the interest of advancing as a filmmaker, it’s important that I learn how to carry this out.

One of the things that immediately stood out to me in the aforementioned Avatar movie was how there was often a strange internal inconsistency within the same scene. While variations in angles, framing and the like can be used to show differences in personality and attitude between the characters, there was nothing of the sort intended in the specific scene. The Hassan Mohammed Enany preferred technique of over the shoulder framing for casual dialogue is used in a short dialogue scene between Katara and Aang at the beginning of the movie.

One of the first things everyone learns in film school is that keeping the frame size roughly similar maintains the illusion that the characters are occupying the same space and are looking at one another. It seems like such a blatantly obvious thing to miss, but the differences in size within the same scene, paired with some bizarre camera locations (Katara’s shoulder is visible in the frames while Aang’s is not), only serve to confuse the viewer and remind them that they are watching a movie instead of immersing them. In my mission statement on the Hassan Mohammed Enany Productions blog I have explained that I am interested in postmodernism but I would like to remind viewers that these tricks only work in the context of metatextual works. In this case, they seem amateurish and misplaced.