Fade in… beautiful music plays as we see the feet of a little boy, tip toeing down the stairs. In the kitchen, the boy starts to prepare breakfast. His little hands carefully spread jam on a slice of fresh toast. He takes a bite, smiling as if it’s the best tasting sandwich in all the world. Cut to packshot: our jam jar sits in the foreground, with the boy out of focus in the background. Your typical commercial right?
This example, just as many kid’s commercials, revolves around the perfect close-up of a ‘box office smile’ from the child. And that’s the shot that gets you hired as a children’s director. To achieve it, there are a variety of tricks in your toolbox. One of them is extremely effective: don’t use the kid at all.
Yes, the use of stand-in’s can be a crucial tool, with a wide use. First of all, during the prep of a shot. Why spend your little actors’ (usually limited) concentration on standing still for setting lights? Add to that the strong chance that a moody crew member will unknowingly put off the kid, and this situation becomes ten times harder. Better to use a crew member (maybe even yourself) as a stand-in and bring in your young talent at the very last moment. There’s an added benefit to this. When your talent finally does arrive on set, everything is new, which usually leads to more genuine reactions.
Secondly, stand-ins can be very useful in insert shots too. Remember the close-ups in the example? The hands carefully spreading the jam could be the hands of a stand-in. I once shot a commercial with a little girl who was so energetic that standing still for an extreme close-up was basically impossible. We were shooting in a park, with loads of background extras. Luckily one of them was a father with a daughter roughly the same age as our actress. We put her –quite literally- in the shoes of our actress and used her for the shot.
But why stop there? I use stand-in’s all the time for packshots. Take the one in our example: packaging in focus in the foreground, main character out of focus in the background. But did you notice the kid in the background isn’t the same? Of course not, he’s out of focus so you can’t tell. But this saved me from having the main child on set for an extra few hours, because setting up pack shots can be quite the tedious process… He can escape this, and be all the fresher for our ‘box office smile’ money shot.
Nothing is more volatile than a kid’s focus and concentration. So we better treat it like a precious resource. Use it sparingly and preserve it for when it really counts.