Shock! A New Horror!

“He Sucks”

Hi everyone, welcome to my reflective blog post!! Today we will start off by diving into the creative process of an all-female production team mini horror film ‘He Sucks’. I am lucky enough to be a budding cinematographer, lets embark on the journey of crafting this challenging and fun project.

So, pre-production is the crucial phase where every detail comes to life on paper, this is the part Jazmine (our director) creates her dream storyboard and communicate with me to design the best possible way of making her vision a reality. Jazmine was very keen on making the film in black and white which led to extensive discussion on how abouts we are to execute that. Whether we are filming in black and white on the day or colour tuning it afterwards. My priority was to translate the director’s vision into visual language, ensuring that every frame would resonate with the desired tone of fear and suspense. We ended up deciding to use chocolate sauce as fake blood and colour grade in post-production as filming in black and white isn’t very functional due to the everchanging lighting and angles in each shot.

We had multiple group meeting to decide the days on set as we do not want to leave the shoot last minutes hence, we did our shoot first week after our team meeting and condensed the shoot into only 2 whole days, Special thanks to Holland’s auntie for lending her house for our shoot which saved us so much time on deciding location for the film.

Moreover, me, Jazmine and Holland sat through all the auditions in one whole day, and we all agree on the same actors to be our James and Mary. They both have that mysterious goth look that matches Jazmine’s vision. The choice of our actors made the whole film alive as now we finally can visualise how each scene will turn out and work on wardrobe design for them.

The night before the shoot, I was actually very nervous as I feel so much pressure on my shoulders. I am a cinematographer and if I make any mistakes during the shoot, I will delay the whole production. I ended up spending hours the night before rewatching different camera tutorials on YouTube to try have an idea. I remember ringing Jazmine really late at night as I was inspired by a tutorial that I watched, it was a trick of placing very bright light in a small room and shoot from outside the room to achieve that strong contrasted look when the actor is standing right in front of it, we actually was keen on using that but we weren’t able to do so in the end due to us running super late to schedule.

Overall, our team had great communication and spread our workload evenly! I had a great time in this process.