On Monday the nineteenth, after lots of pre-production that involved location scouting (Ramsay’s bedroom), casting (one of my friends (though, he is an incredibly talented actor – if he wasn’t we would’ve looked further, but luckily we didn’t need too) and finding many, many clocks and toothbrushes, we were finally ready to film.

 

Scripts printed and shot list complete, we arrived at our location early, planning on finishing dressing the set and start getting all the equipment ready for the shoot. We had searched for possible locations on airbnb, but had still decided Ramsay’s room was the best – but it wasn’t without limitations. One side of Ramsay’s room is essentially storage – and these shelves could not be moved (not that we could reasonably expect them to be). Therefore, we kind of had three walls that we could easily film on, and one fourth that was a little limiting. So we needed to move the bed across the room so it was next to the nicer cupboards (slash not covering a door) decided that as long as we were careful with our wide shots, we should be able to get away with not having the boxes on the top of the cupboards in shot. We also made the bed, finding a blanket to lay over the stripy sheets, and by the time we had done all of that, we got word that the majority of our crew was running late.

And our actor had already arrived (but as I said, he’s a good friend of mine, has grown up on professional sets and is more than capable of entertaining himself.

(In future, the crew call is still going to be earlier).

Already running thirty minutes behind schedule, we had to start reviewing our shot list to see what could be merged/excluded so we could catch up. Our initial list included a lot of quick cuts – as we thought this worked with the concept of time/Sid’s OCD – and we knew we’d probably have to loose these. Though we weren’t entirely sure what that meant for editing quite yet, the alternative was just not getting footage. We ended up with this long take right at the beginning that merged about five shots – and proceeded to not really review it before we moved on (though we were confident enough that we weren’t really missing anything).

Aside from that, a lot of the plans to shoot a wide establishing shot of each scene and then a series of close ups to subsidize it went out the window, and we ended up shooting the wide and then covering the majority of the scene with a single closeup, transitioning from object to object/face to face.

Rearranging the shot list was working relatively well – and realistically, we were not cutting out possibilities during editing, we were just changing them.

Which is cool.

But even though we had tried cutting back the shot list already, we started falling behind again, because we were so ambitious with our pace. We started having to merge even more scenes, but our crew and actor were still laughing, so we don’t think that we were too outwardly anxious.

The only result of this chopping and changing – which we realised once reviewing the footage – was that we hand’t been clear enough in conveying the chronology of the film to Matt, and to some extent his performance was uneven/he was more panicked then suddenly less panicked etc. Again, it wasn’t too bad, but may need some creative editing. There was another moment when we had Sid going to a corner, then in the next shot he’s standing next to Doc – again, just needs some creative editing (maybe that will end up better anyway, who knows).

Aside from our shot list being totally unrealistic for one day of shooting, we had one other minor oversight.

Matt’s costume is simple – a t-shirt and pyjamas. We even had spares in case something happened.

But Doc’s costume is a heavy cloak, hands, hair and a mask.

Which we put candles in so Doc’s eyes were more frightening.

Which meant Doc couldn’t see.

For the most part, that didn’t matter. Doc is mostly stationary, so we’d place him and then put the mask on (he did need to be dressed, as the hands rendered him almost useless), and the few instances that Doc moves, camera was able to pick up the slack caused by the inability to see, and it still looked great, just might’ve taken an extra take or two.

But one of our major scenes to film was the fight scene. In this scene, Doc is looming over Sid and Sid, with a surge of courage, asks him to leave him alone. Doc then starts chocking Sid, holding him against the wall, while Sid continues to plead with him.

Sid eventually gets a punch in, and then they fight.

Matt is a classically trained actor, and he knows how to do this safely. So did I. If Doc aims for Matt’s chest when moving to choke him, Matt is then able to guide his hand to his neck so it’s at a controlled speed. Then the punching is easy enough to cheat, and Matt being thrown across the room is (again) directed by him. But because Doc couldn’t see, he had a hard time advancing towards Matt, knowing where to stop, and then aiming at Matt’s chest.

 

Having a measured amount of steps could have worked, but we decided for safety, that we would have our assistant director kneel behind Doc and lightly push him forwards, and then tap when he needed to stop. Doc would then try to be consistent with where he puts his hand, and Matt would make sure that his chest was in the way so Doc’s hand would collide with it.

And absolute credit to Matt’s acting because it all looked so natural.

We were still very cautious about what was around Doc, because we wanted him to be safe, but the fight scene was definitely the most difficult to manage, but we were overall happy with the result. The nature of a fight scene does allow for some mistakes, as you’re expecting to have a few short cuts within it.

There was a few other interesting shots we took, as we wanted to have special effects. Including…

A scene where Matt is searching the wall with his torch, and he spots Doc, then whips back to see the wall empty. For this take, Matt stood beside the camera and directed the torch opposite. Sound didn’t matter in the scene, so we were able to speak to each other to coordinate the camera’s movements and Matt moving the torch. It was simple enough – we did two takes, one with Doc standing there and one without, and then planned to cut them together in the motion blur (for this, we also set the camera down to 30fps so there was bound to be enough blur).

Another scene where Matt walks across the room, ignorant to Doc’s looming figure. As he passes Doc, Doc vanishes. This was going to be done through the magic of editing and masking Doc out, but we had to get the two shots in the first place. Knowing that having Doc and Matt in separate shots would be the easiest to edit (as it’s then simply a matter of having Doc masked out, rather than trying to time Matt walk across perfectly twice), we put the camera on a tripod and made sure the room was set up perfectly. We then got a good minute of Doc standing in the corner, before cutting, removing Doc (and being careful that he didn’t knock anything) and then having Matt cross the room to pick up his torch. It was important that we did Doc first so the torch’s position didn’t after Matt had picked it up.

Another shot that was just harder to get than expected was Matt’s POV shot, where Doc looms over him. It was just unpredictable to get down to that angle and not have the lights and other things on the roof get in the way. Plus, it took a few tries to get Doc standing in the right place, as he’s blind (we just kept rolling and now have extra Doc footage, which can only be useful).

 

There was another shot where Matt was essentially directed to ‘loose his shit’. This was done at the end of the day as it involved fake blood being poured on his face. Matt was then sitting in a corner as he broke down, and the camera was placed on a gimble to follow him – we wanted that hand-held feel to build instability. Lighting in this shot was also hand held and harsh to create high contrast, a big difference between dark and light to reflect Matt’s unstable state of mind.

And because of the unpredictability of Matt’s movements, camera and lighting were lagging behind and quite chaotic – which only added to the scene. At one point, I started doing some weird movements with the camera, tilting it etc. because we already had about six minutes of more basic footage, so it didn’t hurt to get the extra stuff.

Another shot that proved to be difficult was the one where Matt is hitting himself, and then we pull back to revel Doc standing in the mirror. Positioning Doc was easy enough, and Matt managed himself, but the camera was another story.

RMIT does not loan out sliders, and being asked for a dolly was met with surprise. The dolly had already been tested, but struggled on the carpet, but given there was no other option we had to push forwards with that. During this shot, we pull back as smoothly as possible (and cannot use any zoom as it raises aperture too much) and, in the perfect shot, reveal Doc standing there. But the dolly kept hitting ruts and the movement wasn’t smooth, plus, it would move off to the side and we continued to fail to get the shot we wanted. We tried a sandbag to try to weigh it down, and were able to somewhat improve it by having two people on movement. The take also involved Matt freaking out, and was taken at the very end… we didn’t want to burn him out.

We were quite happy with the final take, even though it wasn’t perfect. But aiming for perfection just wasn’t realistic, and hopefully this will allow for an adjustment.

 

The other thing we did was play a metronome for Matt (set to 60 bpm), so he could do everything in time to the tick of the clock. It was a hard task for him but worth it, and he managed quite well.

Possibly the best thing about the shoot was that everyone left in a really good mood, and after a brief networking sesh (‘add me on Facebook’) we all went on our way, happy with our day of filming.