CREWING FOR MOVIES 3 – AN EXPERIENCE

On day one of the shoot, our SFX guy had done some research and had found out that cooked pumpkin-mush mixed with red food colouring can give the effect of blood and guts. We mixed the red food colouring with some blue, to darken it. I cooked a pumpkin, and on set we separated the mash – this was a little tricky. I had boiled the pumpkin myself and it was still a bit hard.

We ended up with some gross looking stuff that was going to be a projectile shot out from the drain pipe of the sink. We couldn’t take the sink apart to perform this effect, so we relied on tricky camera angles. There were other sequences we needed to shoot that day as well. And we had run out of actors. I asked my flatmate to fill the void, mainly because I felt that anyone can act in a pinch. Not because I thought he was particularly dramatic or photogenic – neither of which he was.

I soon discovered just how difficult it is to try and force a square peg into an acting opening. He couldn’t remember his one short line. He couldn’t take direction. He couldn’t follow simple suggestions. Even when wound up, he refused to use his emotion for the performance, when the camera was on. He was the worst actor I’ve ever worked with, and I wasn’t even directing, so mine was a fairly objective opinion.

However, we ended up with some semi-usable footage. To fill the space of the inciting incident, the catalyst responsible for bringing forth the poltergeist (not that having one was mandatory) – we decided to use a seance. Our SFX guy built a Ouija board. It actually looked pretty good.

When we met again at the second set to shoot the first few scenes leading up to the seance, I had brought with me some extra equipment. A skateboard for a tracking shot. And a floodlight, for dramatic lighting.

We shot the sequence where one of the characters wakes up, gets out of bed and interacts with the flatmates, just to set the calm of the scene opening. At the end of a day’s shooting we had some pretty half-decent footage. However, when I checked the light I realised that, having set it up on the floor, the heat of the light had burned a hole in the carpet. I apologised to the location’s inhabitants and we quickly escaped. Had I to work with those lights again, I would purchase some rigging to stand the light off the floor.