CREWING FOR MOVIES – AN EXPERIENCE

When I first started making movies, I was inexperienced, so I didn’t realise how difficult making short movies would be. So I would write these epic, intricate, sweeping, complex stories. Then I would shoot the first few frames and I would find that I couldn’t actually shoot what I had envisioned. I had to improvise. Stay sharp, keep moving.

One of the short movies I made as a student was called The Beast. It was about a deformed man who could control the essence inside water. So he could control water and through water, could control anything that used water. I even at one point had him cause a tsunami filled with razor blades. Imaginative, yes. Practical, no. I had one shot where I was going to drench my two flatmates and throw a bucket of razor blades at them. They weren’t too keen and I was pretty sure it wouldn’t show up properly on camera – even when I swapped the razor blades for pieces of silver-painted bits of cardboard and promised to throw the water in front of them, instead of over them. This looked even worse than my original intentions would have.

The one really nice thing about this movie was a scene that wasn’t all that important in the script. It was a scene where the title character smoked a joint in his hut and went a little nuts, excited by his new-found powers. The first thing that went right was the lighting. I wanted to use natural light and I found a dirty laundry at my mate’s flat, behind their house. It was cramped and dimly lit on a hot Summer day, it was perfect. I took the scene from the script and wrote a shooting script to describe the visual storytelling frame by frame, moving the camera with the plot.

The cramped nature of the location stunted the camera moves, and this restriction was a catalyst for my creativity. I prepared the “joint” for the actor and his delight fed the scene. There wasn’t much for the actor to do. It was one beat in many frames. The only weakness of the scene was the wig I gave him to wear, because I wanted the Beast to have long, shaggy hair.

I ended up deleting this scene accidentally, so it’s gone forever. But I watched it on a television screen after we finished editing the film together. Other students complimented me on the lighting and the professional look of the scene. I hope to find a similar flash of inspiration/competency in filmmaking again some day.