You Are It - MAKING OFF

Roles: writer, storyboardist, camera operator, lighting director, director, editor

This was the first assignment of the year: get working on the camera and shoot a short film of a minimum 10 shots with a character doing the Kubrick's stare - you know, that stare, head a bit down, eyes straight to the camera.

I started working on it, then I got Covid and was off for two weeks. I feared I would have a lot to catch up once back, but everything went well. I finished my storyboard and shot list quickly and could shoot one Friday (the corridors scenes in the morning, the studio scene in the afternoon), with the help of Warren (him again!) for the lights, and two acting students. I edited it the following Friday and delivered the link to the final video before the deadline.

I can't quite remember how I decided to do a game of tag. I found it would be quite fun to turn it into something a bit more strange and maybe dangerous (for the character trying to escape) to finally reveal it as just a game. But was it?

I wanted to take advantage of the red and blue gels with the Rotolights, but the colour was not that visible in the corridor, mainly because of the bright light we couldn't turn off or down. I wondered about how I could do it in edit and finally chose to use coloured filters. I think I am going to learn how to change the light around specific characters in edit at some point. It would be a very useful thing to be able to do.

I composed the music on GuitarPro  8, which has a good sound bank (if you ever used GT5 for example, you might remember how horrible the sound was). The music fades in from the moment they are in the studio, to put the emphasis on the ineluctable fate of Red. We're reaching the end, Blue is getting closer.. I also edited the sound to remove parasitic noise and off screen voices that could be heard in the corridor.

All in all, it is a very simple short made of 14 shots. Josh is very good at Kubrick-staring, in my opinion.  Devun did a very nice prey.