The world of non-commercial film and A-V |
Events Diary | Search | |||
The Film and Video Institute | Join us on Facebook |
The inspiration behind Groupie |
||||||
I’d done a few short films by this time but these were
typically focused more on visual story telling with very
little dialogue so I thought I’d go the other way and never
being a person to do things half hearted ended up with a
ten minute monologue.
Also not being someone after an easy life I wanted to do the whole thing as one continuous take.
There’s a lot of drawbacks to shooting in one continuous take. It’s not something you can save in the edit, the actors have to be on their game from start to finish. If there’s something you like in one take and something from another you can’t cut between them. Stephanie and I met up for a couple of rehearsals and would cut the material up into sections to work through and develop. The night of the shoot was the first time we actually did the whole script all together. We did 3 takes on the night and the one in the film is take number 2. I felt quite early on while filming the take that it had a little magic about it and then spent the next five minutes sweating under the dread that the batteries might run out seconds before the end. Groupie was shot on a GoPro camera strapped to the actor playing Channing’s head (Tom Clear). GoPros aren’t really meant for narrative filmmaking but for cycling, snow boarding and extreme sports but it felt like the most authentic way to pull off the POV (point of view) style and I couldn’t afford anything too flash. Sound was recorded on a handheld ZOOM h4n device and we had a couple of softbox lights pointed at the ceiling to bounce some extra light down under the guise of the normal room light. It was filmed in my parent’s spare room.
Making Groupie inspired my next project which is also done in the POV style and is a no budget horror feature called POV which we’re hoping to get finished in the next few months. In retrospect Groupie turned out to be a bit of a trial run for filming in this format. I’m really proud of Groupie. It has had a nice reaction from people thus far and hopefully others will like it too.
Richard Anthony Dunford
Share your passions.
Share your stories.
|