The Beast - a good scene, a failed short movie (2000)

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.

The Poltergeist Movie: Part Two (Principal Photography)

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.