Panacea

So kicking off this blog with my most recent work. In some respects this post will act as a template for future project updates. Please let me know of any changes/improvements you think are necessary.

Here is what happened from behind the scenes while working on my latest short film 'Panacea'. Panacea is my last project as my first year studying a Film degree at university.

Project Name: Panacea

Format: Short Film

Synopsis:

In an alternative future, society is at the point that everything is Government owned. People included. Very few civilians have managed to escape the government drones, one man very nearly succeeds. Living in a secluded forest a man; obsessed with the 'old times' collects remnants from said time. One day he is 'foraging' through scraps when he is ambushed by two drones. He is captured and taken to high command, an office designed to neutralise people who look back to the past (before the government took total control). He is interrogated. Could he be the last surviving member of the Old Times?

Panacea started out vastly different from the end result. Our thought process originally was to produce a short film that included some trippy visuals and used little plot. We moved away from this to more of a period drama. We liked the trippy visual side of our idea but found it hard to come up with a film without some plot.

From period drama we took a complete 180° and we began brainstorming a more… futuristic idea. I would say it's futuristic in more if a dystopian way as we wanted to keep it routed in the real world. An alternative reality so to speak.

I started off by collaborating with other members of the team to create a mood-board. I'll explain the screenshot below. Our mood-board contains; the types of shots we wanted to use, colour schemes, locations as well as inspirations from other films/TV shows/images. We knew we wanted to have some futuristic henchmen so I took inspiration from Marilyn Manson's Dope Show music video and took a few images from it. The video was also helpful for close up shots of someone getting manhandled by orderly's. We have got some images from forests and forest huts. We found a lovely image of Robin Williams with a beard! Took some more dystopian inspiration from the Welcome to the Black Parade music video. And with that the mood-board was complete.

While the mood-board was being put together the script was also taking shape. At this point I must have a little disclaimer: I didn't write the script, I merely added ideas and opinions. As with all scripts one page equals one minute of screen time. Having little dialogue proved a challenge as we had to describe everything in detail. What happens, how it happens, when it happens etc. From the extract from a cut scene you can see how in the majority of the page are simple descriptions.

The script itself was cut down a tremendous amount; we has a lot of unused idea and concepts which sadly had do go. Mainly due to the time constraints of it being a five minute film. It would have been completely possible to draw out the idea into a feature length film.

Once we had the locations, costumes and props all sorted it was time to shoot. We had two days to get the principal photography completed which luckily was the only shooting we did in the end.

Day one of the shoot took place in a local forest. It was a great location with a full 360 environment which we utilized. We found a clearing which we were able to use for the majority of the shots due to the fact we could place a camera anywhere and it looked like a different location. On the odd occasion a member of the public would walk past the crew and get a little nosy which was to be expected. One older gentleman started asking questions while the camera was rolling but he had a cute dog so we let him off.

With the bulk of the scenes taking place in the forest, day two of the shoot was a lot less stressful with more time to focus on dialogue. Everything shot on day two was based in one room (and a corridor). We had lighting rigs as well as a small space to work in, we wanted a small space to make the scenes more intense. We forgot about how awkward it was to shoot bearing in mind we had both actors and crew to fit in there!

As I previously mentioned, we had planned to have half a day filming any pick ups we needed but luckily we got everything filmed in the two days. We went straight to the edit. My department.

Editing Panacea wasn't too difficult as most of it is a conversation between the main characters. A simple back and forth. Cut cut cut. I was tasked with editing the interiors and the title sequence, we had another editor for the forest scenes because it gave the film some contrast, two different editing styles for two different locations.

The bulk of the editing was done within 24 hours, we had a crew screening about 5 hours before the deadline so that we could all input any other ideas into the film. It was at this stage we added the title sequence and any other little tweaks to the edit.

And after months of hard graft, Panacea was complete. We had a small screening for it for the other Film Students on our course and it was relatively well received, no one booed us off!

Sorry this was such a long article! I hope you found it interesting to go behind the scenes on Panacea and rest assured I'll have more updates in the not so distant future.

Keep telling stories,