Directing : On Set

Myself and Tom stood in for the actors as we tried to work out the shots and angles so that the actors weren't standing about.

Initially I had the idea that we would light the room ted with subtle shades of purple, however once I got on set and abandoned the idea switching to gold another colour I had in mind when I developing the piece. I felt the red would make the scene feel to surrealist and fabricated, also I wasn't sure that we had enough red to colour the characters and room how I wanted if I went down that route. The room already had a yellowish tint and so playing on that with the gold made the lighting a touch easier.

We tried some of the shots with the actors wearing there underwear and when Tom got the angle right it was convincing enough for people to believe they were fully nude. However in the later shots we had to have the actors naked for the shot to work, having spoke to both the actors prior to filming about doing a fully nude sex scene this wasn't a unexpected request, however all the crew had to make the actors feel comfortable before and during the filming, having George Dupays as a producer was great as he kept both actors in good company allowing the filming process to run smoothly.

Directing the actors in the sex scene was fairly simple, I showed the actors a shot list and storyboard draft so they understood what I was after. As both the actors felt very comfortable around each other it allowed us to get the shots efficiently, once i had all the shots that had been written on the shot list I was then able to gather extra shots, Tom having a vivid understanding of what I was after was able to get the shots without over direction from myself.

We used two 200 Kino lights to light the sex scene, I used gold and yellow gels to cover the lights, though there was a great difference in the two gels the blend didn't look unsuitable, due to the native ISO of the cameras being very low the lights had to be turned up very high however we could still achieve the desired look despite this. Once Tom got the shot set up I was able to light the shots and then confer with him after he had took a picture. Rather than lighting the actors completely I liked the shadow the light cast when lighting more from one side, a much more vivid look but it worked on this harrowing sex scene.

This is an example of how many of the shots were lit.

Steve setting up his sound equipment.

Originally we had asked for the single floor Mezzanine suite however despite our pre booking one of the staff members released the room and so we had to make do with the double floor room, which actually proved to better in some ways as the bottom floor could be used as a equipment floor and for the actors to take a break while myself and Tom set up shots.