Production diary 6: Extra scenes

These extra scenes are mostly towards the end of the trailer.

1. Alley scene

At the end of the trailer is a compilation of short clips to build dramatic tension. One of them is a scene in which the character is trapped in a claustrophobic environment (an alley) with a creature crawling towards him. It was important that the creature moved (it needed to crawl) and the only way to effectively do this was to get an actor (me) in horror makeup.

Here are some pics which inspired the alley creature. It is a bloody person (female) who is missing the lower part of their body and pulls her body forward by crawling.

 

 

For this scene, I covered an old yellow shirt in black and red paint and food colouring, to achieve a bloody effect. It was very messy and took a lot of colouring to cover all the cloth. I thought that yellow was a good choice since it would make the dark colours stand out. I covered myself in white makeup, eyeshadow (for bruising) and fake blood made from honey and food colouring. The crystallised honey had a great texture. I had to apply lots of it around my eyes. During the course of the filming, it started to drip down into my eyes and it stung really badly.

 

This was the trickiest scene to film for a number of reasons. Firstly, I wasn't completely happy with the way that the makeup turned out. I had to rush because it was getting dark and I knew that the quality of the film would decrease without light (which it did). I felt really messy under all that makeup and fake blood. It accidently went on some places (like the walls and the floor) and the ground which I had to crawl on. The ground was also dirty and unpleasant to crawl on. Another problem was that there were only 2 of us (me and the actor) so we had to take it in turns filming eachother. I had to wipe my hands before touching the camera, which is something I didn't initially think through.

I also underestimated how hard it was to crawl a good few metres using only your hands to drag your full bodyweight forward. I wanted to look like my body was cut in half, so I couldn't use my legs to move at all.

Since we were filming outside, there were many noises which the microphone picked up. This meant I had to completely cut out all the sound and edit voiceovers in.

Here is a high angle shot of the creature crawling. We didn't use this shot.

I didn't use this shot either because you can't really see it. It took us an hour to film all the shots and the sky was getting darker. We had to run in and get some torches at one point.

 

In the end, we made it work with the editing. Hours of preparation and filming for this scene was turned into a 3 second clip, but at least it looked effective. The footage turned out quite grainy, especially in comparison to the other scenes. But I was reluctant to re-shoot it because it meant doing the whole process again and that really didn't sound appealing.

 

2. Outdoor scenes

The compilation of clips at the end is mostly comprised of these scenes where the character is shown outdoors, running or hiding from something. This is what most horror trailers show at the end of their trailers. It creates mystery because we can't see what they're hiding/running from.

 

 

Each scene is shown for 1-2 seconds. They're mostly filmed in various places of my garden.

 

3. Walking downstairs

 This happens before the street scene. It's the stereotypical shot where the main character slowly walks down a creaky staircase. Footage used here is un-edited.  

 

4. Final shot

 

For the final shot, I used the Samara head. I just put the camera on it's tripod and lifted the head up slowly. I wanted more of her hair to be visible, but since I had my hands on her head, I had to use a black filter to hide this.

Although she is a blue/purple colour, she looks grey in this shot because I thought it fitted better with the other scenes. The repeated use of the grey filter created a continuous colour theme. Her original colour was too light in the footage.