During my first year of the Production Design course at NFTS, we had a group project in collaboration with the Directing Fiction and Cinematography students. It was the first time we all properly met and worked together, so it was a great project to have early in our film school journey.
I was paired up with an amazing team consisting of Director Oscar Simmons and Cinematographer Ciara Rigney. Our “buddies” for this project were my colleague Production Designer Will Mansell, Director Olivia Owyeung, and Cinematographer Emmy Ren.
We had one day to design, one day to construct, one day to shoot, and £50 (which we ended up not even using— thanks NFTS recycling!)
Let’s go step by step through the process of this crazy, but very fun project —
1. Design Development
Our assigned word was ‘depression’, which actually was a bit of a bummer initially because it was the total opposite of the excitement I was feeling to get started. Eventually though, as we began to discuss ideas and concepts, the word became more and more interesting.
We quickly came up with the idea of feeling trapped inside a box. Within this box, our character, played by Jessica Flood, would want to escape through openings, or light could poke through. Despite these efforts to escape, the character would still be trapped or at times, stay inside the box willingly.
Below is a conceptual piece depicting a chaotic environment inside a box. We ended up adding pieces of papers and drawings all throughout the walls to give the space a bit of character as the film goes on.
Concept made using Procreate.
2. Construction
I had about a day and a few hours to gather as much cardboard as I could. I visited NFTS recycling, posted on the NFTS forum for any extra boxes people had, and even went to the bin. Hey, it worked out AND we were underbudget— imagine that!
Below is a sketch depicting the main idea for the structure. We had some wooden columns provided by the carpentry team which worked as our primary structure. I had some fishing line that I then tied to each column as shown in the sketch. This ended up serving as the secondary structure in which the carboard would hang from.
Below are the only two photos I have of me and Will (check out his Instagram!) constructing the set before the boxes went up.
Constructing the set for “BOX”
Director Oscar Simmons and Cinematographer Ciara Rigney inside the set.
When we started to build the set though, we realized fishing line wasn’t enough to hold up the cardboard.
Thankfully, the carpentry team was able to provide us with long pieces of wood that we were able to put all along the top perimeter (you can see me placing a piece of a wood beam in the top left photo above.)
We stapled pieces of cardboard to those top beams of wood, and the rest of the cardboard we were able to staple or tape to each other as we moved our way down the walls.
How did we keep the pieces of cardboard on the floor in place? STAPLE GUN! it was quite an adrenaline rush stapling the entire floor minutes before shooting started.
All of the loose book pages and drawings were provided by Oscar our Director and a lot of his colleagues in the Directing Fiction Course. It was definitely a team effort!
3. Experimentation
360 Degree Shot
Oscar and Ciara were teammates that were not afraid of trying new things. They wanted to shoot from above, have a 360 degree shot, play with a mirror shot, try different distorting lenses— all creative ways to learn as much as we could from this project.
This shot was very fun but very stressful as we had only one chance to make it work!
Cinematographer Ciara Rigney practicing the 360 degree shot with directing student Olivia Owyeung in the wagon in place of the actress.
360 shot final result.
Mirror Shot
Olivia served as our actress’s (Jessica Flood) counterpart for this shot. She was right next to Ciara and mirrored every move Jessica did. The result being a very cool effect in which the audience was the mirror looking back at our character.
Behind the scenes photograph of “mirror” shot.
Experimental Lenses
Another tool Ciara used to portray anxiety and an overwhelming sensation was using different lenses that distorted the image. Ciara followed the actress around as she tried to make sense of the space and make it her own with her drawings.
4. Final Thoughts
This project was a great experimental film to start our collaborations with Directors and Cinematographers. My team really embraced the challenge of the tight schedule and came up with ways of testing things out and learning as much as we could.
The entire aspect of having pieces of the set fall in the middle of a shot was terrifying, but this was the project we were free to test things out. In the end, I can say that I learned way more from this small and quick project than I have in other “bigger” projects with more budget.
