- Date
- Tue 30 Jun 2009 at 12:20
I couldn't quite believe it when I found out I would be working as production designer on Brink.
After a few production meetings, getting to know everyone and working on the designs I came down to London for a week to actually make the film. We had a couple of days to prepare everything and get all the props and set dressing that we needed and three days worth of filming. The day I arrived Dan was still adapting the script, I didn’t realise that the script would change, I think, right up until the day before we started filming. This meant I had to be prepared with lists and lists of everything we needed for each individual scene.
We got the majority of our props and set dressing from the skins props stores which is massive. I spent a day in London doing some manic shopping for lots of bits and pieces that had to be more specific to Brink. It was great being based in London because there are so many different places to find everything I needed from the markets to the high street.
The first day of filming we were up on Hampstead Heath where we filmed Dean drawing out his hexagram in chalk. Mitch, who works in the art department on skins, taught me about improving the frame. So we would look at the monitor to see what the camera was picking up and then sometimes rearrange things to make it look like a nicer picture but at the same time it had to still look natural so I spent some time arranging some logs, sticks and leaves up there! This was really interesting because quite often I would look at a scene through the monitor and it would look a fair bit different from the way it looked in real life.
The other thing we had to watch the monitor like a hawk for was continuity. Because we had to film the same lines and action from different angles for editing we had to be really careful that everything stayed the same. This wasn't so much of an issue in the scenes we were filming on the heath but inside Dean’s room and in the nightclub I really had to keep an eye on it and take photos of everything before we started to film so that I'd be able to reset the scene exactly as it was.
The next day we filmed inside Dean's room, I really enjoyed filming in here because there was a bit more designing and set dressing to be done. We basically took everything out of the room, rearranged it to suit the camera angles and the shots that Phil wanted to get and dressed it to make it look like somewhere Dean would live. I really enjoyed setting up Dean's pinboard full of pictures and symbols, it was one of my favourite props.
The final day we spent at the night club. Inside the club toilets was my favourite scene to design and shoot because we got to make such a mess! In real life the toilets are really clean and shiny but we attacked them by writing graffiti all over the walls with chalk pens and white board pens, so that we could clean it off again. We stained the walls with coffee and tea and threw wet lumps of toilet paper all over the place. We finished it off by dropping some empty cans and bottles on the floor, getting loads of perfume bottles, candles and the soap dispenser for the sinks and putting blue filters over the lights to make it look a bit creepier. It was great fun setting this scene up and watching it being filmed and it’s the scene I’m personally most excited about seeing in the final cut.
I think this was my favourite day of filming because I felt like I had learned from the day before what I was meant to be doing, like watching the monitor, resetting the props and having everything ready to do another take with, like the shot glasses and the pills. I felt as though I was getting into the swing of how everything worked.
It was really hard work filming Brink. We worked long hard days but I had an amazing time, I learned loads about what goes into the design and the making of a film on a real professional set and worked with a group of fantastic people. I still can’t quite believe that it all happened for real!
Helen
