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LITTLE BIG MOVIE LITTLE BIG MOVIE
Chris Seager BSC on the challenges of low-budget filmmaking
Being a low budget movie (£1.3m), decisions were made early on in the films prep that we would shoot Super 16mm rather than 35mm. A DI route
was already established within the budget, so Dan and I
decided that to
“shoot on Super 16mm with a DI would give us the genuine gritty grainy feel that we wanted and also enable us to manipulate the film’s colour and contrast to our advantage.
It so happened that many of the
film’s interior loca-
tions were tight and
shooting on Super
16mm cameras gave us infinitely more scope to shoot within these small rooms.
The DI was done at Men From Mars with Adam Christopher our trusty colourist, using their Northlight scan- ner and grading on the impressive Filmlight – Baselight 4. We only had five days to grade but we managed to carve out a look that we were impressed with. The film out was done at Soho Images with only a couple of changes on the IP/IN stage being necessary.
With hindsight, looking back on the experience of shooting Straightheads, we could, of course, have done with a bigger budget, but you can argue that on any movie real- ly. Whether it’s a £2m or a £40m movie you find yourself hitting the ‘empty
fuel gauge’ sooner than you think. What we did with Straightheads
was to push our allotted money into the critical areas. For Dan and I, we desperately wanted the forest to have a life, to play its part in this story to
its full. We stylistical- ly agreed to change steadicam to hand- held and were able to convert our steadicam money to cherry pickers for our ‘forest’ night shoots. We also shot inside cars rather that using low-load- ers and spent that money on our night shoots too.
Did we achieve our goals? Well, by
the skin of our teeth we did. Low budg- et films are exciting; they live on the edge of existence. They challenge you to the extreme and to be honest, you have to be sure that you understand the risks and, more importantly, gen- uinely feel that they are achievable within the limited budget. Then, you just push right up to that limit and insist that every last penny goes onto that screen.
It’s like reaching for the stars, you can never touch them, but, boy, it’s such a great feeling to get so
close and when you do, you
know that you’ve pushed the
movie into becoming bigger
than was ever intended.
Fujifilm Motion Picture • The Magazine • Exposure • 15 ”