The Process: Part II — Pre production and workshops.

Melisa Visca
Aug 25, 2017 · 4 min read

Over the last couple of months my crew and I have been lucky enough to take part in numerous workshops through the pre-production stage of our short film ‘Hardened’, to help further our understanding and skills in the film making process.

‘Hardened’ is the story of Russel (50’s), a father and concreter working day-to-day as a foreman. Despite having recently separated from his wife of twenty years, Russel still holds hope of his wife allowing him to return back home. This may not be possible, unless he can overcome years of emotional detachment from his wife and teenage son.

The workshops that we took part in were constructed and utilised in a way to also further advance our project through the pre-production stage.

It’s really interesting reflecting on the discoveries that I made personally in the workshops about my role as director and the discoveries that we made as a team.

I have been struggling for the last couple of weeks on what I would talk about in this blog because I didn’t want to just reiterate the workshops themselves. BORING… but reflect on some of the discoveries we made for Hardened.

To be honest, everything learned in these workshops reflects the way we worked individually and as a team throughout our production.

Our Directing workshop was taken by Jordan… (Jordan’s bio)

We worked on our script with actors in the directing actors workshop before we started most of our pre production and it was fascinating to see one of the scenes on it’s feet with actors that obviously hadn’t been apart of the process as of yet. We made some great discoveries on what worked in the script and story and what didn’t when the scene was ‘up on its feet’ which prompted Jordan (our writer) to rewrite the scene with the new discoveries that was made from the workshop.

I guess this is the great thing about having rehearsals prior to filming. You get to see if what is on the page, works when it comes alive.

On top of the directing workshops, the other workshop that we took a lot out of what the lighting workshop which we had with Michael Williams.

Michael took our references for the film and worked with us to create and test out our scenes on location. The great thing about Michael is that he always goes back to the very basics with creativity and lighting and reminds us that the most complex of ideas can be executed quite simply but very effectively. This is something that I learned from him when he took us for another lighting workshop a couple of months ago and taught us that a great way to create the effect of fire is to use just one simple, warm light and a gold reflector.

Michael helped us figure out how we could realistically achieve one of our visual references with the look and feel that we wanted for our film, on set.

We transformed this location with set design and lighting at night time to incorporate our visual reference into our film and it worked really well.

We took everything that we learned in our workshops into consideration and reflected on what would work in our film, what wouldn’t and why. This is one of the ways Jordan and I approached our pre-production and creating of the shot list before we go into the locations for location reccis.

If we didn’t have these workshops, we definitely wouldn’t have created a film that would could be proud of.

YAY for learning!

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