This weekend I did a photo shoot on the set of a short film that was written by Schoolcreative students, directed by Stellina Rusich and produced by Olesia Shewchuk. They wanted to get some behind the scene shots and also needed some graphic design work done for the movie poster. The movie was titled “Farewell Ambrosia” and was set over a period of time ranging from the 1920’s to the 1960’s. I had to come up with a design for the poster and had plenty of inspiration from the on set location Jupiter Lounge. The lounge had plenty of periodic style furniture with black and white checkered floor tiles, dark walls with heavy red velvet curtains draped and a large semi circle bar made of polished antique style wood. The hard part about this shoot was that I had to work around the filming in order not to interfere with them and also had a limited time schedule. In addition to that, most of the actors were in and out of costume during the days and some had left before I was able to get photos of them so thanks to a little Photoshop magic I was able to add them in.

This was the first time I had been on the set of a movie and it was really interesting seeing how everything is put together. There’s plenty of work and preparation prior to actual shooting making sure that the set design is perfect and that there’s no inconsistency’s with the set. The last thing you want is to have a modern telephone or coke can that was accidentally left on a table in a scene which is meant to be set in the 1920’s! It was also really interesting to see the documentation process for each take of a scene and how the filming of each sequence was done. Most people don’t realise that a movie is never filmed from start to finish. They usually will film scenes according to the location and set requirements so they might do scenes 1, 5, 8 and 9 in one day. This makes their job even harder because there has to be plenty of attention to detail to maintain consistency throughout the movie. You can’t have an actor film one days worth of scene wearing a red tie and then have him wearing a blue one when in the movie that scene is only five minutes later in the same location.

It was amazing to see the entire crew and actors pull off this mammoth task of filming such a variety of scenes over such a tight schedule during the three days and have it executed flawlessly! I’m looking forward to seeing the first screening and don’t forget to check out the photos in the gallery… until then…

Farewell Ambrosia…