Drip Drip Drip

This film is one I worked on earlier in the year, but I am unable to really talk about it much as it has yet to be released. I was asked by Mike from Glow Productions to help in the art department, as I had previously worked with him before.

On the first night I arrived to the studio at 6pm and met Rachel Barker, who was this films art director, where we both walked around the set with Mike to see what was needed to be done the next day when dressing and distressing. The film itself was using some of the sets used to film the series 'The Syndicate', which for obvious reasons had to be completely stripped down with new furniture and props in (so nobody watching the short could tell!). On the day of art department work, Mike, Rachel, the other Mike (there were a lot of Mikes on set) and I started stripping the wallpaper of the bedroom.

We were low on people in the art department and it was coming up to midday, so I was asked to try and rope a few people in, but due to it being close to one of DFGA first year's deadlines, and not having many friends on Vis-com wanting to work in film, I was only able to get Jamie and Paisley (Fine Art first year) to help out. Which allowed us to quickly finish off stripping the wallpaper from the bedroom and add a yellow tone to the walls, before moving onto the hallway and stairs which needed the wallpaper chipping off in strips and that being painted over. We also needed to find rubbish to dress the living room as the wallpaper had already been sorted out in there.

On the first day of shooting we got to the studio early to set up the bedroom. Rachel needed to leave the set to buy a sofa for the living room, so I was stand by art director, leaving me to manage Paisley and Rachel. We first moved the bunk-beds in, and then dressed the beds and floor with toys, and I drew weird children's drawings all on the walls. However we had a problem with the height of the bottom bunk so some manic D.I.Y. and on the spot problem solving to ensure the beds were high enough off the ground whilst remaining safe.

Whilst they were filming in the bedroom, I was in charge of continuity pictures, and got called after every shot to recheck how the room looked.

Meanwhile I had to make sure that the other sets were ready for filming in later that day, which meant 'dirtying' up the kitchen and any props we had with coffee, butter, weetabix, crisps, biscuits, bread, pasta sauce.. anything that we could mix together to look gross. We then added marks to the wallpaper and rearranged everything to look 'random'. Our other task was to clean up the wallpaper from the floor in the hallway and finish adding rubbish into the living room. One thing which made this job difficult was that we were unable to make any noise whilst they were filming as the set we were working on was right next door, so we needed to work quickly during the breaks from each shot and over lunch.

I can't really give much else away, but there was more gruesome set dressing involved and problems which arose from this which luckily we resolved.

Overall I didn't think I would enjoy working on a horror film, but it was actually really good fun and the team was really lovely and great to work with!! I also learnt that as much as I hate being behind (or infront) of the camera, I really do enjoy art department work, and being a back up art director was less scary than I thought!