Dead Air – Production

Between the 4^th and 7^th of October, with a fantastically talented team at the reins, production for our new short, Dead Air began. Dead Air began it’s life as an idea for a micro-short; something we could produce in one location with one actor in one day with about one pound. However as the creative juices started flowing around the pub table, the film quickly developed into something much more. You can read about the writing process here. With thanks to Cooke Optics who are based in Thurmaston, we were extremely lucky to have access to a set of Mini S4 lenses for this production, which were kindly leant to us and helped us take our cinematography to another level.

During pre-production, we had our eye firmly fixed on a newly built meeting room at The Innovation Centre, which coincidently is where we’re also based. With it’s big glass window and odd shape, it was the perfect space to build a radio studio. So on the afternoon of Friday the 4^th, set build began by covering the walls in acoustic foam panels and a ‘Cosmic FM’ notice board, and installing a desk with computer, radio mixing desk and microphone.

Shot of the Dead Air set prior to production

Simon Parkin as Lester

We needed to wait until nightfall for the first day of shooting. This was down to a number of shots where we needed to shoot light through the windows from the outside as well as using the wider space within the Innovation Centre where blacking out windows was going to prove more difficult than a night shoot. The whole film is exclusively set at night, and so any sign of daylight was a definite no. Production began at around 7.30pm and wrapped at around 1am.

Jordan and Duncan setting up a car scene

Day 3 was a split day, beginning in the studio at 12.30pm for the remaining few scenes in there. Finishing mid afternoon allowed us to revert the meeting room from a studio back to a meeting room before shooting our exterior car scenes after nightfall. Our car scenes were all set in traffic, and so we rearranged the cars in the car park to set up different shots of traffic jams. Again, making use of the batteries on our Aputure Mini 20’s, we set up brake lights to the front of our actor and headlights to the rear, as well as running power out to our LSC300 to act as a street light. We wrapped at 8.30pm after a very efficient set of car shots.

Our final day of production was at an apartment in Oadby. These shots were to make up the scenes where our protagonist, Lester was in his home. The film see’s a series of comical scenes where Lester consumes some rather awful looking porridge and tea over a number of days, and so whilst lighting and camera stayed pretty much the same, the porridge and tea were constantly being taken away to create the next rendition of disgusting looking slop. We also had a few insert shots to capture in the apartment, to really showcase Lester as the radio anorak he is. Finally, we shot our scenes in the bedroom, where Lester slumps into his bed every night. In keeping with the theme of monotony, once again, camera and lighting set ups remained the same whilst performance was tweaked to tell the story in each scene. We wrapped early afternoon on the 7^th to a big cheer, followed by a good hour of loading kit back into cars and putting the apartment back the way we found it.