Shooting the Red Room

For our sequence in the red room we have used the performance studio because this will allow us to fully pull off the effects and shots that we want. We want it to be a sort of 'empty space' that as no real obvious begining or end; the size of the studio will allows to create this effect.

To create the red of the room we set up eight dedo lights in a large circle, all with red filters in them. we chose to have all the lights facing directly into the center of the circle to create maximum impact on the girl and table that take center stage in it.

It took a long time to set up a lot of the shots simply because we had to assemble, move and reassemble tracks . It was good using half of the circular track as this created a really effective and smooth curve. You can see some of the lights in these shots but for me, I don't think this matters. It is such an abstract space that seeing these man made objects just adds to the interest. It makes it seem as if this has been made by someone/thing for the girl to arrive to.

One of my favourite shots that we achieved in the red room is shot that tracks forward, towards the table of objects and moving and focusing in on the animal head that the girl touches. At the same time, the lights change from red to green. I think this is really effective and makes for an uneasy feeling. Linking back to Twin Peaks, I think it makes for a very cinematic nightmare.

In addition, we filmed a short bit with my character speaking backwards. This was taken again from Twin Peaks in which the small man speaks backwards while dancing in Cooper's dream. I did some research into this scene and how it was filmed. It turns out that the scene was shot backwards, with the actors speaking backward too, and then in the edit, it was reversed. As it is still a bit unclear what the actors are saying, subtitles were put in. As said in a previous post, the lines I say are taken from Dr Seuss. When shooting this bit, we moved the lights so that that I would be walking from darkness, back into darkness, while moving in an out of light between lines. The idea behind this is that it would emphasize the mystery that surrounds my character. In this whole scene, I subtly move in and out from darkness, so putting lighting this way seemed the most fitting.