Behind the scenes of “16″0

I started thinking of creating a movie like this one time after I had been on the countryside, in early May. I really wanted to make something in the same genre as “Cell”, but being a bit more inspired by more “direct” horror rather than thriller movies I decided I’d create something a bit different. What then started as a short film project that would be finished in a couple of weeks, turned out to be a much, much longer and bigger project than I had anticipated.

Before even creating the script for the film, I shot the car scene in the beginning of the film, featuring my dad as the driver. This was done on the 17th of May and we shot the whole scene in about an hour. The car scene was originally about double the length it is in the final film, but due to some issues with pacing (i.e. it got a bit boring after a while) and some help from fellow filmmaker Marco von Moos I cut the scene down a lot. Later the same week as when we had shot the car scene, me and Johannes sat down one or two hours after school and tried to think of a reasonable script, which would be pretty different from what I had done before. We both had some general ideas and I had some music cues that should be used in various points in the movie, to achieve a certain mood. A big inspiration for this movie, at least for me, was the not-so-critically-acclaimed film called “Dead Silence” (done by James Wan, who did “Saw”, which I think is a great horror/thriller). That film really had a certain mood to it, and also a very eering feeling to it. When we actually wrote the script, which was actually more of a synopsis, we thought the movie would still be the longest I had ever made, only we thought it’d be close to around 10 or 15 minutes.

But before we could start shooting I had to get some stuff for the film, like relatively cheap lightning and practical effects, such as special flickering lights and blood make-up (which I used in one scene, but we never got around to use in the film) and some 5 picture frames so I could hang up the photographs on the wall, which was an idea I had thought of ever since I started making the film. I bought most of it a place called “Clas Ohlson” but also various things such as UV lightning at a place called “Teknikmagasinet”. On the 23rd of May I shot photos for the picture frames of my fellow friends Johannes, Anton, Amanda, Mattias and Ida. Not very surprisingly, both cameras I tried to use ran out of battery, but fortunantly I managed to find an AC adapter. So the next two days I sat down and heavily photoshopped the photographs I had taken to give them the crazy look they get towards the end of the film. I also shot the short news segment with Christoffer for the TV in the studio scene, featuring a sock on a stick as a microphone! To check out the raw versions of the crazy photos I made for the film, click the links below:
Crazy photos: Johannes – Anton – Amanda – Ida – Mattias

We had planned to shoot every single scene in a weekend, something that proved highly unlikely, if not completely impossible, which was a thing we noticed when we had filmed for one single night, and only been able to finish two or three scenes, instead of the five we had planned. The first thing we shot for the movie (since the car I had used when filming the journey to the house wasn’t available) was the running up the stairs of the house knocking on the door. We actually managed to get some pretty realistic rain while filming using a garden hose, but because of grading, it didn’t show up that well in the final film. Johannes had to repeatedly run up and down the stairs to the house while getting soaked in ice-cold water, which I don’t think he enjoyed a lot to be honest. We shot the rest of the entrance and introduction scene the same evening. We forgot to shoot the thing where I take a photo of Johannes, so that was shot a whole week later (but more on that later!). We shot the bathroom scene also, which is actually the scene where I cut out most from the film. There originally were a conversation between me and Johannes there (with quick flash-frames of me blood-soaked). But it just didn’t fit with the film since you didn’t really learn anything new from the scene, it perhaps only said some things too early in the film. So I quickly got rid of that, and the thing that remains in the film today is only the flickering-lights scene.

Next day we shot some more interesting footage, among these the basement scene, the yellow field scene (in which Johannes thought the whole scene felt like Band of Brothers, due to a specific in-camera grading technique I used ). We also shot the dinner scene, the last scene for the film (the one in the gardening shed) and the interior of the drive to the house (it took about 40 minutes to set up the lights and the rain and the camera to get everthing to work without getting too much weird shadowing and stuff like that. We shot some footage from outside of the car as well, but that didn’t work in the movie, since I would have needed to carefully mask and replace the background with a real road, and I just didn’t have time to do that really.

We didn’t film anything that Sunday, because if I remember correctly both me and Johannes had some kind of huge Biology test in school the following day. So since we weren’t able to film everything, only about half of, what we needed, we decided to go back another weekend to complete the filming. Originally it was planned that we were going back just the next week, but due to various problems we couldn’t go back to filming until the week after that. We went back on Friday the 8th of June to continue and hopefully finish the film. The first day we shot some minor scenes such as the lawn scene (where Johannes wakes up after tripping on the doorframe), the running scene in the beginning, a small scene we forgot to shoot just after the basement scene (leaving and going to bed) and most important of all, the studio scene, which took about two hours to set up with lights, a television, some paintings and whatnot. We felt that we were well on track to actually getting the film done relatively on schedule.

Saturday the 9th of June we shot some other scenes such as the complete escape from the house, the small segment where Johannes’ get’s the odd drink in the kitchen and the short scene where the power is lost to the house. After Saturday, only two scenes remained that could be shot on the countryside, which was really cool, so we decided to watch “Equillibrium” which Johannes had brought in HD on his external Harddrive. Things didn’t go that well, since we both almost fell asleep in our chairs after about ten minutes. This wasn’t at all a comment on the movie’s quality, it just proves that filmmaking can be very tiring sometimes!

So on Sunday, only two scenes remained. This was the first scene on the second day in the film, which I called “The Radio Scene”. The weather was extremely hot that day and it was quite tiring to film that scene, even if it only took about 20 minutes to set up and about an hour to film. Directly after that, we shot the scene that comes directly after the one with the radio, the harbour scene. It was great to actually shoot something in the right order, as it was going to appear in the film, and I think that was a great help to both me and Johannes, since we were both quite tired from what had been essentially non-stop for whole weekends, and this during the most hectic times in our school, with all kinds of crazy tests and exams.

I had edited the first 5 minutes or so after the first weekend shoot, but since we didn’t shoot any of it in any kind of logical order it was really hard to cut together, since it was hard to logically see where everything would fit in good. Well, the end of my first year in high school approached fast, and that meant more time hanging out with friends before everyone’s going abroad to various exotic locations. Anyway, I continued to edit the film as much as I had time to during the last week, and the first full edit was done the 14th of June. The first thing I started working on was the driving scene, with lightning effects and some stock footage that had to be inserted in the film (kindly provided by Marco von Moos). After that was done, which was some time close to June 20th, I directly started working on the grading for the movie, including various digital effects. I started with the basement scene, since that was the first scene in which I fully knew exactly how I wanted it to look. I finished the grading for that scene in about 4 hours, with another hour to keyframe the flickering working light, which I think turned out totally ok, considering how dark it actually was. So what I had to do was to raise the brightness of the frames that needed to be fully lighted, and lower the brightness, gamma and colour levels on those that needed to be darker (i.e. when the light is flickering). The next following week I finished all of the effects and grading for the film. Because of Johannes had been away in various exotic locations throughout Sweden we never had any time to film the opening scene in front of the computer, so I grabbed him one afternoon and we shot the whole scene in about an hour. It is also the scene I’m most happy with, since I tried some new interesting camera moves I had been thinking of and a new lighting technique. I finished the grading for that scene as well and started working on something I really hadn’t spent that much time on before: sound. Always when I had done movies before this one I just took whatever sound I recorded on set with my on-camera microphone and just pasted it on the movie, raising and lowering the volume of that one source track to try to make it fit well with the actions on screen and the background music. I decided during the shoot that I wanted to re-record every single line of dialouge, to have more control about pacing and panning of seperate sound sources during my editing process. So I bought a pretty good (but absolutely no top-of-the-line thing) USB microphone. We recorded all of Johannes lines one day, which took about 2 ½ hours, and I later recorded my own lines in about three or four hours. Me and Johannes then spent an entire weekend (and I’m talking morning til evening) just recording various sounds such as doors opening and closing at various speed, footsteps and running on various surfaces, how rain impacts sound different on different materials such as glass and asphalt and more. I think we stacked up close to 550 different sounds, and I felt we had everything we needed (even if I had to record various stuff later during post-production, such as the breathing both while running and in the basement scene.

The sound mix was finished around the middle of July, and now only the music remained. I tried to use a mix of my own composed small musical scores, as long with some other friends, and soundtracks from not so famous films to create the mood I wanted. The first musical piece that I had figured even before production was the credits theme, which is from the main title sequence of “Dead Silence”, where Charlie Clouser (one of the best composers out there, according to me) made the music. I really had a hard time figuring out the right music track for the middle of the film, as some scenes, especially the basement scene (where I wanted to create tension, while not using a track that wasn’t fast) which was the last scene I figured out the music for, and it now uses a mix of short scores I’ve made myself, and some of the slower tracks from “Saw” (also composed by Charlie Clouser). The music score was close to finished in late July, when I decided to recut parts of the movie quite heavily which improved it quite a lot (I removed about 10 minutes of unneccessary scenes, including the bathroom dialouge, loads of “walking to and from the room to/from the stairs” scenes. I also removed quite a bit of the basement scene, shortening it by one minute, to create a bit more tension. I edited some other scenes too, but mostly it just was trimming some shots a couple of frames to make it a bit faster. I finished the new, and final edit August 1st, then I spent the rest of the time tuning the music and balancing the audio so that the dialouge and sound fx would be approximately the same volume, and not change dramatically.

So what remained now? Well, I had to render the movie (the process where the editing software takes all the work you’ve done and puts everything into one AVI file containing all video and audio data). The only problem was, my editing software, Sony Vegas, isn’t too happy to work with Windows Vista 64-bit. So it just wouldn’t work, and quit randomly loads of times. Then Vista completely crashed, forcing me to re-install it and therefor, making me have to re-install all of the software on the computer. This was just last weekend, on Saturday the 11th of August. I finally got it fixed very late that night and was able to continue trying to render my film. I finally managed to get around it, only it would only render at a maximum resolution of 640×360, instead of the 1920×1080 I had intended to render it in. When Vegas gets friendly with Windows Vista again, probably when they release their next software version, I’ll have to render it all out in HD so I can finally be able to put it up here in all it’s HD glory. I might make some small adjustments to the movie itself, but since the new version of Vegas isn’t out until at least October, that’s a story for another time. The film was finished, compressed and uploaded on August 15th, which is also when I announced the release date of August 17th. It’s been the most fun, but also most tiring and sometimes frustrating project I’ve worked on to date, but I can’t wait for future projects! Because you see, this is just the beginning!