Went out onto the Romney Marsh at lunchtime scouting round for locations for a couple of scenes in the short. Found a perfect site near Aldington, then realised that Paul O’Grady could see us from his house there, so I might look elsewhere, so as not to upset anyone.
The two scenes I want to shoot this weekend are the news reporter footage that Alice watches when she turns the TV on and the last scene with the Mistress of the Marsh (Gertrude Stumpe as I lovingly call her). It’s more second unit type stuff.
Spent a couple of hours researching 18th century make up, to better understand what Gertrude would have looked like. Basically (as was my hunch) she’s gonna be very pale skinned (so we need to get the footage in the can this weekend if we can before Vickie sets off next weekend to Turkey next weekend for a week and comes back all tanned!). We also need to make Vickie look older for this part so I need more pointers on ageing make-up techniques.
Apparently 17th and 18th century ladies believed that washing in your own urine was good for the skin. Samuel Pepys’ wife tried puppy peepee, though he never reports whether the experiment was a success.
Went round to Darren and Amber’s this evening to plan for these shots and fell into a big discussion about the final scene where the Mistress of the Marsh appears in Jess vision (or is it a vision!?). We came up with some really good ideas.
I want the Gertrude scene to be quite scary. I watched The Ring again last night and analysed it, getting more than a few ideas. I love the way the girl moves when she crawls out of the telly. It looks like they just got her to walk forward slowly and then cut out the middle bit just after she starts moving and before she stops, so she slowly accelerates into the jump forwards. I’m gonna try a few experiments with Vickie, getting to walk backwards and forwards to get an unnatural flow to her walk.
The other day Scott Watson asked me what lighting we were using. The best I can say at the moment is they are Dedolights, low voltage ones, but still very bright. Chris the Gaffer brought a kit from some place in London. I’ll ask him about it at the weekend and publish a full list of equipment we have at our disposal.