Alongside bread and butter work these last few weeks we've been hard at work filming, editing and grading one of the war sequences for All That Remains.
The film covers Takashi Nagai’s experiences in the second
Sino-Japanese war as well as his experiences surviving the atomic bombing of
Nagasaki.
Shooting these scenes meant costumes, props, locations (not
all the sequence is shot against greenscreen), several extras, a good make-up
team and a dedicated crew on hand, not to mention plenty of planning in the form of storyboards, pre-visual
art work and shot lists.
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| Board and Shot list for part of the War Sequences |
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| Throughout the film we also explore the "evolution" of warfare. |
Now, we could have opted to cover these scenes with the use
of archive footage, which would have been a hell of a lot easier, but we chose
not to. Why? Well, firstly we felt the scenes needed to be from a personal
perspective, we needed to be there
with Takashi, because his experiences in China had such a profound effect upon
him. Secondly, we had yet another point
to prove. Back in the early days of pre-production, we were told by someone who had just read the shooting script, that because of the China war scenes as well as the atomic bombing sequence, it would be impossible for us to make the film on our budget - it was just too ambitious.
Well we already knew exactly what we could and couldn't do having had a number of years experience making low budget films under our belt (several shorts and two feature length), and if someone tells us we can’t do something, especially if it's because
we don’t have anywhere near a Hollywood budget at our disposal, it’s going to make us even more determined to
prove them wrong. So we have.
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| Working with the portable blue/green screen |
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| Discussing the next maneuver on location |
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| One last take... |
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| Taking a break on set. |
Some stills from the war sequences as they'll look in the final film…
