Experiments Week

Welcome to The Chocolate Factory! Please, watch your step, dodge the ceiling tiles as they fall from the roof and never, ever, feed the mammoth flesh-eating moths, thank you. This is the general gist of the location we’ve been filming in all week.

And we’ve loved every second of it.

We’ve had flour fights, paint thrown at every surface, indoor fireworks, a cosmos painted on the wall with pound land glow sticks – all within a huge, falling down building. The inner child inside every member of the crew has been in his or her element this week. Any excuse for the boys to run around throwing paint at each other and make things ‘go BANG’ makes them happy. Luckily, it hasn’t just been a week of grown men pretending to be ten years old with cameras all week (although if we’d had super soakers it would have been an entirely different story)

Jason and I were first shown around The Chocolate Factory on the Monday – we were told where people can and cannot venture as the building really is falling apart, and too much weight on the first floor would cause it to fall in. We were taught how to use all the alarm systems, where all the fire exits were etc etc – all the boring stuff really. However, after a couple of hours of wondering around this humongous site being told all the do’s and don’ts with much finger wagging, we finally signed a few pieces of paper and this old abandoned factory was ours to use until the end of the project!

Throughout the week we had models, photographers and make up artists come and go whilst Brett, Jason, Matt and I set up and closed down morning and night.
The week started with a make up experiment for the ‘sun’ character on model Keleigh Smith. Make up Artist Farah Akhtar sat poking away for 3 hours to get this look absolutely perfect, with Jason ‘umming’ and ‘arring’ about what he wanted. Once he was finally happy with the finished result, we all piled into the black box room to take some snap shots. Whilst this was going on, I was sat down in the chair and it was my turn to be tortured by various brushes and crayons to be made up like the ‘star’ character. Having never had my make up done professionally, I was trying to hold still whilst pencils were jabbed in my eyes and Jason stood staring at us approving of the ‘look’ or not.
Many make up wipes and colour changes later, I was the one in front of the camera, lights and reflectors everywhere. We got some fantastic shots and I got to spend the rest of the day with fabulous make up!

Later in the week we had two models come in to try different looks for the ‘sun’ character, as Jason still wasn’t quite happy. Models Anna and Sophie were on location bright and early Thursday morning for Lizzie Mazza to transform them into a burning ball of energy. I provided coffee and music for the poor victims in the make-up chair whilst our photographer that day (Ewan Mathers) set up his mini studio in ‘The Black Box.’
Lights, camera, action – we had smoke, multicoloured lights and textured gobos pointed directly at these girls all day whilst all five of us circled them with varying still and motion cameras. The outcome was fantastic, and to see the best stills of this day, check out our Facebook page.
Sadly, one of the male models had to drop out last minute, meaning that Brett jumped at the chance and ran over to the make-up chair to be made up like ‘the black hole.’  This said, the end result was fantastic, and put in front of the cameras, he looked great.

The last and final day of ‘experiment week’ was spent with Matt and Brett quite literally throwing dry paint at each other whilst I manned the smoke machine and Jason, Michelle Papka and Alyson Jackson roamed around with cameras. One particularly spectacular moment of this experiment day was when Matt suggested using the small fireworks. We made the room completely black, and then with a gloved hand, lit a very small firework. Brett waved this around lovely which looked good on camera, but when the fuse finally hit properly, the fireworks went completely crazy and it looked absolutely fantastic on film. Brett somehow managed to hold on to it and created a beautiful piece of footage.

So over all, a very eventful week! The coming week is simply organization, but with only a week and a half until the final shoot, there’s a lot to do!

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 22nd, 2013 at 11:57 am and is filed under News.