The Chocolate Factory Adventure

There are many ways to cheat an audience when producing a film. Because the viewer only sees what you want them to see, it is very easy to lure them into complete suspension of disbelief – For example, did you know that in the famous shower scene in Hitchcock’s Psycho he used chocolate sauce for blood? As the whole film was shot in black and white the blood itself didn’t need to be dark red but it did need to have the same consistency. This worked perfectly and looked ever so convincing.
When it comes to locations however, this particular skill set of thinking outside the box doesn’t work quite so well. Unless there is access to a green screen and millions of pounds worth of editing software (and trained editors to go with it), you have to get the location just right, or the audience won’t believe what they are looking at. This is actually a lot more difficult than you might expect. When Jason expressed his desire for a big empty space, big enough to fit ten dancers, all the equipment and a crew of about 14 people, I knew we were up for a challenge. Especially when he mentioned that this had to be a space completely blacked out so that we could make the light fit our specific needs unless we wanted to film in the dead of night every day.
So, where would you even start to search for a pitch black empty box big enough to hold 24 people? Google of course! After many attempts to get in touch with studios and one or two dodgy sites later we finally came across ‘The Chocolate Factory.’ This particular space, we discovered, actually used to be a functioning factory, but when the business started to fall in the recession the owners up and left to broaden their branch out in France. This meant there was a huge empty space just waiting to be ravaged by artist such as ourselves. The building is now managed by the wonderful Derby based charity ‘QUAD.’ This company are committed to supporting up and coming artists in the local area and provide spaces such as The Chocolate Factory, as well as cinemas and galleries for local artists to showcase and/or create their work.
Once reading about the space online it seemed absolutely perfect for what we needed and immediately filled out an application. Two weeks had gone by before we finally got the call to say we could come and look around it and discuss pricing etc.

Affordable, spacious and available to us round the clock. It seemed almost too good to be true, but let’s hope not. The Chocolate Factory is now ours for filming and we are all very excited to get in there and start experimentation days. Take a quick tour with Jason in our video above to see exactly where it is we will be spending our days now and stay tuned to see us transform this big empty warehouse into outer space!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 6th, 2013 at 1:11 pm and is filed under News.