Coming into the second term I was eager to get going
again with the project but I was also apprehensive about how the rest of the
preparations for the film would go. My trepidation was due to how badly
the first term had gone for us, and also because I feared we were too far
behind where we should be in terms of getting to the end of preproduction.
That said, I was also confident that as long as we
were as organised as we could be from now on, and worked to the full of our
potential, we would have enough time to ensure that Castles in the Air was
going to be as good a short film as we believed it could be.
Our immediate next step was to conduct the auditions.
A positive development that happened over the Christmas break, was that I
finally began to get female applications for the role of Geraldine. This
had become a problem by the end of the first term because up until that
point we had only received male interest. However after I
put up a separate ad specifically looking for an actress, the
applications started to roll in.
My first individual role was to act as actor liaison.
This naturally happened by default because David had not
received any replies to his actors notice, whilst by this stage I had received
a good number of responses. We planned to audition everyone who was
interested between the 13th - 14th of January in Coláiste Dhúlaigh and in
Coolock public library.
I contacted applicants again to remind him or her of
the shooting dates and to give them an audition day and time slot. Out of
the fifteen replies I received back, four men and five women actually turned up
to audition. This meant that David had to stand in on one occasion to
restore the balance, which he enjoyed had no problem doing.
For our audition method we chose to work off script
and adopted the role playing technique we had used during the acting workshops
in class. We each drafted a rough outline for a dramatic scenario that
was similar in tone to the bench discussion in the script. We then
auditioned the actors in pairs and guided them through the freestyle scenario,
gradually changing the circumstances and the emotional beats as it progressed.
We were very happy in the end with how the auditions
went and with the level of talent we saw. I had been quite nervous
beforehand, as I had never before conducted an audition. I was concerned
that we wouldn't have the necessary experience to control the
improvisation effectively if it wasn't working out or if we needed encourage an
actor who wasn't comfortable with the process. But we felt we did well in
the end and all of the actors commented that they found the process enjoyable.
By the end of the auditions we were fairly
confident about who we thought was the best man to play Tom, and
chose an actor named Hugh Gormley. Hugh is a very amiable man and
has acted three times previously for past students of the film course. We
had a shortlisted of three women we though could play Geraldine and in the end
decided an actress named Rosemary Keogh. We both agreed she was our
favorite and she has a good voice to listen to and a kind way about her, which
we deemed to be appropriate attributes for Geraldine.
Next we needed to fill the role of Sean, the
doctor. We decided not to audition for Sean, because we figured it was a
small and expositional part. Instead I advertised for a small speaking
role on Star Now and we chose an actor from the responses I
received, based on who we thought best looked the part and who could
obviously act as evidenced by his showreel. We chose a young Brazilian
guy named Rodrigo for the part, as we liked his look and thought the work on his
showreel was good. I also figured that having a non Irish actor might add
something to the dynamic of the film.
We began production by shooting both the interior
hospital scenes (1 & 3) in the area of Coolock Civic Centre that
we had been allocated. We had planned in preproduction to shoot both of
them on the same day/evening if we could possibly manage it, and I had drafted
a tight shooting schedule so we would have the best chance of achieving this.
For the set up, we arranged the area so it looked like
a waiting room e.g. we removed all the tables and formed a row of seats.
Then we put up a selection of medical posters on the walls that I had
gotten from my aunt who is a district nurse. With all of this in place, I
was confident that we were going to pull off the hospital waiting room look we
were trying to achieve.
The only two possible set backs we feared might
prevent us from shooting as much footage as we planned to, was that we could
only use the Civic Centre after business hours (4pm onwards) and Rodrigo could
not get to us any earlier than 6pm. We arranged to meet both actors at
six and by that time were fully prepared to go on a production basis, so I
would just go through the script with them once they arrived making sure they
were both comfortable and fully understood the scenes. Rodrigo got
delayed in traffic, so we were under time pressure as soon as we were able to
get going.
I ran through each scenes with both actors and they
were fine overall with everything, although it was clear that Rodrigo was
nervous. A friend of mine who works in the Mater hospital kindly gotten
hold of a set of surgical scrubs and a mask for me, which was great because
once Rodrigo was geared up it was fully clear that a believable hospital scene
was what we had on camera.
Despite the time pressure, and some issues with
dialogue pronunciation, we managed to get both scenes fully shot by about 10pm.
We were very happy that everything had worked out as planned and the only
notable factor that had changed due to circumstance, was that the opening
hospital scene would now be at night instead of day. This was due to
the darkness visible through the centre's large windows.
However we shot the second scene away from the windows so we will have
more temporal control regarding time of day with that scene.
Before we shot the remaining two scenes, I met with
Hugh and Rosemary for a script read through. I was keen to do this
because the bench scene dialogue was so important to the film and I was really
wanted both actors to be as comfortable with it as possible, and to have the
opportunity to ad any creative content they felt might work well.
We met at Rosemary's house and went over the scene in
great detail for about two hours. It proved to be a rewarding experience
and they both began to really find their way with the characters. I also
had the opportunity to make notes in the script based on things that worked
well in the moment, such as their physical rapport, facial expressions and eye
contact.
We shot both exterior scenes in St Anne's Park in
Clontarf early on a Sunday morning. We had chosen a bench that would act as the
focal point for most of the morning’s shoot. Our plan was to film the full
conversation between Tom and Geraldine a good number of times and from various
camera angles. This meant that Hugh and Rosemary needed to run through
the entire conversation roughly eight consecutive times with hardly a
break in between.
The reason we had to work so intensely was because we
were filming on a weekend and needed to get all of our key shots done before
the hordes of Sunday park goers started to arrive. We got all of our
coverage done by early afternoon and after a lunch break we filmed various
shots of Hugh walking around the park so as to link them with his walk to the
bench. We also got plenty of general cutaway shots of the park itself.
