A lonely teenage girl discovers her eccentric modelling creations have something magical about them, just as she is about to give up all hope of ever being liked for who she is.

Like my previous short The Paintbrush, I wrote a short film that touched deep themes related to my childhood but with a hint of magic. The entire film is set in a white room with 8 walls and 8 uniquely designed doors. They represent different social cliques that one would find in school (The Goths, The Geeks, The Misfits). Estelle is prevented from entering because she doesn’t meet the requirements. She’s not pretty or talented or smart enough. It’s when she’s about to give up all hope that she discovers magic in her own creation: a simple sculpture made out of wire, that makes her own world unique and desirable to others. Instead of moulding yourself for others to be liked, you can look inside yourself and create your own identity. That’s the story in a nutshell.

This film turned out to be even more ambitious, with a unique set design and some CGI. With a bit of crowdfunding on Phundee, my dad and I scraped together around £5K. We were in development for well over a year, searching for crew members and a studio to build the set. In mid April 2018, we hired Camberwell Studios for the weekend and started building the set with production designer Jonathan Brann.

The night before we were due to start filming, my dad and I had stayed late at the studio, helping Jonathan paint doors, hang doors on hinges, screw handles on doors and retouch surfaces. At 10.30 pm the studio manager came round to say was packing up for the night and we were nowhere near done!

My dad and I set off home on foot in a fairly desperate state, physically very tired and mentally anguished over the predicament we found ourselves in. On the tube home my courage had taken a beating.

“Dad,” I said, “maybe I’ve just been unrealistic about Look Inside… Maybe I was too much of a perfectionist to hope that I could create this film the way I’d dreamed it to be…”

My dad told me we could still turn this around. We just had to rejig the schedule and focus on the task in hand and hope to hell the production designer could put things in place while we were working.

I went to bed fighting against despair, worried that I had drained all of my last savings on a project that was going to go down badly… and break my heart.

Day 1 – and a better start than we’d expected

The next morning I woke up refreshed and quietly determined. We spent the tube journey down to Brixton working out which shots we could do that would NOT involve opening the doors. We reckoned Jonathan had about 2 hours to get 3 or 4  of the doors on their hinges, after which we would be stuck and important shots would have to be jettisoned.

We started turning over just after 9am. While we got busy with the opening scene and close ups of our female lead, Lydia Barnes (16) as she crafted a small wire tree, Jonathan continued hanging and shaving doors and adding handles. And that’s how we started the shoot – with production design trying to stay one shot ahead of camera as we went through the shot list at break neck speed. This was a totally nerve-wracking experience, knowing that if Jonathan couldn’t keep up we would likely end up without insufficient footage with which to cut a film.

We got into a nimble rhythm early on. Clearly the long meeting between Lorenzo, my dad and me to discuss shots and schedule a few days beforehand was paying off – we were well prepared and wasted little time discussing performances or shots.

To Jonathan’s credit, he continued working on the set outside in the studio driveway when we were shooting and inside between takes and that way he managed to stay one step ahead of the next shot by a margin of 3-4 minutes.

Wonderful female lead in Lydia Barnes

We were also very fortunate to have such a wonderful young lead in Lydia. Not only were her performances for each take consistently good, she remained unruffled by all the rapid costume and make-up changes she had to do, largely unassisted.

For some scenes Lydia had to lie on a cold floor with her legs in water and needed to be mopped down between each take to remove white emulsion that was coming off the floor and mixing with the water we were putting down. And at no point did she so much as let out a sigh about any of it. And more importantly, of course, she just got the part, and worked well with the director.

Getting a handle on Day 2

At the start of Day 2, Jonathan still had a few more doors and handles to fix. And again we had to work round the ongoing adjustments and additions that he was making to the set. As if this weren’t enough, we had another major problem: the condition of the floor…

On Thursday night, at our request, the studio had put down white emulsion over green. With the movement of crew and dolly over the floor, however, the white had begun to peel away. By Sunday, when we had to create puddles on the floor, the white was peeling away faster than we could paint over it!

Worse, our supply of white emulsion was running very thin. Luckily, we had just enough to cover up the green as we prepared for our final VFX shots. By lunchtime we’d got through most of our VFX and were still on schedule for an 8pm finish. It was still looking very tight, though, absolutely no room at all for error.

Shots we wished we had

By the end of the day, I was sorry to not to have had the time to capture one or two more wide shots. “Well, that’s filmmaking for you,” my dad told me, “there’s always a bunch of things you wish you’d got but were stolen from you by the clock.” He reminded me that along the way we’d chanced on a few good shots not on the schedule, including one very nice wide from overhead.

The final touches 

Once the grade was done (at Priory Post in Belsize Park), I spent a couple of weeks compositing – basically erasing the many small blemishes of the set wherever was possible. Ordinarily, you shouldn’t plan to fix things in post, but in this case, there was no way of avoiding this end result. As cast and crew were moving around the white set for the duration of the shoot, it inevitably got dirty. I chose the colour white as it evoked emptiness and isolation – it’s like a blank canvas, which Estelle must transform using her imagination.

But as we all know, white is the worst colour to maintain. Even more difficult, the paint we had wasn’t waterproof, so when we poured water on the floor for the crying scenes, the paint would dissolve, revealing the green stage floor underneath. And our actress, Lydia Barnes, found herself slopping around in the white paint. We had to wipe her knees before every take during that part of the film.

Now getting into the technicals. To remove these marks, I imported the shot into After Effects and applied a small mask by creating a solid colour layer and using the pen tool to customise its shape. I matched the colour of the white floor by applying the Ramp effect, which allows you to create a gradient and not just a solid colour. I animated the mask’s position in nearly every frame so it covered the green marks. It wasn’t difficult, just a bit tedious, but at least it got my floor looking good as new again.

I then applied masks to the rest of the film to cover the dirt on the floor and the drill holes on the door frames. This took me about two months to do this, working in my spare time. It was pretty gruelling. My dad thought I was going overboard with the compositing, but I couldn’t simply un-see those blemishes. I wanted the film to be as perfect as possible.

The task became more difficult as the lighting grew dimmer in the later scenes. There were more colour tones that I had to match, which looked fine as a still image, but when I previewed the whole video, the colours on the mask shifted, creating strange bars that completely distracted you from watching the film. My heart sank when I saw this. I had to scrap these compositing efforts – they just didn’t work.

So I tried again using other effects instead of masks. For the dirt on the floor, I applied an effect called Dust & Scratches to blur out the dirt on the floor, instead of replacing the floor with a solid colour.

I discovered a neat effect called CC Simple Wire Removal, which is primarily used to cover wires on stunt shots. I used this to cover the holes on the door frames. This worked really well.

I still have a few niggles, but that’s always the case with any project you do, I think. Hopefully, the compositing work I did has enhanced your viewing of the film.

Although production and edit were executed in just a few weeks, the CGI took about 18 months from start to finish. Our VFX Generalist, Jeroen Desmet, is a specialist in water effects, so we were lucky to have him on board. Naturally enough, experts tend to be in high demand, so we had to make do with his available weekends and evenings. He stuck with it, though, when he could so easily have begged off on account of his ongoing workload. We really appreciated his tenacity!

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