Q: How long did the 2 actors stand still for?
A: About 22 hours over two days. We often felt sorry for them so we fed
them from time to time!
"I had a killer 'to-do' list in my head by the end of it!'' - Greg Lanzillotta
Q: Why the dragon?
A: To be clever, I'd say that the dragon is there to refer to Le Démon Du Midi - a French expression for ''midlife crisis''. But in fact, he's just there cause he was funny and trippy.
Q: What are some of the difficulties you faced working with that monster behind the bed?
A: Well, you know what they say.. never work with animals, children... OR MONSTERS! Seriously, the monster was great to work with, as long as we kept the bowls of latte's coming. We shot that section with flashlights only, so it was very confronting for the crew to be there in the dark with a monster. The hardest part was finding the right monster! Do you know how many children's beds we had to look under to find one? We were lucky to find one who had been studying acting part time and was keen to give it all to the role.
Q: How many images in the end?
A: We took 144 images every revolution and a somehow random amount for every scene ( dining, living & bed scene ) - for a total of 25 gigs of raw images. At the end, the final edit was composed of 2880 frames.
Q: Did you shoot the film in sequence?
A: No, we shot it out of order for scheduling reasons which caused our DOP's brain to melt. In terms of lighting it is pretty much one continuous shot where the lighting evolves through four key scenarios so we had to know/guesstimate where the lighting needed to be at each key point - and the lighting functions as a prop as well.
Luckily we had a day of prep where we could map out a rough lighting setup for each scenario so that when we were shooting we could gradually work into and out of each setup keeping in mind any continuity we had to match. Another challenge was the fact that it was 360 degree shot and we didn't want lighting supports obstructing any key points in the film. It was a very organic shoot so instinct was as important as preparation, and some of our favourite moments came out of ideas that came up while shooting.
Q: What type of gear did you guys use?
A: We used 3 Canon DSLR ( 5D Mark II, 50D, 5D), a few L lenses, 3 Profoto 8 + 6 heads, 3 Alien Bees, 2 MacBook Pros ( one for the image capture with Dragon, the other one as a backup ), we rendered on a 24inch Aluminum iMAC and a really powerful PC, using mainly Adobe After Effects and Quicktime Pro. Other than that, we used a lot of tape and about 300' of electric cables!
Q: What lighting did you use for the shoot?
A: We used strobe lighting only because we wanted the depth of field and sharpness it could give us. We didn't want the actors to have to stand still for one second exposures. We had to devise a very ghetto contraption to be able to combine strobe, the live view function of the camera gear, and the remote firing of Dragon stop motion software we used.