Live Brief 2 - ManiaFrame Shoot - Clown Shoot

An important sequence in ManiaFrame that the whole crew were focused on capturing with great quality, was the office scene with a clowns death. This was quite a strong and pivotal scene with its visual style. The crew planned out and tested how the death scene would go down using a pump and fake blood to give the squirting effect for when the clown slits his throat. We had three clowns dressed and acting for the scene, along with a bunch of extras to fill up the scene with office workers. We captured the majority of the cut aways and build up scenes early on before we cause a mess with the death scene and it gave more time for the clowns to get dressed and prepared for the shot. We did a few run throughs with the actors to plan out the best way we could make it look crazy and brutal without hurting or injuring anyone, we managed to organise and choreograph and good looking death scene which would translate well on film.

We filmed the office scene in the Seminar Room at CCAD and rearranged tables and chairs to give a more office building feel. The extras were all great and helpful with sparing their time for the shoot but the main shot to capture today was the clowns death scene, which was to be a one take with no other times to repeat it, so all the pressure was on the one shot. Dan practised capturing the shot so he understood where he was following and how to keep it focused on whats happening, Glenn hid under a table and operated the blood pump which would release mayhem once the clown pretends to slit his throat. The shot went as great was we wanted and had us all give of a sigh of relief when done, all the actors and extras were stunned and impressed with the shot as well. The only problem that was really wrong with the scene was that it seems like there is quite the delay with the time the clown slits his throats and when the blood starts pouring out. You can't really see the blood start flooding out of the throat until they hit the table and little later on. It still works great and doesn't take you out of the film or make it less believable, we just would've preferred or more bloody and graphic scene but we can work with what we got.

The whole shoot was really built upon and around this shoot and was great to have it out of the way and not be worrying about it anymore. The other shots for the day were simple and basic compared to it and went quite smoothly, we successfully put together one of our most complicated shoots to manage and pulled it off quite well. The white clown costume which was been worn by the Ryan Siggers who performed the death scene, was created specifically for our production by someone on the Costume Design and it was incredibly well designed and great looking. I'm glad we were able to use other course to our benefit to add more production value to our shoot.