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The process of making The Lurgee

After brainstorming ideas with a new crew, we formed a new idea about a man who gives an illness to others. After watching movies such as Gummo and Eraserhead, I liked the idea of not having this piece driven by narrative. Instead, I chose to create a dream like visual narrative for the piece, although the story is still somewhat linear. I also wanted to play with tone hence why the soundtrack is so varied. the initial idea is a man who can give people a mysterious illness but at a cost. After giving his illness to a gumtree salesman who rips him off, he begins to develop intense symptoms much like the salesman. It is also revealed that his partner is dying from the same illness and that Carl (the lead character) does not wish to live after his partner eventually dies. This then leads him to walk on a pier and shoot himself at the end of it. The ending is then left to the audience to decipher. Tonally the film was never supposed to be as moody and sad as the film eventually became, but due to the shoot day and how we edited the film itself, i thought this was the tone that fit the film best.

We shot near my house in Mount Batten, I have always wanted to shoot something huge and iconic on the pier there so the idea to have this character shoot himself on the pier was there from the start. I enlisted the help of my friends Dave, Vince and Shaun of Laserhouse, a production company they themselves started. I enjoy their work and the cinematography style of Vince so I knew the film would work well with them involved. In terms of cinematography, I wanted

For the makeup design I wanted the characters to look worn down and near death so we used my sisters makeup kit and a spray bottle with water in it so as to imitate sweat or a fever.

In the film my head becomes completely shaven, this was done using a pair of kitchen scissors and a razor. The crew helped me shave my head as seen below. I agreed to have my head shaved in quite a violent manner to emphasize the crazed mind state the lead character is in. Although this wasn’t entirely safe, I do think that it added a sense of realism and grittiness to the film that was needed for this portion of the film.

The drone was piloted by Shaun and is used in the movie to get the main shot of the suicide on the pier. I wanted the location to be mesmerising and mean something metaphorically which is why the pier is included, the pier is in fact a stairway to a kind of heaven that this character is getting to. The end of the pier is the characters release, the end to his journey and the end of the film. The drone worked incredibly well with this theme and I am immensely proud of these shots. The drone shadow sometimes appears in frame so a quick edit to make sure it isn’t seen was swiftly done by David.

David was the editor of the film, with me overseeing and suggesting ideas. I love his editing style as it is efficient and very creative, we worked together on ideas throughout the editing process. For the wild track I used my organ that I have at home to create eerie, droning tracks that helped to create the creepy tone of the film. We also used stock waves and wind sound effects to create dissonance. I wanted the film to have a slight drama feel to it while also being a surreal exploration into the lead characters psyche, so we used a royalty free piano track that fit the tone of the film perfectly.

In terms of lighting we decided to use natural light throughout the day, luckily the weather was great for the drone shots and lighting for the interior scenes so it worked perfectly. For some scenes we used a reflector so that the lighting was reflected onto our faces during shooting, this involved me having to hold it during the bedroom scene.

Vince used a c100 with a sennheiser boom mic, since we had no sound man he mounted it on top of the camera for some scenes and used a tripod to mount the sennheiser next to him for some exterior scenes. The sound sounded ok for the whole shoot although we definitely could have benefitted from a sound man to get extra wild track and better sound for the film. The sound is a bit misguided at certain points in the film and muffled, this could definitely have been resolved with a sound man pointing a boom directly at my chest during dialogue sequences.