Forest Gibson on directing the “Untitled” vignette
From a directing point of view, the untitled vignette provided an interesting opportunity to explore the past—and how it is perceived—because the main character was not around to see what happened to his girlfriend and could only assume what happened to her. I ended up playing around with many different interpretations that fit into the same script but had dramatically different implications. One idea was that although from the main character’s point of view they were perfectly in love, she had actually been cheating on him when Night Zero happened (thus adding a whole new level of tragedy to the story). I ended up deciding on the direction that did not leave such a bitter taste in your mouth when the story ended.
The actual production process was riddled with many obstacles to jump over. For most productions we have a varying sized crew, but this was the first time that Anthony was not involved in the shooting. The weather also did not play to our favor. The locations for the vignette are all outside (with the exception of one or two shots in a studio inside). We were originally set to shoot in late November, but were stopped by weather. Another attempt was made for mid December but the production ended up being put on hold until Spring came and things thawed up a bit. We attempted to get the shooting done in just one day, but it was during spring break and so many people were either out of town or working that we ended up having to have a second shoot several weeks later to do the large scratcher scenes.
The biggest thing I learned from this experience was the difference it makes to have someone else doing photography while you are director. In the first shoot I struggled to play both roles at the same time. Your mind functions in different ways when you are thinking about lighting and framing than when you are thinking about emotions and motivations behind the characters in a scene. It was a challenge to jump back and forth between these two things. So when Eli ran the camera in the second shoot and I was able to just direct and things went a lot more smoothly. I feel that this is another important justification in this kind of collaborative work.
The larger shoot was a lot of fun. We had more scratchers in this shoot than we had on any Night Zero shoot prior. It was a good experience working with more extras and will come in handy in the upcoming Night Zero productions. All in all I am quite happy with the final product. I was extremely pleased with the action shots of Jon (playing the main character) jumping off of the ledge and landing on the ground in the most epic of poses. I fully plan on making that shot into a poster to put up on my wall.
