This was my first film as a director and I hope it can bring a smile on atleast on a few faces.
Oh, and I just joined this forum, altough have been reading it for a while.
Runaway Beer
On christmas eve, as the temperature rises to 40 degrees celsius,
two people cross their paths, driven by the passion for company and the thirst for beer.
A lady with car trouble leads to an amazing chase where anything is possible.
As the look and feel in the film is USA 50’s / Spanish, the overall mood is picaresque and savvy.
Director & writer: Henri Savolainen
Cinematography: Mikael Gustafsson
Sound design: Irene Poutanen
Set design: Henri Savolainen, Mikael Gustafsson, Matias Nystedt
Editor: Linda Melen
Wardrobe design: Aki Luomanpää
Make-up artist: Kata Launonen
Shoot: 28.7 - 31.7.2008
Premiere: 10/2008
Cast: Ilkka Villi, Jasmin Hamid, Artur Kukov, Nina Parviainen, Antti Pesonen, Kalle Vellonen
Shooting format: S16mm color
Length: 10 min
Producers: Henri Savolainen / Annika Lindén / Apinakapina
Filmed on location in Finland
A few feel-good pics (with comments from the cinematographer Mikael Gustafsson):
Locations:
"Car repair shop - About half of the movie takes place in a dark, dirty and run down repair shop.
The space was a big garage at a farm, filled with old car parts and tools. Next to it was a storage
facility filled with old cars from the 40's-70's. Really nicely aged and dirty already,
the place was short of ideal for the film. The group added old posters, retro oil cans
and a lot of other stuff, topped with dirt and dust and some occasional oil smudges."
"Exteriors - The rest of the movie takes place on roads and on fields all around the area of the garage.
To emphasize the foreign feel we framed all our shots so that our omnipresent forest would be hidden
behind hills or just blocked somehow. A Scandinavian forest would break the illusion immediately.
We found some roads where we got some depth in the images even though we had no sky in the image,
with hills, electric lines etc. The best place we found was an even hill in the middle of a huge field.
All directions towards it could be used to get clean sky-field horizons without too much logistics."
Light:
"We studied all our reference films and ended up liking Rodriguez´s "in your face" way of using light, and
decided to try and do something similar. Exteriors were always backlighted by the sun, as good as every
exterior shot had to be time scheduled against the right background according to the sun and time of day.
This was a horror to puzzle together schedule-wise. We used an 8'x8' checker as the main reflector
to add some kickers or just reveal the shadow side. Some smaller silverboards were used for details.
Pretty much every close up was lit the same way, one harsh kicker from one side and one softer from the other.
We intentionally ignored light continuity, the sun could be in four different places during one scene,
never in frame though. We were extremely lucky with the weather, as good as the whole week was sunny
and exceedingly warm. If the sun would never have shown up, it would have been a totally different film altogether."
"The interior was mainly toplit with snooted 575 HMI's and some CTS. All light coming from outside
was balanced neutral 5600K. As daylight we used three 2.5K HMI's through some bigger frames.
Here the closeups got the same kickers as outside, vaguely motivated by the lights in the ceiling.
When we added smoke the place looked like a 80's music video."
Camera:
"An old Arri SR2 with almost dead batteries. A lot of ND's and ND grads outside combined with a polarizer in
the exteriors, and clean inside. We shot on 250D, exteriors around f2.8-4.0, and interiors f2.0-2.8. Zeiss Mark III's
ranging from 9.5mm-135mm varying a bit from exteriors-interiors. The last shot of the film was done using a Canon 300mm.
We varied the height of the camera quite a bit. Six tins of raw material on 74 shots."
Grip:
"One lousy Sachtler DV 15 which almost broke during some car trailer work. An old Elemack dolly and its jib,
worked beautifully and we (at least seemingly) managed to pull off some quite complex shots.
We used autopoles to hitch those 575's up in the ceiling, they had to be secured since they couldn't take the 575's weight."
Pictures by: Matias Nystedt & Dan Gustafsson
