Splintered - Behind The Shoot
03 September 2010
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First time director Simeon Halligan enticed new producer Rachel Richardson-Jones to leave her full time job working for a Manchester based commercials company and join him on the road to producing their first feature film.
Rachel made it her goal to take Splintered into production one way or another. Recognising that conventional film finance would be damn hard to attract for a first time team, she set about attracting a mentor and raising private equity to fund the production.
A chance meeting led to a very strong working relationship between Rachel and veteran film producer Clive Parsons (Scum, Gregory's Girl, Tea with Mussolini, Half Light). Splintered is dedicated to Clive, who sadly died last year.
Clive was the teams guiding light and the film wouldn’t have been produced without his support.
The team made the bold decision, to raise finance independently and set up a scheme to attract wealthy individuals to invest in the production, utilising a number of tax incentives.
The journey was fraught with difficulties and it took a whole year for them to raise the money to move the film into production.
Splintered is a truly independent movie, made with sheer determination and a desire to prove that it is possible to make a cinema quality movie on very limited finances and resources outside the conventional studio system.
Simeon brought talented new DOP, Mike Costelloe (‘Doctor Who’, ‘Spooks’) on board the production fairly early on, recognising his flare for strong composition and cinematic lighting style, while also being an advocate of new HD technology.
Splintered is the first UK feature to be shot on the RED camera system. Two camera kits had been ordered from the US and only made it into the UK, days before the shoot started!
The process gave the production real cinema quality imagery on a low budget. Much of this was down to Simeon's comprehensive planning (Simeon worked previously as a production designer for film and TV), storyboards by artist Barry Renshaw and Mike's thorough knowledge of lighting and the Red camera system.
The lighting style was inspired by high contrast movies like the classic ghost movie, The Haunting (Robert Wise) and the camera style took on a predominantly steadycam style as the camera relentlessly prowls and follows our protagonists through shadowy corridors, often placing the viewer in the protagonists position, through moving POV shots.
Simeon's visual inspirations come from a variety of sources, including Hitchcock’s obsessive POV roaming style, to modern euro horrors like Switchblade Romance and Ils (Them).
Bleached out colour, dark shadows and a deliberate choice of blue and green colour palette help to create a rich but unsettling mise-en-scene for the film, while the broken, derelict environment becomes a visual metaphor for the mental states of its inhabitants.
The main location used in Splintered, St Joseph's seminary near Skelmersdale, was once a massive gothic training school for Priests. Now a semi derelict wreck, this building was a very scary place to be at night!
It became the team’s home for a couple of months, as they set up shop in a number of the abandoned rooms within this vast location. Production offices, edit suites, make up and costume rooms, were all incorporated within the building, which also became a kind of character within the movie.
Many areas had no electricity, if cast and crew members left the unit, they could easily get lost within the maze of disheveled corridors and rooms.
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