Horror/thriller
films derive much of their scare factor from the atmosphere and location
of the story. Knowing this, the pre-production team of THE RESURRECTIONIST
fanned out across the Southeastern U.S. searching for the perfect
location.
On
a scout with Tommy Fell from the Alabama Film Office, the director,
Susan Bell, fell in love with the town of Spectre created for Tim
Burton's BIG FISH, located near Montgomery, Alabama. The set of the
abandoned town was located on a private island and included a man-made
haunted forest passage from the earlier film. It was also used as
a location for the recent horror film DEAD BIRDS.
All
in all, the site was deemed perfect for THE RESURRECTIONIST, with
a small log cabin, a steepled church, and the surrounding dirt roads
hemmed by trees dripping with Spanish moss. So the student crew packed
their bags, loaded the trucks, and traveled to Alabama for nine days
of principal photography in March 2005.
One
of the major technical hurdles on THE RESURRECTIONIST was the issue
of lighting a pitch-black forest with limited money and resources.
Fortunately, Panavision Florida helped out with a super low rate on
three Maxi-Brutes, adding up to 27,000 watts of light. These
lights, plus the FSU Film School's package of HMI's and tungsten units,
just about maxed out the entire output of the school's sizable generator.
A
manlift was used to raise a lot of light power high into the trees
to simulate moonlight. The plan worked wonderfully as one can see
in the beautiful lighting design by Rodrigo Rocha-Campos, the director
of photography, who won the prestigious ASC Heritage Award for student
cinematography. Our only other dilemma was driving that lift around
and getting it out of the stcky Alabama clay.
When
Susan pitched the preliminary idea for THE RESURRECTIONIST to the
FSU thesis committee in December 2004, there was expected to be a
heavy reliance on digital visual effects to generate the film's scares.
But the next spring, through revisions in the writing process and
meetings with Stuart Robertson, an Academy-award winning visual effects
artist on the faculty at FSU, these digital effects started to be
envisioned as practical, on-set effects.
<<SPOILER
ALERT!>> The puddle into which Fredrick falls is in fact two
different holes: one 6' deep, another 10' long and shallow. The actor
playing Fredrick, Christian S. Anderson, was completely submerged
several times in muddy water to get these shots. And both Alison Gallaher
(Elizabeth) and John Shaffer (Old Man) spent many hours shivering
in the cold water of the trough as we shot and re-shot their death
scenes. Even the director got in on the fun as she did double duty
as a stunt double for several of the trough shots.
The
"bottomless" trough was constructed by digging a large hole, setting
the trough (sans bottom) on supports, and creating a liner to hold
the water up to the edges of the trough. Sounds complicated and it
was for a bunch of student filmmakers! And lacking a water tank, the
underwater perspective shots were photographed looking up through
a smaller, Plexiglas bottom trough built solely for this purpose.
But, however complicated these effects were to film, doing them practically
without computer manipulation lent an authenticity to the scares that
only makes viewers wonder, "How'd they do that?Ó
LIGHTING
THE FOREST 
