To-mera
blood
Dop The Gimp & Flemming Jetmar
Telecine Dave and Ben at Framestore

Lee from To-mera contacted us after having seen our work for Panic Cell. The band needed a promo to coincide with the release of their new album, Transcendental on the 11 th September 2006. The promo had to be ready for broadcast by the 1 st of September. After cut and pasting one anothers schedules around, we settled on the weekend of the 12 th August to shoot the bulk of the promo, with additional footage (the little girl) being shot the following weekend. Unfortunately, one casualty of the tight scheduling problem was Yan, who was already commited to a 3 week shoot in Prague.

We pitched a few ideas to the band all based around a central performance. The band wanted the promo to be fairly intense with a creepy element to it, referencing aspects of extreme Japanese cinema, particularly grading and character movement. So the treatment we went with included a brief homage to Hideo Nakata's 'Ringu'

We used To-mera's album artwork, by Eliran Kantor as reference when searching for the location for the bands performance, we chose an area with views over the Dudwell Valley in Sussex.

The weekend before the shoot we did our lighting recce with our DP and began building the set. One of the original ideas was to shoot the video on a desolate beach close to Dungeoness in Kent. Its reknown for its bleak, otherworldly landscape. One of the features that we particularly wanted to capture where the strange broken pieces of wood that jut up from the beach, bits of old breaker that now look like quite skeletal.

We managed to borrow some large, salvaged sections of a 17 th century barn. Originally, we had intended to bury them partially but the ground in the area we had selected to build the set was made up of hardcore, so we supported them with stakes instead, then dressed bits of burnt trees around the beams. The hardcore floor gave the appearance of a kind of coalface which added to the feel of decay. We wanted it to look like a kind of hinterland but not overtly underworld.

Another feature of the original drawings of the set where a series of holes, through which we would see the upside down world, which Julie, the singer, had left behind. After about 4 seconds of attempting to dig them manually, we opted for the use of heavy industrial machinery and got a digger in.

One of the aspects that we enjoyed about the track Blood was Hugo's beautiful piano motifs. For live performances, hugo uses a digital piano, but for the promo we wanted him to play a real one, the older and more gothic looking the better. We decided not to go for a grande piano for reasons of taste and decency. There's no polite way of saying "..Lee, Tom, come down off the piano, you're not doing your solo's up there..."

A couple of years ago, a friend of ours had let the band Keane shoot the promo for 'somewhere only we know' in his garden, which was pretty close to where we were filming. When they'd finished, they left the piano (and drum kit) behind. So we called him, but unfortunately he'd smashed them up a week before we called. He refered us to a local piano dealership, Sussex Pianos, where they'd got the Keane piano from. The guys there were really helpful and let us have a couple of old uprights that were kind of beyond repair (but still in tune!)

Once we'd got them back to the location (that's another story in itself - think Laurel & Hardy) we stripped one down to its bare essentials and buried the other on its side, half way up.

On the day of the shoot we spent the morning and most of the afternoon finishing off dressing the set and then blocking out our shots from the storyboard.

With a title like 'Blood' it would've been easy for us to create a kind of Grand Guignol promo (and fun too!) but we were aware of the problems that we'd encountered when trying to broadcast Panic Cell's 'Away From Here' and more recently Forever Never's 'As I Lie' promos with regards to showing blood and violence. So instead we decided to reference the title by using splashes of red throughout the set.

The weather on the day couldn't have been better (apart from the rain) the sky was full of brooding clouds and as the evening progressed, the wind picked up, which not only gently blew the set and the band around, but also picked up our playback (which, obviously has to be pretty loud) and whisked it off down the valley for all the neighbours to enjoy!

We allowed 8 hours to shoot the band performance. the idea was to begin turning over at about 3pm and wrap by 11pm out of courtesy to the neighbours (both of them!) they were both very cool though and insisted that we could shoot as long as we wanted, but, you know, you've got to have some discipline! The lighting changes throughout the promo were deliberate. Rather than have the same setup throughout, I wanted the background light to change while the overall set up would remain the same.

Our DP, Mesieur Le Gimp, set an overhead 18k lamp to simulate the moon and lit the rest of the set locally which he corrected and increased in intensity as the natural light faded.   

What we hadn't included in our schedule was the M25. Our DP and two thirds of the band were stuck on it for four hours so by the time we got started it was getting close to 8pm. Not a problem for our crack crew though and we were wrapped packed away and bottles of thankyou wine delivered by midnight.

The next day we were in the City to shoot the opening of the promo.   I'd found a location between the Swis Re Tower (Gherkin) and the Lloyds building. We obtained permission to shoot in the area from the ever helpful people at the Corporation of London Film Unit who also gave us alternative locations in addition to the one we were using, incase we needed different angles.

We found our actor, Guy Defferary on Shootingpeople.org, he was a little bit of a late addition but quickly got into the role, even performing a two minute rant in front of a bunch of bemused snap happy tourists.

The following weekend, we were back at our original location to film Rhona, our little girl/demon. Alexandria, our makeup artist, did a fantastic job on her, despite the fact that we don't see her face during the promo, aside from a flash frame right at the beginning, which I had to put in because her eyes looked so good.

The white soul-less items that Rhona holds up were cast from the original items dropped in the street and made into extremely fragile plaster replicas by Angela at Models and Effects in Wembley. I needed them to be as thin as egg shells which she managed to create.

We had to dig a new hole as the ones we'd dug and filmed the week before with greenscreens in, had filled with water and being clay refused to drain away. Unfortunately Mesieur Le Gimp had   been called away to a shoot in Buenos Aires during the week, but we were lucky enough to be able to use Danish DP Flemming Jetmar to help us capture the creepy atmosphere needed.

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