The Call (Yaw)

Written by Andrew Atkins and adapted by Yaw. 

As this production was done solo, I faced a few minor difficulties during the shoot. This was definitely not an ideal circumstance. However, going into this I didn’t feel too underprepared. The most important piece to my film’s development was the pre-production stage, which made execution possible. I spent a lot of time experimenting with how I could navigate my chosen location and execute the shots I intended for. Taking the time to walk through the space with my camera and take note of what shots I wanted and how I intended for them to be framed, I was able to collate a storyboard and bird’s-eye-view plan. This was the most important part of the production which allowed me to execute the film. When it came to capturing the shots on the day of the shoot, filming was made possible by following my shot-list and blocking plan. This really highlighted the importance of approaching filmmaking with intention.

While having a horror style in mind, I decided to approach the colour grade with a gritty appearance in mind. Though I feel like my lighting was too bright and washed out a lot of the footage, I tried to combat this with my colour grading approach. In my final version I desaturated the colour, put emphasis on the darker parts of the picture by making the black points more pronounced, made shadows stronger and added a soft vignette to centralise the focus to add to the suspense. Overall, this gave the final version a cooler-grey feel, which I feel clearly shows my attempt to make a project within the horror genre.

The Call is a quirky, yet entertaining script devised by a fellow Deliberate Film student. I decided to alter this script by adding to it’s already surreal feel. The Call is based around a strange series of events following a mysterious phone call that leaves the main character perplexed.

Below is the films first rough-cut, which contains a much more harsh and over-powering colour grading attempt. This cut contain extra shots, which were later edited out in later version.