Virulence’s production phase – for the most part – went about as we all expected, I think. Time-wise, we managed to keep to our schedule pretty closely, which was incredibly helpful as shooting at night we didn’t particularly want to hang around until 2am. The first night of shooting we had all the actors arrive just before sundown, I ran them through their characters’ motivations and some general narrative stuff as our producer handled the housekeeping notes. Lovely.

We started experiencing trouble relatively soon after we began shooting – the lights. Damn. Nobody had thought to map out lighting positions with reference to the shot map, so there was a lot of fumbling with not only light strength, but positioning and direction as well. As a result, things slowed down quite a bit as we attempted to figure out the best/most consistent way to light each shot. Until this point, I had no experience in using any form of lighting equipment so I could provide little to no help to the cinematography department on that front outside of “that looks good”. Thankfully, our editor had some experience and was quite aware of lighting positioning so that mitigated the damage quite a bit. This whole debacle certainly elucidated to me the importance of paying attention to lighting when considering cinematography and decoupage. For example, while we were hoping for some stylistic, aesthetic lighting throughout Virulence, we should have thought of and noted how each light had been set up in each particular room so that we could at least try to have some consistent lighting across both nights of filming.

Further in relation to the lighting dilemmas, there ended up being a lot of issues relating to exposure. Upon reviewing the footage from both nights, it was clear that a lot of the shots that had been taken were done so using an inappropriate ISO or were underlit, resulting in incredibly grainy footage that would likely prove difficult to work with in post-production. Short of reshooting a significant portion of the film at a later date, we opted to work with what we had and change the structure in post-production as that process would take a significant amount of time – time we didn’t have. Similarly, issues with focus popped up from time to time that brought things to a standstill; unfortunate, for sure, but we managed to turn some of these focus issues into a technique of sorts. Not all bad.

It also became clear that in developing the cinematographic style of the film, we did not think about stabilisation or the difficulty of doing tracking shots without some form of rigging. On the morning of shooting, I scouted for some kind of action handle for the camera or a relatively cheap gimble to help the cinematographer and 1st AC pull of the more difficult tracking shots easily. I found the IT hire doesn’t have much in the way of handles or rigs for DSLRs and the stores that I went to looking for something of the sort had nothing for us unfortunately. I felt a little bad for not having thought ahead in this sense as anything I could do to assist the camera department was at the forefront of my mind until this point; shot lists being the main example.

I found that taking charge of an entire crew was about as difficult as I expected. While not the role of a director – moreso an AD – I tried my best to make sure everyone knew what I was after regarding their respective department. The actors were all very accommodating which made things a lot less stressful, which was nice, however upon catching up with one of our actors after filming I asked how I could improve and the feedback was “you can afford to be more strict”. Reflecting back on the production process, I see what they meant. In the future I need to worry less about being stern and more about making sure things are even clearer and smoother.

I got a lot out of the production of Virulence. A lot of lessons were learnt on both a technical and personal level that I will undoubtedly be taking into future projects, regardless of my role. That being said, I feel as though next time I would like to take on a role with less responsibility/expectation.