Hit Girls is a light hearted action ‘short’ about two female flatmates, who are coincidentally assassins. After one girl kills the others ‘date’ (retaliation to a previous argument) they are both united in burying him in the depths of a forest in the middle of the night…
However, their continued bickering breaks into a dynamic combat.
This ‘fight’ between the girls is the showcase of the film so two nights, of the three, were dedicated to filming this in some deep, dense woods in Oxfordshire last August.
At our first pre-production meeting, the film route wasn’t completely ruled out – but it was up to Adrian Vitoria (Director) and I to overwhelmingly convince Rosie Fellner (Producer) that it was integral to do so. Rosie had already set up a few meetings going the HD route and, with a couple of HD features on the cards, it was actually a sensible time for both Adrian and I to delve into the wider market.
We’d recently shot a feature called, The Crew on the F900R which was for DVD release through Momentum. We’d been very pleased with it for that project, but this was now an opportunity to look into some of the more ‘filmic’ cameras on offer. A couple on our short list were, Red One, Arri D-20 and the Viper.
At the time we’d heard stories of damaged data and frozen peas being used to cool down the Red, which were slightly off putting, but it was still a camera Adrian and I wanted to explore. At this point, however, Rosie secured an Arri and Molinare collaboration where we were offered a D21 for three days combined with Molinare handling all aspects of the post.
The approach was to treat the short film almost as though it was a pre-title sequence for a feature, so the D21’s reputation for reproducing cinematic and high production value images was a really exciting prospect to work with. The ‘duel’ between the two girls was a key theme and I was keen to give them their own frame space, far right and left, so in the wide shots there’d be an apparent and significant ‘distance’ between them.
ANAMORPHIC
To help this, we agreed to shoot FHA (Full Height Anamorphic), which was an option Arri were developing at the time on their D21, and use, ‘High Speed’ anamorphic lenses.
Unfortunately, a combination of factors and timing issues meant we couldn’t experiment in this way. Nevertheless Adrian was still eager to pursue with the wider scope, as per our earlier storyboarding, so we decided to compromise some ‘lines’ for the desired aspect ratio – letterboxing at 1:2.40
I always intended to light across the centre plane, and draw the viewer into these action areas (using vignettes and oval spots too) – so cropping the top and bottom wasn’t a huge sacrifice in that respect as the tree tops and ground would’ve been close to black anyway.
Adrian likes to shoot spontaneously, so depending on how dialogue or action goes in rehearsal – absolutely anything can change. I really like his methods and the boldness of not being dictated by the script for the sake of it, but it really keeps you on your toes as a DP and you have to have a number of lighting set-ups in your head in case you’re suddenly shooting towards what was once your ‘safe’ zone.
For that reason, and with the short time we had, I decided to light this scene with a view of us looking the full 360º. We’d shot a scene in a boxing ring for a previous film, so I knew the sort of coverage he was going to need, particularly with me involved for some ‘hand held’ POV – and I knew that was going to be intensified with the girls ‘duel’.
These sorts of night locations are interesting because you’re essentially lighting from scratch and can just pick out the detail you want and leave the areas you don’t like to disappear into darkness. And, whilst I like night to look as convincingly like night as possible, and therefore we all know that the forest in the middle of the night should really be pitch black, it’s a worthwhile challenge to engineer acceptable sources of the light.
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