A Quiet Place - Behind the scenes

     First off, something I find very impressive is that the Dad in the film is also the director of the film. Every shot that he is not in, he is behind the camera making sure everything goes well. He talks to the actors between shots and he looks at the shots when they are finished on the screen showed above. Along with dealing with all of the actors, one of the actors is deaf, making it extremely hard for him to communicate with his actor. Along with being deaf, she is a young girl, but is extremely compatible and easy to work with. They hired a translator to relay thoughts between the director and the girl. The whole premise about the story is remaining quiet, which makes this all work very well. During the film instead of dialogue being used, it’s all sign language, which is perfect for the scenario given.

 

 

          In Pre-production, they started off turning a farm in the town of Little Falls in upstate New York into a film set. They ran sand along the path ways to have the sound of the feet be almost silent. Along with the path, they had to make a silo filled with corn that the kids get stuck in. instead of using a whole silo, they only used about half of one and cut  the mid section out to be able to have the camera to appear inside of it. Along with all of this, they built a small ledge where the crew could stand on the side to help the kids out when the scene was over.      

There are some extremely difficult shots and lots of follow shots that are being done. To do that efficiently, they brought in a golf cart with a long bed that had a stabilizers for both of the cameras and the boom mic. There is two people on the cart, one holding the cameras in place and the other driving the cart with an iPad livestreaming the film to the screen. This helped the driver to see when to accelerate more and when to remain at the same speed. It was all dependent on how fast the girl ran.

 

 

 Another shot involved the girl getting the girl getting underneath a truck. For this, they jacked the car up a couple inches so they could fit the girl and the camera underneath it. The ran a boom mic along with a second camera along the side. While watching the movie, I never thought of how difficult it was to film that. So much work went into every single one of the shots. Even the basic inside shots took a lot of effort to film. It required dead silence to get the shots they wanted and for everyone to do exactly as they want. There were two different cameras filming the same scene simultaneously.

 

 

 All of the scenes were lit with three point lighting. It was done very sneakily though. They used the decorative christmas lights on the ceilings for a key light. There is a bounce off to the left and a diffused light to the right to balance out the face. The lighting throughout the whole film is phenomenal as well.