By Fraser Brown
I’m producing my first feature film. We’re on our 10th day of night shoots and I’m delirious with lack of sleep. It’s 11pm in the middle of a New Zealand winter so I’m wearing 6 layers (3 of which I slept in last night) and a pair of ugg boots. It’s not pretty but I don’t care, I’m loving it!
Production designer Lyn Bergquist gives Calae Hignett Morgan “Kenae” a graffiti lesson.
We’ve written a character driven drama so all our planning was designed to produce an environment that would enable us to get the best possible performances out of our actors. 3 of the 4 leads in the film are teenagers, dealing with some pretty heavy material, so we needed to provide a safe and supportive working environment for them. To create this environment we developed a Whanau (Māori for family) approach to the production that has 3 main elements:
