Bunk Beds

For our final film brief for 2024, we brought together all the skills we had honed throughout the previous tasks to create a complete, lit, and fully realised micro short film. The brief specified that two protagonists would interact and that we would have enough in the rushes to craft a 1 to 2-minute edit. We were very pressed for time, but soon got to work crafting a scene to display our lighting and creative filmmaking abilities!

For Bunk Beds, we wanted to make a film in one continuous take — inspired by I Was A Teenage Anarchist by Against Me!.

Collaborator, Jacob Garbutt (Skellecat Productions) plays the creature under the bed.

Setting up the shot, we used a high-angle Zylight to provide a flood of white light on the sofa (barely visible in the top left, as we were filming in a very enclosed space), which we bounced off a reflector (disguised with other objects in the right side of the glaskugel) to fill the left side. The glaskugel inverted the image reaching the camera, so we mirrored the camera’s monitor vertically to preview framing for the footage we would flip in post. We set the focus to its closest setting and positioned the glaskugel to fill the leftmost two-thirds of the frame before fine-tuning focus with the camera’s in-built magnifier. We used a low-angle Neewer LED panel light (distorted on the right) to flash pinkish-purple light onto the scene – similar to the television in I Saw the TV Glow.