Conversations with Poppy

We are excited to finally be making our first short film. It’s been 5 years since we initially created Beyond Summerland Entertainment and throughout that time we studied and got our qualification, broke up, went into lockdown, got distracted with other work, got fired due to the mandates and here we are again full circle at our original goal and plan lol.

Throughout that time I also got to experiment with cinematography on a lot of my music videos with the lighting, mixing and producing sound so my understanding of filmmaking needed to develop a little. Also Nicki had time to work on her writing skills and to develop a new desire for her acting.

I’m excited to see her performance in this short film as I’ve never really had a chance to see her engage her passion for acting.

The story is a supernatural, drama, comedy and as we will be entering it into film festivals it won’t be available for immediate public viewing. But if anyone would like to see a private screening of our film by donation, please get in touch and we can send you a private link for viewing when it’s done.

If anyone would like to donate to this project but would like to know more about the story and concept you can download our full pitch here which is full of information.

conversations-with-poppy Download

Nicki and I are going to attempt to create the whole film on our own with a shared role in writing, directing and producing it,

Nicki’s other role’s also include actress, voice over, set design and camera assist and my role will also include voice overs, sound composer, sound recordist/design, set design, gaffer and editor.

It will be a one person, one location short film roughly around 5 mins long shot in our very fancy bedroom. We had to use our bedroom as the set which was a bit of a challenge because we have these plain off white walls which is a nightmare in film as it never looks good especially if you are going for low key lighting atmosphere.

We were donated at $250 budget from Nicki’s sister, and given this we had to find a way to create a set that would suit the storyline, so the cheapest thing we could afford was movies posters and string lights to break up some of the plain walls.

Another challenge was our window and lighting. We wanted to have complete control over the lighting but as we are on the 6th floor of our apartment block we couldn’t just put a light outside our window to create artificial light. We also couldn’t just block out the window because we woud have no window and given this is a bedroom scene we needed a window but we also needed to block the light.

So we bought a cheap blind from spotlight, attached it to a plank of wood and propped it up on a cheap green screen stand we bought ages ago to create an artificial window.

Nicki in her element here! Any chance she gets to use a drill or build something she will and she can’t wait to have her own work shed one day. When it comes to decorating and making things look pretty she feels she has no clue.