The Will

Vincent De Paula · October 5, 2012

I arrived early this week in Oslo, Norway, to finish prepping my next feature called “The Will” which will be shot in the surroundings of Copenhagen, Denmark.

Director Alexander Chapan is also the writer of the script, and we have been in touch for many months now talking about this film. Initially they were going to bring the feature to North America and considered shooting in New York and Vancouver, BC, but in the end it worked out better for them to keep the project in Europe.

This is a very character driven feature, with many characters in the script and all the action taking place on a vacation home in a private island. Although we always thought of the project to be shot on 2 perf 35mm, we will be shooting now with the Red Epic with a 2.40:1 ratio. I like shooting with one camera setups as much as I can, and we will have another camera ready when I decide to go with two.

I have decided to shoot on 5K 2:1 and frame for 2.40:1 so that we could alter the size of the frame in post if we needed to do so. Most likely I will be shooting at 5:1 compression, except when I will be wanting high detailed shots, most likely on wider shots. I want to take advantage at times of the HDR capabilities of the Epic so I will be switching to that mode at times, although not very often.

All the camera and lighting gear are provided by Dagsljius, in Sweden, who have giving us a great deal too.

All the crew will be local, based in Sweden and Denmark. I am this week finalizing the crew and meeting everyone.

The location is based on a private island, and to be honest it feels very small for the amount of actors we have, so I will be trying to move some interior scenes to the outside. Hopefully the weather will be kind to us, although I am expecting rain and wind.

Most of the actors are coming from the US, so it will feel like being on a US set. It is great to be in a different country, a different continent with different culture, history, but when you enter a film set, there is something that makes you feel at home, no matter which country you are filming in.

I am off to Sweden today and will head to Denmark after that. There have been some problems with the location, and we won’t be able to scout as much as we wanted.

We are going to be very naturalistic with our approach, and go for longer shots than usual, to let the action develop in front of the camera.

I'll be posting updates regularly.