The Birthday Card

Lucy and Nick are a married couple leading an uneventful life. However, this seeming harmony is disrupted when an unexpected birthday card for Lucy comes through their door. That sums up the set up of The Birthday Card, a dramatic short film written by Alexandra Thomas. In the next article, I intend to analyse this production that I took part in as my first experience in the role of the cinematographer. In order to make this review clearer and as detailed as possible, the different stages of the production will make up the structure for the analysis.

First up, we have the Pre-Production level of the film. The aim for this first step is to make as much progress as possible before the first day of filming. It is also a key stage that will make a direct impact in the outcome of the project, as this is when most of the decisions and artistic directions are settled. In reality, every movie is shaped well before it is shot, in these early stages of the process. After choosing The Birthday Card as our script of choice, the first thing we did was meet with the writer and talk to her about some adjustments in the script in order to adapt it to the screen. The writer’s willingness to take into consideration our suggestions for the script also gave us the opportunity to make some other changes in the story, like its ending, which was drafted a couple times before we settled with it. After several meetings with Thomas, we managed to tailor the script to the film’s needs. Next, we proceeded to talk about possible camera blockings and shot choices. Although this is normally one of the director’s responsibilities, this task was mainly performed by the producers and myself, the cinematographer, even though we counted with the collaboration of some other members of the crew. After that shooting script was done, I then developed the storyboard of the film, which in the end suffered a couple alterations during the course of the filming of the production. Some of the key aspects of the photography in the movie are the abundance of hand held shots, which aimed to make the film more human and flawed as so are the issues the story portrays; the abundance of close ups, specially on Lucy, as she is the character with whom we empathise the most; and also, the choice of having very similar shots for both Lucy and Anna, with does nothing but emphasise the contrast between both of them while highlighting they both have something in common. Also, as it was already hinted above, Lucy is undoubtedly the main character in the film, so when choosing how we wanted to visualize the story, it was clear from the beginning she was going to lead every scene, and so, every shot was designed around her as the main element.

We would be wrong to think all that anticipated preparation would make filming a piece of cake. Many issues of different sort appeared and what should have taken us two days to film, ended up being four days. Obviously, this made a huge impact in the movie’s budget, as we had agreed to pay our actors’ transport expenses, as we add that to our own. One last factor that made us decide to start again from scratch after two days of shooting was the quality of the footage we had taken in that span of time was not up to the standard that we wanted. That is why we chose to reshoot again using the Blackmagic cameras, which gave a boost to the quality of the overall picture. Actors were another of our main problems during production, as our original leading man left the project two days before the first filming day, leaving us nothing but barely any time to find another actor that could play the part. Fortunately we did find one on time, but with such short notice he did not have enough time to prepare well enough for the role, which made filming slower and was one of the reason why we decided to reshoot the whole thing. Our second problem regarding actors came the last day of shooting, when the actress that had agreed to play Anna’s role (again, she was not our original actress, but we had to change due to her unavailability) did not show up on the settled date to set, without any notice or explanation. Even though we tried to contact her several times through email and via phone calls, she did not reply. That is why I had to play the role of Anna in the film. It was an extreme situation where we could not do anything else at the moment. Also, I was reluctant to take the part as it was not my job, I did not feel capable to fit the role and I did not feel comfortable with it. Still, there was no other choice, as we did not have the house we were filming available any other days, which made rescheduling another shooting impossible. Personally, it was not a good experience for me and I would have done anything to avoid coming to that situation. Furthermore, because I was not suitable for the role, I believe the movie looses all the credibility our other leading actress (Julie Thursham) gave to the story, as a more mature character that gave a different approach to the movie, was ruined by my appearance as Anna, as I obviously was not suitable for the role, especially age wise.

Finally, after what seemed like a never-ending shoot, we got to the Post-Production of the project. This stage has been mainly focused in the editing of the film, trying to sew all the pieces together in a seemingly seamless final piece. Even though we were shown the development of the rough cuts and offered feedback on them, my main contribution on this stage was the development of the film’s website.

All in all, it has not been an enjoyable process, problems seemed to multiply, but in the end the outcome of the movie, even though it can be definitely improved, has ended up being mostly satisfactory and I am proud of my work as cinematographer in the production.