Carpe Diem (2009)

Carpe Diem was the graduation project of my first term in film school. It was an opportunity to put everything we had learned about the basics of movie making to the test and the result was my first science fiction movie, focusing on existential issues. The movie is set in a close future and begins with a man in a car entering an apartment building where he meets a woman. They seem happy to see each other but something in the air is wrong and their actions hard to understand, until you realize that something is happening to their world. Here’s what I recall from the production that took place in the months around the turn of the year 2008/2009.

Cast and Crew

The man is played by Magnus Göransson and the woman by Camilla Algulander. As this was a small project we were only five people in the crew. I directed the movie an co-wrote the script together with Hannah Chaker, Marcus Tegler and Kervin Tran. Hannah was continuity supervisor and edited the movie, Marcus casted the movie and took sound and Kervin was behind the camera as well as sharing the special effects work with me. In addition to that my brother, Henrik Wikner, made the music for the film.

Preproduction

From the beginning I intended to make a zombie movie as my graduation project. The first idea I presented was a movie about a man and his wife escaping the city during a zombie plague, with the woman being infected. Filming outside in December wasn’t that tempting, so we started to talk about making a moral play taking place in a car, where a man, his best friend and his girlfriend was escaping through an zombie infested city and his actions leading to him becoming a zombie without even being infected. Both of those stories felt too complex and hard to realize during the short time we had, so with just a few days until Christmas we scraped the ideas (although I later made the first idea into a movie during the following summer with Somdom). We decided to try to make a movie indoors and through some exhausting sessions we finally finished a script.

Production

The production was spread over a couple of days and nights, as the actors was working in the meantime. The first thing we shot was the exterior scene where the man sits in his car and walks up to the house. It sounds as a pretty easy shot but to be able to combine it with the opening special effects we needed to get the composition exactly right and also take some still photos that could be used for the transition. The part where he enters the door and she looks at him was shot on another location, near my house, on the busiest calm street in Malmö. There was a lot of retakes until we manage to get a shot without senior citizens, garbage trucks and other things. The interiors was filmed in Magnus bedroom and in my hall and living room. Because of that fact that we had to film during different time during the days we put extensive energy on getting the light right, without anyone noticing that it was daylight or dark outside. This was done by putting work lights on my balcony during nights.

Postproduction

After Christmas and New Years Eve we had a pretty intense period of post production. Hannah played in a play at the same time and Kervin had a visitor from the other side of the world. In the original script there was more about the man preparing to propose, but it didn’t really help the story so we cut it. We made the last changes and managed to get the film finished just in time, although we would have loved to make some more grading and work with the sound.

Reception and Distribution

The movie was shown for the first time at our class’ show. What I really liked about it was the varying interpretations people had after the movie. The movie got its own life and that is something really interesting which I’d like to explore some more and actually have done with Fatale (2010). The movie was accepted to the Pixel Short Film Festival 2009 where it had it’s official premiere. By being accepted to Pixel, the movie was also made an official Swedish movie and was registered at the Swedish Film Institute and that was a real boost as it was the first time for me.

Lessons learned

The main lesson I learned after this production was to try to keep it simple and avoid overdoing things. Still today I tend to make the scripts a little bit to complex, but at least I am aware of that I’ll need to simplify the script before shoot. We also filmed with two cameras to be more effective, but it’s obvious that you need more planing and people in the crew to pull that off, as the composition suffers in some of the images. Another thing was the lighting. We hadn’t had any advanced classes in lighting yet, but was pretty content with how the light was seamless during the final movie. However, that was at the expense of working with a more interesting lighting. The importance of using lights as a narrative and aesthetic tool became evident. Carpe Diem was the first sci-fi movie I ever made, and also made me interested in a more indirect kind of narration with focus on emotional content.

Watch it:

Tags: Carpe Diem, my projects