finalyearprojectcernunnos

[finalyearprojectcernunnos]

Post production

Post-production, due to how amazing Robbie and Gaby were, was a smooth process.

I was very happy with pretty much everything they did. I was present for quite a lot of the edit as that's how Robbie preferred to work. I was less present for the sound design, as that was how Gaby preferred to work.

The biggest stress was on my part, as during the edit I was also ADing Pickled Fish. And during the sound design I was horribly ill.

But in the end it all looked and sounded amazing!

A trickier process was the grade. John Kelbie was our colourist. We assumed that colour grading a black and white film would be easier, but this was deceptive, especially considering the fact that John had to do a lot of very complicated things, such as the day for night scenes. In the end - this also looked amazing however!

[finalyearprojectcernunnos]

John Kenny and the carnyx

I think one of the coolest aspects of the Cernunnos film is our usage of a real Carnyx, an ancient Celtic instrument that you can see pictured above.

I had done a lot of research into the Picts prior to writing the script, and the carnyx was present from the first draft. It was unclear whether or not we would actually be able to achieve getting one for the film however, as from my research there was basically only one man in Britain who was able to play it. That man was John Kenny.

Not only was John Kenny able to play the carnyx, but was a part of the archeological team that were responsible for accurately reconstructing it based on bits and pieces found all over Europe.

Gaby managed to organise our meeting with John through getting in contact with a museum. Usually, for a single session, John would charge £800. Instead of this, we got it for free, based on the fact that we will be shooting a short documentary for him.

[finalyearprojectcernunnos]

Day 5 of filming

The hill you see pictured above is where we shot the opening wide shot of the film. It took a long time to find the perfect hill that looked great but would also be safe for our actors to run down. The shot itself was pretty simple, it was just getting up there that was a pain.

I don't think I have yet mentioned how unbelievably lucky we were on Cernunnos with the weather. Bad weather could have completely destroyed the shoot. The same applied to day 5 in the most perfect way possible. For this wide hill shot, a thick fog rolled in, which looked amazing on camera and also made the silhouettes of the characters stand out amazingly.

The weather started to get quite bad though. This was of great concern as we were re shooting the Cernunnos scene later that day. However, the weather cleared up. The stone circle didn't take that long to set up. The Cernunnos makeup was finished right on time. And we pretty much nailed the scene in my opinion. So, in the end, everything was alright, thank god.

Overall, the Cernunnos shoot is by far the most insane thing I have ever done in my entire life. I learnt so much on it, in terms of preparing for directing, but also in terms of managing people. Michael was incredibly difficult to deal with. It was quite stressful to work with Ellen also. I made alot of mistakes, but I think I handled it quite well.

I am incredibly happy with how the film turned out and despite all the woes I have described in this blog I had an incredible time, and I really genuinely think the crew did as well.

[finalyearprojectcernunnos]

Day 3 & 4 of filming

Day 3 & 4, aside from a few Michael moments, had no real catastrophes. I think they went pretty smooth, and as a director I think I did a pretty good job.

I think the biggest thing I was learning day to day was just how tricky being the leader of a team could be. Specifically, the trickiness of making decisions where you are guaranteed to irritate somebody.

In the background of the scenes that we were shooting on these days was the prospect of the Cernunnos reshoot. I had told Ben about it, who had to do the difficult task of gaining last minute permission from the forestry commission. Until that happened, I didn't want to stress everyone out and confuse them by announcing such a major change.

However, I got the greenlight, and we informed everyone. In this reshoot, this obviously meant that we would do it differently, as previously it just hadn't worked. One of these decisions was the decision to now show Cernunnos' face. Out budget only allowed for makeup, and showing Cernunnos' face just didn't work, it just looked way too human. Unfortunately, Charlie had been growing his beard out for over six months. This was all in vain. A handful of people also had problems with a handful of other things.

I found this all quite stressful to balance. It was such a learning experience for me, of having to make these importance decisions and bearing the consequences. If you sign up as director you have to deal with it. It was worth it though and I am proud of the way I handled things.

[finalyearprojectcernunnos]

Day 2 of filming

Day 2 was by far the most hectic day of the shoot.

Most of Cernunnos takes place in just random forest. The only real production design that we had was the location of the grand finale, the standing stone circle.

The stone circle had been one of the biggest concerns since I wrote the script. Many people asked, including myself, how the hell we were going to do it. My hope was that it would be similar to that of the production design on my previous film Necropolis Munro. For that film, we had a dream sequence in a grave yard on a hill, for which we rented out some prop graves that were made of Styrofoam. So hopefully, there would be styrofoam standing stones as well. Eventually, we had found some, they weren't even advertised on the prop house's website, they had to be shipped over specially for us.

The thought process behind the scheduling of this day was that the stone circle would take a long time to set up. They were also massive and took up the entire space of the van, where we would usually have all of our equipment. We only wanted to do it once. Hence, we wanted to shoot the dream scene and the final scene in one day. The final scene, FYI, not only included a massive complex fight sequence, but also included the one time that we actually see Cernunnos in the flesh. Both of these were going to be incredibly difficult to pull off, despite how much Owen and myself had cut the shot list down.

The dream scene was quite easy. There was no dialogue, it was just Servi reacting to Cernunnos approaching (who we do not see). The most time-consuming part of shooting this was the fog machine. Initially, it broke. After we got it working the time it took to re-fog each take and keep it consistent was massive (although very much worth it). Based on this, we made the decision to not have fog in the fight sequence, as we presumed that there would not be enough time.

The fight sequence was very full-on, but quite smooth all things considered. Carter our fight director was there (thank god). Without him, I have no idea if the sequence would even have worked. He was so unbelievably useful. We kind of abandoned chunks of our shot list in favour of getting what he suggested. I think parts of it were probably saved by him as well, such as making sure that we perfected the moment were Servi gets slashed by Antonius. I think the sequence would have functioned if Carter hadn't suggested this, but it would not have been anywhere near as good. For the duration of the fight sequence, although I obviously wanted input, I made a decision to let Carter, the man with decades of experience, take the reigns. I think that paid off.

The fight sequence was an incredibly exciting sequence to shoot for obvious reasons. However, it was a lot of work. And afterwards, everyone was shattered. And we still had to shoot the denouement of the film - Servi's interaction with Cernunnos.

Charlie had arrived in his Cernunnos makeup and it unfortunately just wasn't up to the standard that we'd hoped. This was due to many factors that I do not blame Nikola at all for. She was in charge of doing the makeup for Servi, Antonius AND Cernunnos (the latter which took hours and hours), all whilst remotely being in charge of the look of the stone circle. We had a makeup artist there on the day to help, but from what I understand she did not help Nikola at all.

We had all been nervous to shoot the Cernunnos sequence. Alongside the stone circle, Cernunnos was one of the biggest things we'd have to do. On top of this, the previous night I had received a call from Ellen (our exec), Ronan and Michael, where they voiced their concerns about Cernunnos not looking good enough. It was always a strange dynamic between myself and Ellen, Ronan and Michael. The actors were both pretty big for a student film, and Ellen is the former CEO of Warner Bros China. So despite the fact that I was in charge of them, it never felt that way. So it was safe to say I was very stressed out.

My solution was for us to see as little of Cernunnos as possible. This was always kind of the plan, but we decided to do this to the extreme. We blasted as much fog as possible at Charlie to basically completely obscure him. Except, the wind had picked up, so this didn't actually happen. What followed was about an hour and a half of the camera crew and I desperately screaming for Jack (the grip) so aim the fog this way and that, a bit more or a bit less. Meanwhile, Jack could barely hear us as he was right next to a noisy generator. We were all exhausted and braindead, including the actors, and we just simply didn't get it.

This was a major anxiety for me. I knew that the ending didn't work. It was very hard to keep up motivation for a film where I knew it wouldn't matter as the ending was bad. God was in our favour, however, and it so happened that we only had a half day of shooting on the final day. I wanted to reshoot the Cernunnos scene. This would be very complicated for literally everyone. We were shooting elsewhere on that day, hence Ben would have to get permission from the forestry commission for the reshoot. Secondly, we would have to reconstruct the stone circle. Thirdly, we would have to redo Cernunnos' makeup. All of these things messed up a number of things. But ultimately, I think deciding to reshoot the Cernunnos sequence was one of the best decisions I made.

I left this day feeling horribly anxious. I was happy with the fight sequence and the dream scene. However, none of it mattered if we couldn't perfect the Cernunnos sequence. And as we were yet to do that until the very end of the shoot, that anxiety stayed with me the entire time.

[finalyearprojectcernunnos]

Day 1 of filming

On Day 1 we got up and shot possibly the worst-looking scene of the film, one of the very first scenes. Not only was it because we were just getting into it, but both of our lights broke. Our gaffer (who I had suggested) had no idea what he was doing, so we ended up just shooting this scene with no lighting. It was saved in the grade, however, and I'm now pretty happy with it. It was also probably saved by our excellent choice of location and the fact that we were using a very expensive camera.

I was worried initially about having to cut the scene. This happened on the previous film I directed, Necropolis Munro, where we also happened to shoot the first scene on the first day, and it looked so terrible that we had to cut it from the film. Luckily that did not happen.

Overall though, all things considered, including my lack of preparation, the day actually went very smoothly.

We shot the campfire scene this day also, which looked incredible even before it had been graded day-to-night. I think when Michael saw the dailies his mood improved significantly. But to be honest, he was much less difficult to deal with on set than I imagined. It was mostly just me having to correct his dialogue.

I am honestly thankful for my experience dealing with Michael. It has taught me how to manage a personality like that. It also taught me the importance of being assertive in my vision. I am still not perfect with that, but I am getting there.

[finalyearprojectcernunnos]

Day before filming

The day before filming started off with anxiety as it was raining. The forecast was that it would stop, however with Scotland you never know. If the weather got properly bad it would not only make shooting miserable (especially for Ronan in his skimpy costume) but potentially mean we would have to call it off. We had already had a close call with a ginormous storm that had happened a week prior which brought loads of trees down. This actually meant that Ben and I had to go back to the forests we were shooting in and choose new locations last minute. This actually ended up giving us better locations, but it certainly wasn't something that we wanted to be doing so close to the shoot.

We picked up the van, which costed us an arm and a leg, however was definitely worth the purchase. We would not have managed without it. It also felt very official.

The plan was that the whole crew would stay in my parents home which was right next to our locations. The actors would stay in the neighbor's extension - which was fancy, modern and entirely separate to the rest of the house. It seemed pretty much perfect.

That was until Michael and Ellen showed up. The day for them had already started off on the wrong foot. My friend Dan kindly volunteered to help out on the shoot as a driver, which really saved us. But when Dan pulled up to the hotel in Edinburgh to pick up Michael and Ellen, neither of them were impressed. Dan was driving a tiny polo, and the LA Actor and exec had two or three massive suitcases each. Ellen tried to instead get us to book a taxi from Edinburgh, but Dan managed to get them in the car. I feel bad, but also find it quite funny to picture Dan (who has no film experience) trying to reason with these two big-shot LA people who are used to premium treatment.

Michael was not happy with the accommodation. He properly threw his toys out of the pram. The legitimate issue he had was that the wifi happened to go down that day. Otherwise, the extension was just simply "not up to his standards". Following this, instead of calling Ben, who was currently on a bus trying to get all the crew members to my house, Michael called Ellen.

Meanwhile, I was preparing to have a last-minute call with Paul Gray regarding directing advice. I felt incredibly unprepared as a director. I had done so much on the writing side, but simply did not do enough on the directing side. I was not able to do this call with Paul as I then got a call from Ellen. By the time this information of Michael being unhappy got back to me, Ellen described the beautiful modern extension as a "shack with no power". Ellen ended up paying for Ronan and Michael to stay in an AirBnB, which she was not happy about. So my final day that was intended for last minute prep went towards trying to sort this anxiety-inducing situation. I literally had no idea what could happen, whether Michael was going to walk off and not do his role, whether or not I would squander my working relationship with Ellen.

Other than that, it was quite exciting. Everyone arrived and got settled in. The morale was incredibly high, which was reassuring to see.

But overall I should not have left directing prep so last minute. I learnt a lot about that, and also about dealing with difficult personalities in difficult situations.

[finalyearprojectcernunnos]

Fight Rehearsal

One of the most ambitious aspects of Cernunnos was the final fight scene. It is the biggest moment of the story, the final duel between slave and master, it needed to be tense and thrilling.

However, with our limited budget, this was a massive challenge. I wrote the fight scene in a way I hoped would be engaging whilst also being as straight forward to film as possible.

There is no actual "dueling" in the fight. The two weapons never collide, nor do the weapons even touch either of the actors. It is essentially Servi dodging Antonius' swings until Servi finally gets slashed just once. Following that is the strangulation and the head smashing - which obviously don't actually happen, and is entirely just acting.

First and foremost, safety was a priority. Despite the fact that the sword was fake, we didn't really want it being swung anywhere near Ronan. Second of all, having Servi basically just dodge and weave was so much simpler to do, and its not out of place at all. Servi is a nimble character who is evading the heavily armoured Antonius.

For our own benefit and because of the law we needed a fight coordinator and weapons handler on set. We got in contact with Carter Ferguson - someone that our exec Fraser has worked with many times in the past. Because of Fraser's connection with him and assumedly because we are students we got a large discount for Carter's services. He was an incredibly nice guy and seemed just genuinely passionate about helping out a small Scottish production. That being said, to have him for one day on set was £600. To rehearse the fight scene, it would be another £300.

Carter, in the interest of saving us money, said that because the fight scene was so simple we could probably do it without a rehearsal and just go for it on the day.

However, Ben and myself were concerned about messing the fight scene up. We had very limited time, inexperienced crew and so on and so forth. We decided to pay for a rehearsal as insurance. I don't know what happens in the alternative dimension where we didn't do this, but I think this was an incredibly smart purchase.

Carter was an absolute pleasure to work with. For the most part, the fight scene played out the way I imagined it in my head. However, Carter added a bunch of cool details and movement into it that just made it so much better. Looking at the finished film now, I think my previous plan wouldn't have been necessarily boring, but definitely significantly worse.

Furthermore, it was great to see the actors in their costumes and with their props. For as tricky as Michael was to deal with, by god did he look good in the armour. He has a proper Roman look to him, and was really throwing himself into the role. Fighting (and even just walking around) in that heavy armour was tricky to put it very lightly. Not only did he not complain about this, but had been training for months in the gym in order for it to look good. If he hadn't done this training, it is very likely that it would have looked incredibly awkward. It just simply wouldn't look like a Roman. It would look like an actor in a costume in a student film.

This fight rehearsal was only a few days before the actual shoot. One of my biggest concerns was how to do the spear breaking. In that first segment of the fight scene, it is supposed to be building up to the point where Servi finally gets the opportunity to strike. Then there is a twist that the feeble wooden spear simply snaps against Antonius' armour.

In the shot list I had planned to literally just cut away for this snapping moment and cut to half the spear falling to the ground. Although this would have worked, I felt we were robbing the audience just a little. I also thought that it would seem incredibly clear that we were cutting away for budgetary reasons. We already have a moment like that later in the fight scene with the rock, so I didn't want to do it twice. Carter agreed with this, and we decided on the day that we would basically find two identical looking sticks but cut one in a way where it breaks.

I absolutely loved the fight rehearsal. At that point it really felt as though the film was beginning to come together.

[finalyearprojectcernunnos]

Rehearsals

Ronan and Michael came to Edinburgh a few days before the shoot. Michael flew over from LA with Ellen, and Ronan made the much more dangerous journey of driving down from Fife.

Both of them had clearly done massive amounts of preparation, and to be completely honest there wasn't all that much direction I wanted to give.

The trickiest part of the rehearsal, and what would end up also being the trickiest part of the shoot, was dealing with Michael. He was truly a very difficult man.

Prior to the rehearsal, Ben had picked Michael up from his hotel (the fancy Sheraton on Lothian road). Michael had had a five star buffet breakfast there that morning. Ben asked Michael how the breakfast was, to which Michael responded "beggars can't be choosers".

During the rehearsal Michael would speak back and question quite literally every piece of direction that I gave. Even at points were I was just discussing ideas openly it seemed he would intentionally try to contradict me. I want my actors to speak their minds lest I make any stupid mistakes. But it really got to the point were it was incredibly disrespectful. Despite me compromising on the dialogue that he wrote, when we would rehearse scenes he would still say the lines wrong with his additions. When I would correct him, he would argue back with me. I decided to leave these dialogue corrections for the actual shoot, as I figured there would be changes made on the day anyway, and he was less likely to argue on set in front of the whole crew (this turned out to be a horrible mistake).

From this point onwards one of the biggest tasks was managing Michael, which unfortunately Ben got the brunt of.

Ronan, on the other hand, was absolutely lovely.

[finalyearprojectcernunnos]

Final Draft of Script

Despite having worked on the script for over a year, I was making changes to it up until a week before shooting.

This was for a couple reasons. When writing the script I was always doing it with budget in mind. I wanted to write it in a way where we could actually shoot it and not have it be terrible.

Specifically, the fight scene was of great concern. In my imagination it was filled with gore and blood, however in reality I realised that would be very difficult to do.

When myself, Ben and Ariel (the 1st AD) figured out the schedule, the fight scene was all to be shot in one day (as well as two other scenes that day). Hence, I did not want to overcomplicate an already incredibly complicated scene with issues of blood and gore continuity.

The biggest addition in this final draft was Servi smashing the Pictish stone against Antonius' head. This, to me, is a very meaningful moment. The Pictish stone is a symbol of Servi's freedom, and for Servi to smash it against his masters head is just great. Furthermore, it would have been a massive failure of very basic writing rules to have this rock magically appear and then only be used once to slightly damage a bit of rope.

I had had the head smashing idea in mind for a few drafts but was too nervous to add it. Firstly for the aforementioned reason. Secondly was due to one of the actors, Michael.

When I had initially casted Michael, I was pretty star struck. Ellen, our exec producer, really got me excited to work with him. By student film standards he was indeed quite a prestigious actor to have worked with. However it really does not justify the way that he treated me or the rest of the crew.

Michael was initially great. He seemed incredibly excited and passionate about the film, which I loved. He came up with some great suggestions for the script. But over time he basically tried to take control of aspects of it. At one point he even literally rewrote his dialogue without conferring with me beforehand. There were bits and pieces of his rewrite which I thought were good, but for the most part I did not like it. Ashamedly, to appease him, I compromised and kept some of his stuff and some of mine. I regret this a lot.

Michael was the biggest obstacle in the way of having the ending where Antonius gets smashed with the rock. He thought it was "overkill". Because I was still quite enamoured by him and was slightly concerned that he would kick off if I didn't listen to him, this was quite tricky for me. It was at this point that I thankfully decided to finally stand up for myself and keep it in the script, which I am very thankful that I did.

I pride myself on being incredibly collaborative with everybody on the film, as I despise authoritarian dictators. However, as a director I also need to be able to stand my ground. The situation with Michael would not have even been nearly as difficult if I had just set a precedent from the get go that I was in charge. This was a ginormous learning experience for me.

So in the end, I got the draft of the script that I felt very happy about.

[finalyearprojectcernunnos]

Crowdfunder

As we were making such an ambitious film, the crowd funder was quite stressful. There were no cuts we could really make to the budget if it didn't go to plan.

We very luckily got the kind donation of £1000 from the Edinburgh Napier Student Grant Initiative. We also had one of the biggest target amounts out of the grad films of £4,500. Even then, we were still quite concerned about the amount of money this film was going to cost.

Hence we undertook a vigorous advertising campaign, AKA spamming our social medias every single day. Robbie went above and beyond making videos for our Instagram tracking the progress of our crowd funder. It was quite touching the amount of people that I used to know that donated money.

It went very well initially, then slowed to a near halt. I was messaging family members that I haven't spoken to in years asking them for a fiver. Eventually, we did make it thanks to everyone's kind donations.

[finalyearprojectcernunnos]

Casting - Charlie Barker

One of the biggest questions during the pre-production of this film was how we were going to achieve creating a Celtic forest god with a small student budget.

Cernunnos is an idea that I've been working on since 2023, the first draft being written in June 2024. Prior to that, I was briefly living with my friend Charlie, who actually acted in my previous film Necropolis Munro.

Charlie liked the idea and was keen to get involved. He had both the stature and the giant beard to realistically play the part - and so he was casted long before Trimester one begun.

There were some concerns on my part on casting a non-actor. An inexperienced director directing an inexperienced actor sounds like a disaster waiting to happen. However, in this particular role, the performance would be very simple. There would not be any lines, only body movement.

Regardless, you can often tell when an actor is inexperienced even if they are just walking from A to B. Something about the way they compose themselves just seems off. However, Charlie did very well in Necropolis Munro, and after doing some rehearsals with him where we practiced his stance and his death stare, I felt very confident that it would go well.

Generally speaking the idea with Cernunnos was that less is more. We did not have the budget to make the god look incredibly realistic. So it was to our strength to show the least amount possible of Charlie.

[finalyearprojectcernunnos]

Casting - Ronan Doyle

On New Year's Eve, I had a last-minute call that was organised between myself and Ronan Doyle, an actor from Fife who has acted in some series such as The Witcher: Blood Origins (Netflix) and films such as The Last Bus (2021).

In order to find Ronan, I had spent days going through every single Scottish casting agency I could find on the internet, watching hours upon hours of showreels.

I saw Ronan's headshot, and he just seemed to have the right look about him for the role of Servi. I watched his showreel, and although there was nothing in there remotely similar to that of a Pictish slave, I had a gut feeling that he was it.

During the call we discussed our ideas for the film and the role. The role of Servi in my mind was going to require an almost Gollum-esque performance, of a groveling defeated man who does nothing but serve his master. He got this instantly. I sent him over the character's backstory and I awaited his audition tape.

When the audition tape arrived, the performance was brilliant, but was way over the top, however it was over the top in the right way. It really showed potential. For the majority of the film this performance needed to be dialed down, but I wanted to harness the energy that he'd given and save it for the final act.