P A S S A G E (Short Film)

Passage was my graduation project in the final year of my undergrad studies. This was a project that pushed me beyond what I thought I was capable of. The unfortunate effects of COVID-19 on my final year's calendar was that everything was pushed later in the year, causing some overlapping. While trying to crunch out the last few weeks of post-production on my mid year project, See You Then, we were also in the pre-production development stages of Passage. Early on we realized the passion and excitement we had for this film. It would push every department in the crew to the absolute limit meaning everyone had to be firing on all cylinders. We managed to secure some external funding which allowed us to pursue and execute every task we had set out for ourselves. We decided to shoot the film in the main studio at AFDA Cape Town, allowing our production designer, Marc Petrelis, to showcase every single inch of his strengths. He spent longs hours building the set in the two week bracket that was allocated, and managed to create a stunning world to film our cast in. We shot for 5 days in a dark, dust and smoke filled studio. With our masks on of course. Going into Post-Production, we knew we had again set out a map to push our limits. I co-edited the film with Sebastian Braune and we had decided to throw ourselves in the deep end and work, for the first time on a big project, in Avid Media Composer. Fortunately for us, we were able to swim. We soon discovered that shooting in a small studio meant we had no extreme wide establishing shots. This left the edit feeling claustrophobic. As the VFX Supervisor I realized this problem would fall into my lap. I quickly called on my VFX team of Benjamin Jacobs and Tristan Peel, who also had their hands full working as Sound Designer, Director of Photography and Colour Grading Artist respectively. We ended up creating 4 more shots than originally intended, almost doubling the amount at which we had planned for. Benjamin was tasked with creating the magnificent 3D environments, Tristan with recreating the physical set of the bridge in 3D space, while I created smaller 3D assets for the wides and worked on the other shots. The crunch for the deadline meant the whole post-production team ended up working 12-14 hour days straight for 3 weeks to meet the deadline and have the project at a standard which we were proud of. All the hard work would eventually pay off when we witnessed the reaction to our opening screening and winning an award for AFDA Critics Best Film. I created the poster for the film as well as being credited as Co-editor, VFX Supervisor, 3D Artist and VFX Compositor.