Throw Back Thursday: Reshooting "Messenger" in the Rain

One of the most interesting days of filmmaking in our lives revolves around the reshoot of our short film "Messenger."

We shot the film in late February, but after an early edit we realized that we needed to get more shots to fill out certain crucial scenes. So we set out to reshoot the movie in April. Among the scenes that we needed to reshoot was an outdoor scene at night around a camp fire. In the original production, we shot at the same location for all the outdoor sequences and actually set up a live camp fire. But during the second round of shooting we face a number of obstacles.


1. We did not have a permit for the location
2. We had a fourth of the crew at our disposal
3. We needed to have about 5 or 6 extras
4. It was raining that evening and we had some big lights that we needed to use for the scene.

Fortunately, we have a nice backyard with a lot of trees so that was the location we decided upon. But we still had to overcome the rain situation. That is where some creativity from our cinematographer Jeff Seesselberg came into play.

We had a tarp that we had purchased to use for other scenes in the production so we took a number of C-stands and stretched it out to use for cover. Underneath it we created our camp fire and utilized a Kino to create the fire effect. The result was seamless and one of the finer looking moments in the film.