What was the inspiration behind making this short film?
I was fortunate enough to be given the opportunity to utilize the Bolt-X motion control rig, which is one of the most advanced pieces of technology available in film and camera equipment today. With this opportunity I wasn’t going to do just anything, I wanted to push the Bolt-X to its absolute limits and see how far we could take it. As the Bolt-X has the ability to move a camera to any position within 270 degrees and within a 3 meter radius an idea evolved whereby the movement of the camera would reveal the story to our audience. I had had a few near death experiences before and had written about them. In those moments time had both raced and stood still while both a million thoughts and nothing popped into my mind. This seemed like a deep and introspective idea which could be housed in something short and exciting.
Was there any particular challenges you had to go through to make the short film happen? This was filmed in the height of Covid-19 so the safety of the crew and everyone involved was of paramount importance to us. Tests, isolation bubbles, precautions, and an incredible safety officer ensured that we had zero incidents with a happy and safe set. From a technical standpoint we had several challenges. In essence the story is told through 5 reveals to the audience. The initial reveal of the characters eyes, the reveal of his cuts and bruises which hint at something being wrong, the reveal of the gun which confirms this suspicion, the reveal of the antagonist and our character’s obstacle, and the final moment as the world literally closes in on our character. This placed significant technical challenges in front of us as we would be moving our shots from extreme macro close ups to medium shots to wides all while moving around our main character without any edits. To allow us to achieve this we required, in addition to the incredible dexterity of the Bolt-X, a zoom lens which would allow us to get in close enough to our character to achieve our opening shot but then allow us to be wide open in our final shot. We spent our first day in testing using a zoom lens from a photography camera to test out whether we could pull this off. While our initial footage was raw it gave us the confidence we needed to know we would be able to achieve what we were looking to do. How has the short film been received? It has only been a week since its release but we have been selected for inclusion in 3 international festivals with 2 in Los Angeles and 1 in Berlin. We have also received incredible support from the filmmaking community with pages such as yourselves doing write ups and reviews as well as people reaching out to let us know how much they enjoyed it. Do you have any other projects in the pipeline? My debut feature is next. What advice would you give to anyone wanting to make their first short film? Stop reading this and go and make it.
Courtesy of Think Shorts at: https://thinkshorts.com/behindtheshort/interview-with-robert-dos-santos-director-of-a-moment