Published Wednesday 28 August 2024 by Mark Brindle in Video Production

The Questing Beast Short filming in Ipswich BTS

Mark has been in Ipswich for a 2-day shoot of the live action elements of The Questing Beast by writer/director Joseph Brown. Mark arrived a few days early to do final camera kit preparation and to recce the outdoor locations to be used in the film. The day before the shoot, the weather was amazing, so Mark and Joe went through the woods to found suitable locations for all the scenes involving the stop-frame monster shots that will be incorporated into the film in 2025.

The Recce the day before the shoot weather was great! Director Joe Brown on set.

There was a fair bit of sawn/cut tree areas to avoid as the film was meant to be in olden times before chainsaws, but they found some great areas in the woods run by location manager Anthony Gibson (he did the cooking too!). The next day of shooting, the weather forecast was looking bad and in fact it rained almost non-stop all day. A bit more recce and some shot re-planning, action blocking, costume and makeup tweaks were done, but no filming could be done at all on day 1 of 2 due to the weather.

Jedd the slayer trying to stay dry on the set of The Questing beast

The pressure was on day two for everyone, including the Actor Jedd Bonstad-Clark to give great performances and the costume/makeup/armourer Jean Arthur to keep costumes pristine in the damp location.

There is a Behind the scenes video of the film shoot on the link above, or directly watch on YouTube here. This was created by members of the Colchester Film Club who were assisting on the shoot as Assistant Director (AD) Gethin Thomas and Leigh Martyn Thomas plus camera assistant Joshua Bradbeer, plus Producer and Director Joe Brown and DOP and camera operator Mark Brindle.

The storyboard was reworked and shot order tweaked to reduce the risk of getting costume damaged, but we still managed to get all the shots filmed at 6k BRAW, including the gimbal shots on the DJI Ronin. Mark used the new DJI Transmission wireless system to allow the crew to see the camera shots throughout into the Smartview monitor.

Its a wrap on teh Questing Beast Live Action filming for this stop motion mix short

At the end of day two it was a wrap and all the shots were completed. Mark will next generate smaller H264 proxy files for Joe to work with and create a rough cut edit of the shoot to use for planning and blocking the stop-frame animation shots as the next phase of the video production. It was great fun to work on the production planning and the filming of The Questing Beast.

The Questing Beast is seen from the forest edge - Jedd Bonstad-Clark reacts to the Beast