Our tenth and final day of shooting my short film musical Edgar Allan Poe adaptation “The Pit and the Pendulum – a musicabre” was all about the three doppelganger judges of the Inquisition, but not as they appear to the unlucky protagonist in his trial but as they appear in his imagination as his situation goes from dire to worse to just plain horrible.

To create the particular look I wanted for the judges, we filmed me wearing special headgear we called mirror masks. This ended up leading to imagery that has been the most commented and queried upon in the many Q&As I have given in film festivals that screened P&P over the past year and a half.

Above is a glimpse in the monitor as we shot a particular moment that is featured in the trailer for “The Pit and the Pendulum – a musicabre”. Below is a better view of VFX specialist Jimmy McCoy looking at the monitor (as well as D.P. Jason Chua behind the camera, gaffer Ja’rel Ivory beside him, and make-up artist Sami Eddy and me blocked from view behind Jason).

In the photo below you can see how what’s in the monitor above got translated into the final version: as with many of the shots we filmed this day, the mirror mask look would itself get mirrored in post production.

Here is a pic of one of the first mirror mask shots we filmed, with me wearing the mask made to fit horizontally just under my nose. This is the first time in the film we will see the judges wearing mirror masks.

In this clip you can see us shoot a take of the middle judge wearing this mask. In later takes I will be performing to the same music but moving my head differently for the judge who will be placed to the left in the screen, and differently again for the judge who will be placed at the right.

Here is a screenshot of what that eventually looks like:

The same idea for when the judges are wearing mirror masks that divide the face diagonally, from below the left eye to above the right eye and also from below right to above left.

So how did these mirror masks come to be? Let me rewind a bit, and move this blog post into pre-production. Like I said, I knew the three identical judges of the Inquisition would need to appear in ever more nightmarish forms in the protagonist’s imagination. I had this idea that mirrors attached flush to someone’s face would create unique and freaky images, and wanted to explore those possibilities in the film. Create “mirror masks”, devise and shoot a variety of looks wearing these mirror pieces, and then combine these looks in various ways for the three judges.

I realized I would need to find an artist, a sculptor or mask maker, to help me make these mirror mask pieces. First I drew some sketches of what these pieces might look like. The first sketch explored horizontal planes:

The second sketch employed diagonal mirror planes.

Then I made sketches of horizontal/vertical and diagonal mirror crosses dividing the facial plane:

Plus another sketch of just going nuts with possible mirror designs.

These sketches were posted on an on-line message board / list serve for artists with a description of what I was trying to create and a request for a sculptor or mask maker interested in collaborating.

I got lucky. Radka Salcmannova, a sculptor and mask maker, answered the call. She would make the mirror masks for “The Pit and the Pendulum – a musicabre”.

First she made a plaster cast of my head, which in turn allowed her to make this face sculpture.

The plaster head allowed her to cut mirror planes that were especially designed to fit snuggly against the contours of my face. Radka made several horizontal and several diagonal planes, each cut to fit in a different position on my face. Instead of glass, which would have been too heavy, she used acrylic, which mirrors just like glass but is light enough to fit easily, bendable metal wires or rubber bands sufficing to keep the pieces attached firmly (enough) onto my head.

She also made this piece with a horizontal and vertical plane. Here I am taking a selfie wearing it.

And in keeping with the “go nuts” brief of my fourth sketch, Radka made additional headpieces that fit in ever more bizarre and elaborate ways.

I had several months in pre-production to play with the many mirror masks and try different looks in the mirror and take pictures with my phone.

In addition to the larger pieces that fit on my head, Radka also provided me with smaller, slotted pieces that could be attached anywhere I wanted to on the mirror planes of the larger head gear. Here I have slotted one of those pieces between my eyes onto a horizontal mirror plane, while two vertical planes frame my head.

I gave names to those small slottable pieces. That’s “arrow” in the foreground. And “shark” reflecting my visage in the background

Remember the headgear from the first practice shot above. Here I am wearing it on set.

And here is me cueing up my Ipod to start the playback.

For this short segment we could film several attempts in one take. I would just keep repeating the music segment I was performing to. A monitor was always placed in my eyeline so I could keep track of my head position in the shot.

There are five separate segments in the film where the mirror masks are employed to ever more elaborate effect. The longest mirror mask segment required me to hold my position and lip-synch in Latin for 70 seconds. When the particular look required some precarious mirror balancing I didn’t always get through the whole take, as you can see here.

Below I get through that whole take OK – but only just. Not all 70 seconds were going to be used, but at this stage I didn’t know which part would be used – I wanted as many options as possible for the edit, so I needed all 70 seconds to be as usable as possible. In total we shot 13 different looks for this 70 second segment, which we then combined and varied to create 21 different final images.

21 for this segment, which is one out of 5 that feature the mirror masks – in total I count 56 different completed mirror mask images in the finished film.

Below is a screenshot of how the above take translated into the finished film – one of those 56 mirror mask images. The look from the take is placed both at the left of the screen and – mirror reversed – at the right, with a different look placed at center. In the film you see this image for 6 seconds before the next mirror image takes its place.

In addition to mirror reversing (AKA flipping) the look, as you see here, we could also shrink or enlarge it, or turn it upside down. We got very creative; I’m sharing plenty in this blog post but even that is only a small fraction of all the crazy images that ended up in the movie.

Basically the full process for the mirror masks was this: Radka Salcmannova built the masks, I then practiced looks with them for months before creating a shooting plan for the looks to be captured on set, noting in which of the 5 mirror mask segments in the film the looks belonged. D.P. Jason Chua and the crew then shot me in these looks on set. Then (while editor Stolis Hadjicharalambous first worked on the rest of the film) I had several weeks in post-production to examine the results and put together a plan for how we would vary and combine the shots we had. That plan got handed over to Stolis who put together a rough version of all the mirror mask sequences, after which VFX specialist Jimmy McCoy – removing hands and torsos etc. – completed the final version.

In the fifth and final mirror mask segment the candles that we earlier saw on the table in front of the judges make their way into the crazy world of the mirror masks.

Unfortunately in that take the candle flame got too close to a mirror panel, singeing it (you can see the singe spot up left), making the headpiece unusable for further takes. Another headpiece fell apart after too much use. At the end of the day I suddenly found myself not able to do all the shots I had planned for the grand finale with candles, and had to improvise looks on the fly with those mirror pieces that were still available to me…

I was able to concoct just enough looks to put together the necessary imagery for the grand finale with candles. Here is one look similar to one of the bathroom practice shots I made at home and shared above. The smaller piece called “shark” has been slid into a horizontal piece that also has two vertical planes attached to it. The candle is held precariously close to my face and mirror panels for this take. I didn’t worry about my face (even if A.D. Charlotte Pursor did), but I did worry about singing yet another mirror plane…

Here is us shooting that take. That’s make-up artists Sami Eddy, who the day before shaved my head, hovering behind me…

And this is how this shot is doubled and flipped to create the final image in the movie – a shot that will go by in two seconds; still longer than some other mirror mask images that last less than a second during that climactic segment.

The final shot completed just in time before we had to finish for the final day, we celebrated with cake, a special Edgar Allan Poe cake…