Notes from a Composer

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.