Welcome back to the “Tell-Tale Heart – a musicabre” film shoot diary, and the day I murdered my husband. Repeatedly. Take after take after take.
Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” centers on a “very very dreadfully nervous (but why will you say that I am mad?)” man recalling how he murdered his housemate. I musically adapted and performed the piece on stage years ago, and now am producing a short film of the “musicabre”.
Our movie had a six day shoot. The first set-ups focused on the “flashback” shots of the narrator’s nightly stalking of his sleeping housemate: slowly opening the door, looking in, casting a thin ray of light onto the old man’s closed eye. It is the pale blue “vulture eye” of the old man that disturbs the narrator so much he resolves to kill to rid himself of it.
I cast my husband Ed as the old man. Which means I cast my husband as the murder victim.
Above you can see photographs of the camera monitors during the filming of me as the narrator opening the door and very slowly moving my head into the bedroom. The monitors show the image in black and white, because that is how the flashback shots will be seen in the final film.
Early during the second day of our shoot we shot the murder; when the narrator, after accidentally awakening the old man during the eighth nightly stalking visit, sees the old man’s vulture eye wide open in terror, and rushes into the room for the assault. Below you can see me getting ready for action.
And this here is my husband in the bed looking at me adoringly, before we shot the murder sequence.
His character would have no good reason to look at me so trustingly.
When I plan choir concerts for elementary student performers, I hope to choose songs that will appeal to the age group but also to adults, since the kids’ parents will be our audience. I also like to choose some musically exciting pieces that may seem unusual or difficult, but which I believe children can master and will enjoy. It challenges me as a teacher and artist to push against the boundaries of what is expected from a grade school choir concert.
Most of the short film adaptation of my chamber music theater horror show will be filmed on constructed movie sets. But there is one half day of location shooting scheduled to shoot the entrance (and some interiors) of the home where the man who insists he is no madman kills the old man with the pale blue vulture eye, only to be driven to frenzied confession by the beating of the heart of the dismembered corpse under the bedroom floor boards.
