Working on a film can be a long process. Especially when the film is completely self-funded. It happened for ‘South of Heaven’, our inhouse colourist Marco van Bergen’s new short film, which he wrote, directed, graded, post supervised and finished. It took him five years to complete the 18-minute film.
The film premiered in Pathé Tuschinski on May 26th 2019. But Marco has been working on the film since 2014 and tells the story of Elias, when his boyfriend shows up unannounced, Elias’ religious family learns their son’s darkest secret.
At the end of 2018 the film was shot on location over the course of three days by a passionate crew, headed by Marco and cinematographer Jim Stuurman.
On location, editor Efin de Landmeter was present for datahandling and proxies, also carrying out some rushes editing at the end of the shooting days. After shooting Efin edited the entire film under watchful supervision of his cat Betsie. Betsie always joined in on edit sessions with Marco and Efin, taking her prime spot on the director’s lap to watch along and comfort him when scenes would get tougher to cut or little tweaks needed to be made.
After we locked picture at our facility in Amsterdam, Sound designer Max van den Oever started working his magic. He carried out the final mix in our 52-seat 5.1 Dolby certified mixing theatre. Together with cinematographer Jim Stuurman, Marco graded the film in our grading suite, providing finishing in P3. When the entire film was done, it was conformed in our facility and the DCP tested in our theatre, before being sent off to the premiere venue, Pathe Tuschinski, after which we made multiple different deliveries for festivals, TV, online etc.
“Working on this film was an incredible experience. A beautiful, often painful, creative process in which I got to work with talented and dearly beloved friends. I wouldn’t have wanted to do it any other way. Even though it was often stressful, it was good to know that we at Fireplace were always in full control of the post proces. It made it a lot easier knowing we had everything under our roof and ready to step in when needed .” – Marco
Fireplace is ready to assist projects like South of Heaven with full post production. From acquisition on set to delivery in multiple formats and everything in between. Shoot us a mail if you want more info on how we can help your next production!
