Vultures Episode 5: Character Portraits, Stalking & Chase Sequences

I’m attempting to sort through a huge backlog of photos I’ve let build up from the past year, in particular all my behind the scenes shots from the 10 week shoot for Vultures episodes 5, 6 & 7.

As I’ve said before, I’d like to put the photos up in the order that the scenes appear in the episodes, not in the order they were shot. The result of that choice is quite confusing; the shooting schedule was pretty complicated and scattered, I’ve got over 2000 photos from the shoot that need to be put in the right order before I can work on them. After previous episodes I was aware how frustrating it was to have to hold back on uploading shots to avoid spoilers. It meant that I had looked at the shots so many times before they went up that I just wasn’t happy with them anymore.

Thankfully, over the past few months I’ve learned a few new tricks and tips, I’m beginning to concentrate on the overall presentation of my work and I have a lot of new ideas with plenty of photos stocked up to test them out on. Recently I’ve been looking at a lot of commercial photography and in particular image sequences, it’s something I wanted to try. I was never quite happy with the final presentation of most of my Vultures character portraits, so as a test I revisited three individual shots of the gentlemen detectives of V.P.I: Niall Tennyson (Séan Hackett), Jim Vultour (John Morton) and Dan McGrain (David Thompson), each standing outside the red door exterior location used for the V.P.I offices.

I wasn’t happy with the overall finish of the shots but at the time didn’t know what to do with them. Now, I’ve done a bit more work on them and feel they go better together in a sequence which you can see here.

I’ve also uploaded a couple of behind the scenes shots from the scene in episode 5 where Dan McGrain stalks Tom Moriarty. For such a small scene it was surprisingly complicated to shoot; with bits of the scene being shot on different shoot days. The stuff where McGrain gets a lift from Noah (Gus McDonagh), who suggests running him over, was shot on Shoot Day 22.

We only had four days to shoot any scene featuring Noah and it was the most intense four days of shooting overall; attempting to shoot scenes that were bigger and more complicated than anything we’d shot before. We had been shooting all day and then before we completely lost the light we picked up this part of the sequence. Gus can’t drive so we simply found a quiet street in an estate, with a gradual slope and then we slowly pushed the car along. Sla was positioned sitting back-to-front in the passenger seat to get the shot and I watched on the monitor through the window as we pushed the car along. I didn’t get any photos.

But I did get a nice shot of McGrain watching Tom through his binoculars at the Black Abbey. It was Shoot Day 37 and it was horrible. I can’t remember what else was shot earlier that day but we went to pick up the shot outside Frank Walls and it began to rain, ice cold rain. Snow was soon to follow. We moved quickly to the Black Abbey, the rain stopped but then Sla got called away. We attempted to shoot without him (NOTE: never attempt to shoot without Sla), but we ran out of tapes. There was more in the office but Sla had the keys. It was a painful day!

The rest of the stalking sequence was shot on Shoot Day 39, the last day of shooting. I’ve uploaded two new shots from behind the display of the Canon XA H1 featuring McGrain watching Tom leave his house and one shot of Tom leaving his house with Isabelle watching him strut away. Shooting the rest of the sequence where Tom walks through town and all the ladies swoon was hilarious but I didn’t get any photos, I was either laughing too much or in awe of sexy Tom Moriarty!?

Episode-wise, the stalking sequence leads us back to the office, Quint Quigley makes his entrance and then all hell breaks loose with a chase sequence through the various lanes of Kilkenny. We shot the office interior stuff with Quint on a different weekend entirely, where we also shot the dialogue for the start of the chase sequence. We shot the chase sequence itself over the intense weekend that Gus was available, on that day in particular the Post Office on High Street had been robbed and so the high presence of squad cars and helicopters added to the mood.

Sla managed to nab a couple of handy pick-up shots throughout the day and we got quite a lot of funny looks. We started an hour later than planned, somebody got delayed, it was already going to be a tough day and now we had to pick up speed. In the hour wait, I managed to pick up a character portrait of Alan Dawson as the randomer-punching eye-patch-wearing samurai-sword-swinging Pinkerton goon which you can check out here on the Oss237.com homepage.

Shooting was quick and frantic, we were against the clock,  shooting the sequence in order, quick handheld set-ups that I had mapped out in advance, moving through the various lanes, dashing across roads, dodging traffic and occasionally having to hold for human traffic wandering through shots or simply for actors trying to catch their breath. I kept putting my script and flask down for set-ups only to forget them. Thankfully Pip was with us and was good enough to constantly pick them up for me!

The chase sequence was also the first introduction of new Pinkerton goon BrickMan played by Matty Gargan. I didn’t get to take many shots that day but I had already snapped his character portrait during Shoot Day 8 where we shot some of Ned Savage’s montage sequence for episode 6. Again I wasn’t entirely happy with the finish of the overall shot so I’ve gone back and worked on it to produce a two-shot sequence that properly introduces BrickMan, you can check it out here.

Following the chase through the lanes we moved location to an industrial estate to shoot the end of the sequence where Noah shows up to rescue the detectives and Quigley, which was then followed by a location move to Jenkinstown woods to shoot Noah’s montage sequence from episode 6, but I’ll talk more about those scenes when I get the photos sorted.

The result of the quick-paced shoot for the chase scene meant I didn’t get a lot of time to take photos but I had a couple of rough shots. Alone I wasn’t happy with them, they were taking on a corner as the lads ran uphill and towards the camera. I hid behind a car out-of-shot to get the photos during a take, but as they came around the corner the sun was shining and I didn’t have the chance for a second take or adjusting settings. It also wasn’t ideal to be trying to shoot all this action on a 50mm lens, focus was a nightmare. So rather than not have some of the scene captured in photos I spent a bit of time working on the five shots I had (seen at the top of this post), playing with colouring and textures for a sequence that I’m very happy with, for a first attempt at this sort of thing.

I wanted to give it a film sequence look, making it look like old film footage that had been slightly damaged and exposed. To finish it off I added some lines directly from the script that best described the scene and explained what exactly was going on in the sequence.

So please have a look at The Chase Sequence and as always any comments, critcism or feedback would be greatly appreciated. More photos on the way soon.