Vultures Episode 5: The Car Park Scene, Character Portraits & “watching a man take a poo!” (Photos)

My first upload of the new year is another batch of behind the scenes photos from Vultures Episode 5: ‘The Adventure Of The Hidden Microfilm‘; a mixture of shots from the bathroom & car park scenes, a couple of random shots and some character portraits.

First up, there’s some individual portraits of John Morton and Alan Slattery taken in the Mycrofilm’s production office. Given that the premiere for Episode 4: ‘The Case Of The Poisoned Dates‘ took place two weeks into the shoot for episodes 5,6 & 7; it meant we spent most of our nights in the office (if we weren’t shooting). Those nights were a crazy mixture of editing episode 4 and pre-production for upcoming shoot days whilst drinking endless amounts of tea.

The schedule hung across the entire back wall of the office, constantly changing and being re-worked, it had quickly become a foreign language to me and indeed everyone except John. That evening in particular, I had received my wireless-flash-triggers in the post, so I took a break from story-boarding to test them out; I can’t remember the settings at this stage but I was playing with opposing colour pre-sets to get a cool blue effect on John as he stands “master of the schedule” and Sla sitting at his desk editing.

Following the scene in Noah’s car in episode 5, the fugitive V.P.I detectives and Quint Quigley retreat to Niall Tennyson’s house; where they put on some rubber gloves and attempt to retrieve the stolen data from inside the stoner. The scene was shot on Shoot Day 20 and although I didn’t take any photos of that scene I remember it was a lot of fun to shoot. We had spent a couple of days shooting various scenes in Tennyson’s kitchen (our old house was used for most of the interiors in Tennyson’s house) so lighting plans had been worked out in advance and with a basic shot-list for the montage we spent the afternoon doing various nasty things to Quigley (Kevin Mooney); making him drink cod liver oil, shaking him upside-down and saying things like “does it look like three men forcefully jamming their fingers down another mans throat!?”.

The scene eventually moves to Tennyson’s bathroom so Quigley can try force the microfilm or usb stick or possible laptop out his other end. The bathroom scene had actually been shot a few days before the rubber-gloved montage, on Shoot Day 16 in John Morton’s house. It was the only bathroom we could find with enough space to shoot four people in and even then we had a very limited shoot space. We didn’t have room for the lights so we set up a light outside the window (which is actually an interior window) and it created a lovely warm yellow glow to the scene.

Cut to a phone call from Jane Tennyson (Annette O’Shea) sitting in a car with Inspector Leeson (Paul Young), this single set-up was picked up quickly on Shoot Day 34, during a hectic weekend of shooting the scene in the Pinkerton’s lair amongst many others. We took a break from shooting interiors and moved to the car park outside to grab the shot.

Following the phone call, the detectives and Quigley race to buy some weed off Jack Street, a scene that was shot on Shoot Day 31. I have yet to master the art of taking behind the scenes photos of scenes I’m actually in, especially scenes where I get maced (again!), so once again unfortunately I don’t have any shots. On this day in particular, we had nobody to swing the boom so Sla was both the camera & sound crew. But during a quick tea-break in Jack Street’s lane-way, I managed to shoot some character portraits of Quint Quigley.

The fugitives then move to an underground car-park, so Quigley can once again attempt to poo out the microfilm. This scene was also shot on Shoot Day 34 in the car park of MacDonagh Junction shopping center. As I’ve said, we were in the middle of shooting the Pinkerton’s lair scene from episode 7 that weekend, the long scene took two night shoots and two full day & night shoots but on the Sunday morning we had limited access to the car park while it was closed.

The car park was easily one of my favourite shoot locations, I just wish we had more time there so I could have taken more photos. We had a three-hour window to shoot the scene which involved seven characters, tracking shots, interior & exterior car shots, a judo flip and a good bit of dialogue. Despite the time constraints we still managed nearly 20 set-ups; using a wheelchair for the tracking shots and then getting plenty of hand-held coverage of each of the actors outside the car.

The end of the scene had been re-written just days before, with some extended dialogue in the back of the car being added as we get our first glimpse of Nathalie Blaise (well, her pink glove). After shooting the car scene with Noah, this was a lot easier to shoot; once again putting the Canon XA-H1 on my Slik Pro 4000x photography tripod to shoot the V.P.I detectives in the backseat, a side-angle on Leeson from the passenger seat as the car pulls up and then shooting hand-held close-ups from the backseat for Jane Tennyson & Inspector Leeson’s dialogue in the car.We’d quickly set up the shot, adding or losing cast members depending on the needs of the shot and the space needed for the set-up, then driving in laps around the empty car park, repeat lines until we were sure it was covered and our time eventually ran out.

You can check out all my shots from behind the scenes of Vultures here, as always comments and feedback would be appreciated and there’s plenty more photos on the way soon.