On a dark evening in March, my fellow MA film students and I began filming for a 5-minute short film. As an editor I often don’t get to participate on set, or get to travel to exciting and exotic places. Editors are normally the vampires of the film world – hermits tucked away in a dark room alone, in silence. So it was a nice change to be able to help with production as a script supervisor.

This film’s exotic backdrop was Kimmeridge House, which we were disguising as a hospital ward. The set design was a challenge as the budget was minimal, but with a little imagination and innovation I think we did very well to give it a hospital aesthetic. This was achieved through posters, which I designed, as well as dressing the desk and a very kind student nurse letting us borrow her uniform. It’s amazing how the little details come together to paint a larger picture.

Shooting a motorbike getaway behind Kimmeridge House.

We worked with a mixture of acting students from AUB, other students from Bournemouth University who could act, and some actors from the Bournemouth area. Our cinematographer shot with the C300 (it’s so heavy, I don’t know how she does it!), and the quality of the footage we got from the camera is fantastic.

The director (left) talking to the sound recordists.

In total we filmed for about 50 hours on set, which was spread across seven days. It was a lot of footage to get through in the edit, but thanks to some detailed note-taking and good communication between myself and the director, we quite quickly managed to pull together a rough edit and refine it across a couple of weeks. Now all that is left is for the sound production to finish up, and we can enjoy the fruits of our labour!

Getting ready to film a chase scene in Kimmeridge House.

By Alice White

Photos courtesy of Sheila Silveira