What kind of techniques did you use to film the dream sequence?
Usually when you do an indie film you need two things. You need a dream sequence and vomit. They’re both visually captivating and cheap. So we definitely used both of those in here.
The dream sequence was just running with the camera through the woods. I took Steve into my basement and we kind of reenacted some of the scenes that happened in the beginning with Twelve, where he’s crazy and doing the Ouija board.
We did close-ups so you couldn’t see the rest of the room. Shot those scenes mixed in with scenes from earlier in the story, because the idea is it’s a flashback of what’s occurred in the story, catching up to Six and he’s having a mental breakthrough.
So it was really fun getting these montages of images and throwing them together and being very artsy-fartsy about it.
To make the dream sequence stand out from everything else, we bumped up the contrast and got rid of all the color, except the color red, because there’s a lot of blood in the scene. So basically it’s all black and white except for the red.
James Conklin, the guy who helped me make the film, he’s a tech guy. So we shot it in color and then processed everything in Final Cut afterwards.
And there’s also an animation sequence�
Yeah! The animation stuff was fun because it was something we wanted to shoot. In my mind�it’s a scene of the character having a dream of freedom. The character is flying down the highway with out a car. His body’s just floating over the highway and he’s letting go of things that he’s used in the film; like the cell phone, the gun, the bullets. They drop away from him and break up on the highway.
Originally I had planned on hooking up Steve to something like a large skateboard type thing, like a couple two-by-fourseels on it, dragging him behind a car, and shoot that. In my mind it sounded great.
Then when I thought about finding a road you could do that on and not get arrested or kill Steve I said, “It’s a dream sequence anyway, let’s animate it.”
So I just did a bunch of drawings and James put it all together as a Flash program. We just did a very basic, simple thing. I think it came out cute.
I’m sure Steve appreciates it.
Yeah. He likes living. I had already almost drowned him in a tub of blood so he was happy not to be drug along the highway.
How do you feel about the movie?
I’m pretty happy with it. It’s my first film and it definitely has all the earmarks of a first film. It’s heavy on the visuals and light on story and character. But that’s fine.
The ending of the film and comic is open-ended. Are there plans for more comics or movies?
Both. We just finished writing the outline for a follow up series.
The “Six” comic and short were intended to say, “This is the first act of a larger story.” It’s a self-contained story, but definitely the first act of something much bigger.
So, we’re following up with a new comic. What we’ll probably do is when the new min-series comes out it’ll be like four issues. After it’s been out for a while we’ll combine the original “Six” one-shot, the four issues of the next series together and put the DVD in with it and release it all in one little package.
And, where the short was to hopefully get people interested in doing this as a larger film. If a producer sees a combination of the comic book and the short and gets inspired to make a big budget movie out of it.
What’s next for Mike Oeming, filmmaker?
I’m planning on doing a couple more shorts and the do a feature length film. I definitely want to get more filming exercise under my belt with the shorts. This summer we’re going to shoot at least two more.
The way I look at it is, I’m a storyteller. I’ve even gotten to the point where I don’t think of writing comics and drawing comics as being that different from each other. I think of it less as art and writing, and more as storytelling.
The same thing with the filming I’m doing. I just think of it as being an extension of story telling.
But I’ll always be a comic book artist first. Nobody needs to worry about me abandoning the arts field for film in any permanent way. I know who I am.
Don’t forget to head over to OemingFilms.com and watch the movie!
This article originally appeared on Comics2Film.com. Used with permission.
