Directed by John Travers, A Soldier’s Pain follows Alex, a retired Army officer that suffers from PTSD. Five years after his discharge from the military he still relives that traumatic experience. He has to learn to accept and admit that he needs help.
As part of our senior capstone projects, this project began the summer before our senior year like many other films. John approached me and asked if I would act as his Director of Photography. Our early conversations about the film were about the story, and me trying to understand what direction he was wanting to go with it. After hearing his vision, and hearing the crew that he was pulling together, I knew it was going to to be a good one.
We slowly moved from concepts into breaking down scenes to see how they would play out. John pulled together the different locations and he was able to bring me a long to do a scout of the location to know what we would be walking into. Knowing what the spaces looked like, allowed us to draw up some floor plans of the space. Floor plans helps to show everyone involved what the space will be setup as, and where the equipment will go. This was crucial for the lighting team. I placed the camera for the different shots, and then they knew where they could place their lights. Even with this planning, we knew things might play out differently once we got onto set.
On a gear side of things, I decided to go with a Canon C200 as our camera of choice. I picked this camera for a couple reasons. We considered the resoltion we wanted to shoot at (4K), the frame rate we wanted (23.976fps), and how well it would mount up for our different shooting situations. We also decided to do a mix of shooting on tripod, dolly, and handheld. We used this shooting style to help breakup the different shooting locations.
There were four main shooting locations that included their house, the therapy office, an art studio and the car where he has his PTSD attack. The art studio was to be a calm, so we knew that those scene should all be shot on the tripod. Everything needed to be still and calm. We did decide to use a dolly shot at the end to reveal the many paintings that he had done, but it was still a smooth slow shot. The therapy office was similar. It was to be a calm and vulnerable space, so we shot most everything on a tripod. The car and his house is where he experienced most of the tension. We wanted to shoot those more handheld to help elevate the feelings of uneasyness. While in the house we used a shoulder rig. Using the shoulder rig helped to steady out our shots a little bit so they were not all over the place, but they still had an unsettled feeling, but it also helped me from a shooting perspective as it took some of the weight off my arms.
The car scene was more challenging to shoot as we were limited on space. I shot this one truly handheld and with a trimmed down rig. We were able to do a couple shots with a full car of the two actors, myself, John as the director, our sound operator, and a gaffer to help add some extra lighting. Eventually we had to reduce that down to just camera and sound with the actors. Shooting the car scene was challenging, because we wanted to make sure that everyone was kept safe. So we knew we did want to be driving on a busy road. But we were still not feeling great about being on a road in general. John was able to pull on a connection he had and allowed us to shoot in their parking lot. The problem with shooting in a parking lot is if you are driving in circles, then you see the same background outside over and over again and you can tell that you are driving in circles. To get around this, we chose to shoot from a lower angle. This ofset the balance and made things feel more uneasy, further playing into the scene. This means that the background of the shots is mostly sky with some tree tops or just the top of the buildings.