By Carrie Hajny

19 June 2025

Rehearsal

I had scheduled rehearsals with all the main cast in the week before the shoot (in hindsight, way too late…), but we all finally got to meet in person. A few days before the rehearsals I panicked, as I’d never led a rehearsal for a narrative film before and didn’t really know what to do with my actors. I panic-read an entire book on directing actors which seemed to help – it all went well in the end! I also learnt a lot through the process, and finally getting to see the characters come to life was so special. We also utilised our rehearsal for costume fittings and to take some photos we needed as props in the film.

Tech recce

Together with my DOP Lorene, production designer Karin and producer Sophia we did a tech recce of all our locations, some of which proved to be quite challenging. However, as you can see, the final frames are super close to the reference images we took on the recce so it was definitely worth doing. As we shot over only two days, having such a solid blueprint was crucial – we knew exactly where we were going to be for each section of the script. We also knew which shots we could potentially lose if we were running out of time, which made our AD Lauren very happy.

Shoot week

The week leading up to the shoot really tested my limits – obviously I was insanely busy with other projects, which I couldn’t turn down as they ultimately paid for the film. I spent about 18 hours a day glued to this chair, prepping for some (really cool!) commercials while organising the last bits and pieces for our film. I thought I had done all my prep, but with low-budget projects you end up putting out one fire after the other in the days leading up to the shoot, whether that’s losing a location, missing extras, or props being delivered late. Shit happens and you and your team somehow sort it out, simply because: you have to.