Above: In case you couldn’t tell that Plenderleith loves The Shining. …
GamesBeat: And the worst part for me, by which I mean the best part, was when I realized I couldn’t go back even if I wanted to.
Plenderleith: Yeah, exactly. You kind of expect some kind of get-out clause like “Run away.” But actually, you can’t get out of that. In a movie, you would be able to escape, but in real life, that’s not a possibility. You went too far. You’ve had enough warnings. At that path, you’ve been given a chance where you could turn right. And the sound design is there to tell you to go right, if you’re listening carefully. But if you decide to go on, you’ve doomed yourself.
That whole final scene was shot backwards, that whole scene where you die and are eaten by a zombie maggot. I started the scene where you’re being eaten by the zombie maggot and then we did the whole scene in reverse. I didn’t want any wires and stuff because this was all really low-tech. This was all like 1980’s sort of movie effects. It was quite a long sequence to get all the zombies to go down as I turned around and to get the Zombie Queen to call out in reverse. And then walk backwards away from the scene. Because I wanted the maggot to come out at my neck. The simple way to do that is to start with the maggot on your neck and then throw it on the floor.
GamesBeat: So you were the guy in the game?
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Plenderleith: Yeah, most of it. Not all of it. I was mostly the camera man and the director. It was just the simplest way, because I storyboarded all the scenes and I knew what to do. But yes, certain scenes, for instance, the car scene where you’re trying to negotiate the car and get the driver out, I’m the driver. I’m the driver there. The sort of flopped corpse.
GamesBeat: I thought you looked familiar. So you shot the entire thing with an iPhone, right?
Plenderleith: Yes, absolutely, 100 percent.
GamesBeat: How?
Plenderleith: Yes, how. Good question.
Above: The Hunting makes heavy use of the Olloclip’s fish-eye setting.
It’s not a good idea. I wouldn’t recommend it. I mean, not because the iPhone is bad or anything; the iPhone is awesome. But because I shot it all in first-person. I considered doing it with the GoPro and all that malarky that you can do. But this was a risky project, and really there has been nothing like this beforehand or since where it’s been shot on an iPhone and it’s interactive horror.
I was worried because we had just done children’s stuff before, so I did this thing as an unknown territory. Like if iTunes rejected it, it’s an entire year and a half down the pan. So I thought, “OK, I’m gonna film it all on an iPhone.” I did a test run, and we thought hopefully we could use that as leverage to say, “Hey, we shot this whole thing on the iPhone, and doesn’t it look amazing?” And that would be something to help give us a leg-up with the marketing app gurus. Who knows who they are.
Then we had to work out ways to do that. There was a fantastic program on BBC News about three months after we started filming all about how to shoot a movie on an iPhone. This was a program called BBC Click, which is an Internet online program. It had lots of gadgets and technology that I hadn’t actually discovered yet.
I’d found a few, but there were things like the Olloclip, the wide-angle lens for the iPhone. There was the Glif, which is a little grippy device that goes under the iPhone to attach it to a tripod or any other device that has a screw mechanism to attach to tripods. There were various other ones like zoom lens and steady cam and all sorts of stuff. So of course, I immediately went on Amazon like, “Buy! Buy! Buy! I want all of it!” It was great.
Above: The elaborate rig used to record The Hunting.
Some of them were better than others, and I ended up using the Glif a lot and the Olloclip all the way through because it just gave me a bigger frame, a bigger view of the world. The iPhone is fine, but it’s quite limited in the angle you get, so the Olloclip was a real push toward being able to do this properly. It has two settings, and if you spin the little lens around, you get a fish-eye mode. It gives you a huge amount of detail but some black areas around the corners. But you can get around that in post-production. But it was great. That was what spurred us forward really. We found these bits of technology.
The actual way we filmed it was with a bicycle helmet on my head with a GorillaPod gripped to the helmet. And then the Glif connection to the tripod, and then the iPhone itself with an Olloclip lens, all taped securely. Because if you don’t tape them all down they all fall to pieces as soon as you start running around.
It worked really well, but the only downside is that when you film like that you can’t see what you’re doing. Because I really wanted the iPhone to be my eyes and as a result my iPhone was about an inch and a half away from my face with a massive glowing screen. You clearly can’t see. It was a terrible idea. And so I would have to rehearse the scene and not look at the screen because you can’t see at an inch and a half. So I would rehearse over and over and just go through the motions and ignore the massive blurry glow that was in my frame of vision all the time.