This was shot in the Owl House and the town of Nieu-Bethesda for promotional purposes. The concept of the video is to capture the haunting beauty of the Artist Helen Martins as well as place the Owl House in the context of the town it is situated in.

Directed by Greg Karvellas & Daniel Rutland Manners
Camera and Edit by Daniel Rutland Manners

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‘The Hive’ examines how two people can exist in the same space but be in totally separate worlds. I explored this visually by creating these two different ‘worlds’, one the exterior, full of life, colour and potential and the other, the interior, dull and sparse, the empty hive.

My approach to achieving this was to first find a location resembling a beehive with a flourishing garden attached to it. This was both a creative and practical approach, as we had limited shooting time and budget. The film required a one-stop-shop location which we found in Makanda in the Eastern Cape, South Africa. With my DOP Daniel Manners, I then worked towards creating a visual separation of the characters in each shot and sequence, even when they are in the same room, symbolising their disconnection. I did this using the geography of the house and property, the furniture and the interior and exterior spaces and then, of course, in the performance of the scenes. For the grade, I looked to support this visual separation of the worlds by highlighting the garden’s colour and the interior world’s deadness. I chose to keep the camera still and on a tripod as I wanted to accentuate the feeling of the two characters being ‘stuck’ in their respective worlds.

In addition to the camera work, I worked with production designer Niall Griffin to strip back the environment as much as possible. I wanted the audience to feel the sense of emptiness the 2 characters experience in the film. We chose the largest rooms to shoot in to drive the central ’empty nest’ syndrome theme.

The music composition by Charl Johan Lingenfelder and the sound design by Morné Marais were designed to raise the tension in the film and to help drive the symbolism of the bees hive to create an element of underlying danger in an otherwise anaesthetized domestic world, a sense of pending invasion which by the end of the movie becomes a reality. 

The post THE HIVE first appeared on Greg Karvellas Theatre Director.

Written, Directed and Produced by Greg Karvellas

DOP and Edit by Daniel Rutland Manners

Commissioned by the Common Humanity Arts Trust

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