THE HIVE

‘The Hive’, on the surface, is a very simple story. It is a story about a husband and a wife who have lost a connection to each other, with the final disconnect being their daughter going away to university; the only bond they had left is now gone. In the simplicity of this domestic adjustment, a crack appears, and when a crack appears, feelings tend to creep in, feelings such as sadness, loneliness, miscommunication and potentially infidelity.

‘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.