SCHOOL’ S OUT FOREVER | DRAMA
IMAGES Sorting some bounced fill on the set of School’s Out Forever
S hooting a feature film in just a few weeks is difficult. And doing that on a tight budget is even more difficult, but between July and August 2019, that was the task facing director of photography Thomas Hole on Rebellion’s School’s Out Forever . The company is perhaps best known for games such as Sniper Elite and a series under the Alien vs Predator banner, but recently took a bold step into screen production with the purchase of a £100m production facility in Oxfordshire. Plans include a slate of content based on the company’s other properties, including a television production titled Mega City One based on the Judge Dredd comic series and Rogue Trooper , based on the game of the same name, to be directed by Duncan Jones. School’s Out Forever is based on Scott K Andrews’ post-apocalyptic novel of the same name, published in 2012 under Rebellion’s Abaddon Books imprint. Hole became involved, he says, via director Oliver Milburn. “We worked together years ago when he was a VFX supervisor – he’d had this feature come up as a pitch and said, ‘Tom, I feel like you’re the right guy’. That was last summer. Rebellion actually funded a teaser, which is very rare for a company to do. They funded a scene, we shot the scene in January, then the producer Emma Biggins
said it was all funded and was going to go ahead,” he explains. THE PREP PROCESS “I went into prep on it in July,” Hole continues. “We started shooting at the end of July through to the end of August, so it was a super tight schedule. We shot the whole feature in a month.” Most of School’s Out Forever was shot at Eltham College in Mottingham, and at a school in Ipswich. “We shot our interiors in London and our exteriors in Ipswich. It was about 70% interiors and 30% exteriors, and all the exteriors were pretty much night exteriors.” With scenes, including a climactic finale, cutting rapidly back and forth between two locations covered weeks apart, Hole compliments the script supervisor Rebecca King, saying: “I’d never seen continuity so busy.” While the weather was kind, the resources available to Hole and his crew were stretched by the demands of the narrative. “We had really big scenes with no generator. We had no generator for the whole shoot, which was tough. Going into a feature without really big heads was very tough, because we were still lighting huge things. I used a lot eight-by-eight Litemats, which are super low power. That was our moon,” he explains.
We were the first narrative in the UK to use the Panavision Panaspeed lenses
DECEMBER 20 1 9 | DEF I N I T ION 33
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