Prime Focuses On Chilling Wasting Disease

A powerful new cinema campaign designed to highlight the shocking effects of motor neurone disease (MND) and the work of the charity Motor Neurone Disease Association (MNDA) has been post produced by Prime Focus London.
'Sarah's Story' was directed by Jim Weedon at Bare Films and has been showing in 70 cinemas across the UK since 30 January.
The 90-second piece illustrates in chilling detail how a perfectly healthy young woman comes under attack from a virtual 'unseen assassin'.
It depicts the rapid deterioration of her body to full-blown MND.
Two artists were required for the story as the final shots feature a real life wheelchair-bound MND sufferer.
This powerful concept presented a number of challenges in post. Prime Focus London's James Maclachlan applied distort and lens techniques in Flame to gradually decay the muscles of the actress, emphasise the appearance of sunken cheeks and eye sockets, and give her bonier shoulders and legs.
"The first time I showed the sequence to Jim Weedon and the client, there was an audible gasp in the suite," said Maclachlan.
The last sequence of the sufferer sitting in her wheelchair required head replacement work.
"The camera was tracking backwards at this point so I used Flame's camera tracker, planes and projection to replace the head and clean up the many areas of the set that were covered in rig," continued Maclachlan.
"Having watched the offline I realised the sequence gained a great deal of its power to scare from being filmed in the open," explained colourist Kai Van Beers. "It turns the conventional idea of being attacked by an unseen enemy in a darkened room on its head.
"Here you can clearly see all around the woman, and yet you can't see what's attacking her.
"Instead of vignetting sections and creating dark areas, we applied a steely blue/grey look to emphasise the wide open spaces and her chilling experience," he explained.
The project was shot on 35mm and scanned at Prime Focus London on Spirit 4K before down-conversion to 2K for grading on Baselight.
It was projected through a Barco DP90 at 2K during the cinema grade.
(BMcC/JM)