The Stunts of "Citizen"

Yesterday, we finally had a chance to get over to Gibsons, BC with our stunts team to see how feasible some of our ambitious stunts were going to work.

 Leif Havdale (IMDB is back as our stunts co-ordinator once again after having a good experience working on "To Save One's Self" (IMDB) together. With a truckload of stunt pads, boxes, and an experienced stunt performer Curtis Braconnier (IMDB), we caught an early morning ferry to jam as much in the 4 hour window of opportunity we had. First off, Leif and Curtis run through the pieces of the fight scene we are doing at one of our largest set pieces, a staircase leading up to a 2nd story patio.

 The scene starts with Agent Travis being pursued by the dark agents. Forced up these tight stairs, he takes out the agent right behind him and tosses him over the railing. With some tight choreography and critical timing, we want to show the agent going over the railing and have our camera follow our actor as he peeks over the railing, revealing the bare ground the agent has landed on.

Here's where it get's complicated. We can't actually make our poor agent fall 10 feet onto the hard ground, so to do this he needs to land on a stuntpad, giving us MAYBE a 3 second window to pull the stunt pads out before the camera peers over the ledge. We have talked about just using an insert of him landing and one of him coming over towards camera, but if we can get him going over in one-shot, pull the stunt pad out in time and then show him on the ground, I think it's going to add a certain element to the fight scene that people aren't expecting.

We filmed the fight scene as the stunt performers go through it so we could see how it cuts. I think it works pretty darn good for a rehearsal.

The next stunt is where it gets a bit more difficult. Agent Travis does a 16 foot drop over the diner patio...and we follow it with the camera. Our problem here isn't the fact that were doing it without a crane or wires. It's trying to hide the stunt pads when we actually shoot. We believe we have a solution by building a garden on the pads bed to hide the shifting perspective, or use some fake turf and blend it in to the backyard with grass clippings. Honestly, both of them work. We actually have a video of our test jump from the weekend, but we're holding off on showing it to people.

Here's some photos in the meantime. Please enjoy, and be sure to share the link!

Leif Havdale setting up the mats.	Our 1st AD (Neil Allan) helping Curtis and Leif out.
Jumping with the camera.	More jumping.

On that note, the stunt rehearsal was a blast. We have a couple more stunts and sequences we didn't have time to rehearse but these two being the more complex we all walked away extremely happy with how well it all went.