Cold Mind
After surviving a massive cave-in, a coal miner is forced to face his inner demons, with a canary by his side.
Role: Production Designer
This film was a 3 day shoot that included the challenges of creating a life-size tunnel that matched one in the coal mine, and also finding and replicating authentic items and wardrobe from 1952.
Throughout the planning of this film, the biggest question that needed to be solved was, how do we find multiple props and costume pieces from the early 50's without going over our $3000 budget?(which also included makeup costs)
My partner, Mary Lockwood-Lirazan, and I spent months researching and negotiating the props and wardrobe you see in the film through: auction sites, Amazon, thrift stores, and yard sales. We were able to pull together an extensive and authentic collection of items that we could use in the film.
Mary(right), Mievre(center), and I (left) drying the paint on the inside of the fake cave tunnel Howard will crawl through.
Another challenge came when it was time to build the tunnel. Months of planning, designing, and strategizing went into this build. We needed to figure out a model that had the right perspective on camera, but also had enough room for our 6ft 3 actor to crawl through completely. This tunnel was based off the exact mine we filmed in. Everything was matched, even up to the actual rocks we used in the tunnel.
The base was created out of a wooden platform, and the interior was built up by using newspaper and chicken wire to shape a curve structure and give us less space to fill with foam.
Actual Rocks used in film
After the foam was set around the entire interior, we assembled a team to help carve rock like structures to look like the sides of a coal mine tunnel.
Once this was done we painted and sealed the design with some modeling clay. We also placed real rocks from the application mountains on part of the sides and bottom of the tunnel. So our actor was crawling on real rocks!
Now we didn't just do this without taking Ryan Kaiser's(Howard) consideration on it. He wanted to do it with the real rocks.
Starting foam on interior
Me on set sticking a shoelace to the ceiling with mud from actual mine
One of my favorite moments is when we needed a shoelace to stick at the top of the coal mine, and after many trials of clay and gaff tape weren't working, I looked at the ground and grabbed some mud from the floor.
Odd enough this worked perfectly and we were able to get the close-up shot we wanted of water running down the shoelace.
Also I would like to add the the dead bird you see is an actual taxidermy canary, and that is because we couldn't make anything realistic ourselves in the time we had. Trust me when I tell you it was not my favorite part about the film, but to clear my conscious, this bird had already lived a long beautiful life before passing and becoming taxidermied.
