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Photo Essay: Film Production in Prague

Photos by Estefanía Rincón, (American University) Student Correspondent CET Film in Prague, Spring 2018
At CET and FAMU we spend the beginning of the semester pitching our ideas for a short film. After hearing everyone’s pitches, we choose who we want to work with for our final project. Once we have our group, we decide which idea we will choose, assign roles (director, DP (director of photography), script writer, and editor), and start creating drafts of shoot lists, storyboards, and the script. It is a long and tedious process.  My group was on top of all the pre-production preparations, so we decided to take a group trip to an island in Spain as a last vacation before we started shooting.

Letna park is full of couples walking, friends picnicking, and families playing frisbee. The atmosphere is so lively now compared to the solitude that overtook the park when I arrived in January.

 
Spring brings blooming trees, flowers, pollen, tourists, and beer gardens. The city really comes to life once the weather gets warmer. The castle and Charles bridge are the most crowed places this time of year.

 
My family came to visit me in Prague! I took them to a craft brewery and we were able to try a wide selection of beers. Don’t worry if you’re not a beer drinker in America. The beer in Prague is 100 times better than what you find in the States. If you don’t believe me, ask my mom! She never drinks beer back home, but here she was having a beer with us at least once a day!

 
Take tram 17 past downtown and get a different view of Prague. I took my parents to Vysehrad, a historic fort near the Vltava River. It was nice to see how wide the city expands instead of being confined to the city center.

 
Along the Vltava River you can find many boats turned into restaurants. It is a great place to hang out, enjoy the weather, and people watch.

 
Shooting day approached really fast! My group’s film is about a Czech mother having to let go of her son who is going to college in the States. Our film has a dream element where the mom sees her now-18-year-old son, as a 9 year old boy. In this sequence they build a pillow fort together.

 
We had to build the fort two different times for the shoot. I can confidently say I am now a good pillow fort builder. All you need are pillows, sheets, blankets, lights, a cardboard tube, sandbags, string, wooden clips, lights, and chairs. It’s pretty fun!

 
Getting the right lighting for the pillow fort was a bit of a challenge. Luckily, with the extra hands we had on set and the advise our teaches had given us during the semester, were able to recreate late night lighting at 2pm in the afternoon. We had to blackout the windows with blankets, towels, and trash bags.

 
We were able to create moon lighting (blue) on the outside of the tent, and warm (orange) dreamlike lighting inside the tent.

 
Two days after our shoot it was time to go to Barrandov Studios to watch what we had shot. The negatives were put into a machine to be read and then transferred to the computer so we could watch it on screen.

 
We sat there with the Telecine operator and watched the footage that we had captured a few days before. It was amazing to see our hard work on a screen. After we watched the footage, it was processed digitally and put onto our hard drive. Now our editor will work with the footage to put the film together! It was super fun to direct my first film and I am looking forward to the final screening of everyone’s projects.

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