I’ve known and worked with Tristan Versluis for a few years now since I did stills for his FX-heavy short, Pixel, in around 2007. He’s mostly known for his prosthetics work (recent credits include World War Z and Harry Potter & The Deathly Hallows Part I) and has been moving into directing first via self-written shorts and now features.
His first big feature came a couple of years ago, called Not Alone and starring Lucy Benjamin amongst others. Frustratingly, that project seems to have left his control in the edit, taking a somewhat different direction to that originally envisaged. Since then there have been more shorts and now a brand new self-written feature that he’s in full control of, called OMNI.
An alien abduction story, OMNI started shooting in Germany a couple of months ago with Tristan’s core group of previous collaborators, led by Stuart White on cinematography duties, and this month returned to the UK with two night shoots on a rooftop in Hackney Wick. They’re shooting on a couple of different cameras but for this particular shoot the team got access to a Red EPIC and a mini jib arm which injected some real dynamism into the scene, one of the key moments in the film. Speaking of which, I actually know virtually zero about the plot of the film other than that some of the characters witness an extra-terrestrial visitation and one of them gets spirited away. Is Tristan keeping a wickedly tight grip on the secrets in the script, or did he just forget to send me a copy of it? I have a feeling it’s both, which is cool because I like a bit of mystery…
The scenes we were shooting featured Charlotte Hunter and Ray Bullock Jnr, and despite the freezing temperatures (but thankfully little wind or rain!) both put in very moving performances. At some points in the scene Charlotte was lying on the baltic concrete wearing really not very much (no more than the average lady wears to a nightclub, put it that way) and before the camera rolled was visibly shaking with cold; these actors willingly suffered for Tristan’s art – the effect of the staunch loyalty Doctor Versluis instills in those that work with him (he has such a calming, zen-like bedside manner when applying time-consuming prosthetics to actors that the name ‘Doctor Versluis’ was coined and stuck).
So here’s a bunch of my stills from the evening, mostly behind-the-scenes because I think that stuff is always a lot more interesting, and all approved by Tristan for their lack of spoilery content; if you’d like to comment on anything I’m @myglasseye on Twitter. Enjoy, and thanks for visiting.
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