Irma Vep

The final scene of Irma Vep, a French film considered to fall under the genre of comedy-drama. Its final scene has a very chaotic, yet particularly
curated mise-en-scene to create the unique mood that it has. Some of the filmic elements being the unsteady/shaky camera movements, the swift cuts between a myriad of action shots, the lack of stability in composition or movement, the costume design, the play of shadow and light, the irregular lens focus, the characteristic black and white film with a high contrast, and the performance. Of course, there was also post production which was mainly creating the variety of animations layered over the footage, adding the unconventional original audio, and color grading the black and white tones of the footage.

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On our first day of filming, we opted to do all of the roof scenes (or as many as we could). Unfortunately, that day had been one of the hottest days yet and I found myself having a really difficult time wearing the costume under the sun for 2 - 3 consecutive hours. We did several takes of each scene, and I’d say composition & camera movement were quite challenging because of how chaotic and messy the original film is. That said, we took advantage of that and tried to capture similar shakiness of the camera and shot compositions through playing with perspective. We improvised a lot of our shots to find something that closely resembled the original scenes; most of the time we got creative with perspective through camera angles, shot composition, and character performance.

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For instance, the scene with Ty walking through a door and sneaking up on me as I walk up the stairs is a good example– as the “door” he’s behind is actually a bench that’s propped up to look like a door. For the scenes where Maggie was doing “parkour” on the roof, we did a lot of them on leveled ground and jumping on benches. Those were challenging as we had to come up with some sort of an interpretation or “routine” if you will for the flow of the action that was taking place. We found that the more takes we did, the better, as there was always one that we knew nailed it per se. I believe that the hardest part of production was composition and matching Maggie’s actions, body language, and eye-movements. They seemed so simple, but one small mistake made all the difference in the overall mise-en-scene of the shot. Not to mention the animations– I think other than being in a latex suit in 90 degree heat for hours, animating over 600 frames for a few seconds was a humbling experience that broke my mind (and my back). We certainly underestimated how much time it was going to take and how tedious post-production was going to be; that said, we learned a lot and had a great time. It was truly worth it in the end and we’re quite proud of what we were able to accomplish.