Production Stages

By Satpal Singh

Pre Production • In the Descent the idea of what the film would actually have been all about would

have been chosen by the writer and director who would be Neil Marshal, who would also allow the production team to have a say in it too.

• The film would be written by Neil Marshal who would have a basic idea of what he wants the film to be and then build the story up from the characters point of view.

• The location for the film would be found by the location team but probably in this case as it’s a low budget film, the locations were probably found by the producers.

• The cast characters would be chosen by Neil Marshal who will have interviews with the actors who will then chose weather they will be right for the part. He will also chose the production crew, he will see what they can do and how they can work as a team.

• The film Descent cost $7 million dollars to make and produce which then made a staggering $57 million dollars just in the box office. This was a great success for Celador films and Neil Marshal.

Production • In Descent the scenes were mainly shot in pinewood studios in London which

created 6 different scenes of caves. The only bit of the film shot in public was when they were rafting in the river which was in fact at a public river in Scotland.

• The road scenes were all shot on Private road on the outskirts of London. The track is also used by Top Gear. The road scenes were carefully planned out which were all held in controlled locations.

• Some of the shots in the caves were shot in front of green screens because they couldn’t possibly shoot in a real cave as it would have cost too much and would have been a real challenge to get camera equipment down there. So to get it as close as possible to a real life cave they used green screens to shoot some of the scenes.

• Most of the scenes were shot in the studio which was in fact Pinewood Studios in London. The crew had to create and build caves in the studio which were designed by the production designer Simon Bowles. He created 6 different cave sets. The hospital at the start where Sarah was in after the crash was also shot at Pinewood Studios. The room was designed to look like an actual Hospital.

Post Production • In the Descent they would have used and had to have edited allot of scenes to try

and make the scenes as realistic as possible. The main scene edited would have been the Car Crash scene which the editors would have edited the bit where the poles went into the husband and the daughter, the sounds they would have made and the blood splatter. All of this would have only been made even more realistic with the the help of CGI.

• The editing of model shots and green screens shots would have taken place at the river scene. The producers in fact actually used dummies instead of the real actors for some of the river scenes. To make this realistic the editors would have merged the two scenes together creating a scene that just portrayed the real actors and no dummies.

• There is also the use of CGI. There main challenge was creating the huge amount of bats which all flew out of the cave leaving an unbalanced tone. This was obviously only done with the use of CGI.

• Throughout the Movie we whiteness sound edits taking place. All the music, water noises, crawler sounds and even the sound of the bats was all edited and added on after the movie was shot. These are all examples of sound edits.