A Little Help
about / vision
A little help is a short written and directed by Daniel T. Halsall.
This film is about Oath, an 11-year-old girl with a craving for a lolly. Problem is that the sweets-jar at home is hidden away too high and the market man refuses to sell her candy based on her height. After pondering in a fashion one could only attribute to Einstein, the 11-year-old decides to takes matters into her own hands and avenge herself by building a robot.
Revenge has never tasted so sweet (*warning, this may or may not be a spoiler).
expertise
The script for A Little Help was one that I had been wiling to shoot for quite a while, I really enjoyed the mean edged humour and characters, it felt closer to my fingerprint then any project I had done before.
For the film we flew over two great actors from Portugal, which I had seen perform and fell in love with: Luisa Garcia and her uncle Nuno Esmeriz. Faking bonds between two characters with only a limited time, can be quite hard to fake. Especially a bond that goes as deep as in this story, the girl builds the robot, the robot is almost mom-like: there’s an (odd) and close relationship there. It really helped to have that tight bond between the two already. Not to mention how comfortable it made Luisa, the young girl feel during the shoot.
We had a great team during the shoot, the girls clothes were custom made by a seamstress. We had a great art department which built some magnificent sets and props from scratch. They understood what I was going for, and worked hard to get things done in the limited time we had.
We shot the film anamorphically to try and set it apart from all the shorts being shot on DSLR and excruciating sharp Canon lenses, we wanted the film to have character, to be fairy-like in a way. And most of all it was lovely to see what the lenses did with natural textures and light, it has a great look and feel to it which worked perfectly in the style of the story.
experience
It was great experience to shoot the short and see the actors embody the characters and adding their own flavour and life to the characters. It’s nice to see how the film grows each step of the process. We had a great crew, great cast, and great post-production folks.
Stillwave – Slow Binders