Mutual Casualty: Director's Comments

Mutual Casualty is by far the most ambitious and largest production ever taken on by the Windebank Production crew. It holds many of the records of our production history. From the longest script produced, most shooting dates, most ADR needed and surprisingly, shortest production time. It is also the first to be part of a 'series', as the film is actually a prequel to Demons, and viewers will have to watch both in order to understand the film. The film doesn't fall short in topics tackled too, as the film explores suicide, anxiety and drug addiction all at once.

Mutual Casualty (2019) - The prequel to Demons is available to watch on YouTube

Mutual Casualty Bloopers is also available to watch on YouTube

I wasn't kidding when I say this was an ambitious project. The film was a prequel to another film which didn't have any plans for a prequel in the first place. So getting the story right and to get it to fit in with the original Demons was definitely a mammoth task to undertake. I go into more detail about how this was achieved in a seperate blog post here.

The creative team and I spent a good portion of the production time in pre-production simply because we had to get the script done right before anything could happen. But with that being said, within a month of beginning production, we were all good to move forwards to principle photography.

Mutual Casualty teaser poster

"When you find out a friend has committed suicide, how many souls are lost?

The script itself was quite beautiful on its own. It told a brilliant story in a wonderfully refreshing way when compared to our other work. It was making it a reality that proved to be a challenge as portraying many of our ideas were actually much harder than we thought.

We had to establish three new characters over the course of the film while at the same time maintaining the two existing characters we had from the original Demons. On paper, the creative team and I had no problem understanding and evolving the characters, however having them portrayed the same way was difficult given the fact that we are all student filmmakers, so none of the characters were actually be adults. At times we had to actually go back to the drawing board to redefine our characters so that they would make sense as being adolescents in the production.

There were only three planned shoot dates which later had to be expanded to five due to time constraints at certain locations. But with that being said, most of the shoot went over quite smoothly. Especially considering the sheer size of the cast and crew, it was definitely an admirable performance as it was all rather efficient.

There was however, an audio issue. Most of the locations we had picked had terrible background noise. And due to the poor quality of our mic on set, the dialogue was often masked by the location's ambient noise. Thus a total of 3 days were used to recored ADR and another day was used as pick-up shots to go each of the locations to pick up ambient noise and also mood shots in order to mask the audio issues. After a lot of hard work however, most of these issues were fixed, to a relatively decent extent too, as over 85% of the lines were recorded in an office. Bet you didn't notice that while watching the films.

With that being said, the production as a whole was a complete blast and a lot of fun to do. The chemistry of the cats and crew on set was electric resulting in super efficient and high-moral shooting. This is evident as this is the first production to actually be worthy or a blooper reel being released, as all the mistakes were taken as fun instead of a hindrance to the work.

This production just goes to show how far this team has come after two years of filmmaking, and I can assure you there will be many more to come.