KOKOMPOTI
Delivery boy Koko accidentally takes a batch of experimental compote and spirals into a hallucinogenic adventure around the city of Sofia.
Trivia and commentary
The film was conceived in the span of 4 weeks – from the first meeting with the production heads to the wrap on the final shot.
It was shot in the summer of 2018, where out of the whole month of July there were only 3 sunny days. The aligned perfectly with our schedule.
This is a debut film for the director, writer, production designers, two of the actors and the sound mixer.
We only broke one jar out of a hundred.
The bike
Many ideas of shooting the bicycles scenes were discussed – trunk of a car, a bike with baby carriage, using skates – eventually we decided on a moped.
The main pro of the bike is that it helped keep the production low key, something which is essential when you are shooting guerrilla style. The big negative was that because the bike was in low gear the engine would overheat after a long take and we would have to let it cool down before continuing.
For the scene in which Koko is talking on the phone to Pesho we couldn’t use the bike as we had to maintain a certain frame composition. There we actually used a cameraman on skates which gave us that control and for the sound we put a recording app on the phone so that we could at least get reference sound which we could later ADR.
Shooting high
When Koko drinks from the “spiked” kompot, the d.o.p Boris and I wanted to create a visual style that would communicate his state of mind to the audience. We also knew that we wanted the effect to be achieved in camera. So Boris started to experiment with different ideas – mainly putting stuff in front of the lens and looking at the results. On rig which I’m sad we didn’t use in the final cut, consisted of two rectangular mirror pieces which all hung in front of the lens all held by one magic hand… This of course was held by Boris who was riding on the moped. For the final result we found a crystal which we put in front of the lens. The trick there was to aligned it so that we could achieve symmetry in the shot.
The dog
Shooting the dog was challenging for two key reasons. The first one was that to achieve a ”human” effect on Robby, the dog, we had to stuff padding in the sleeves of the jacket he was wearing. As he was moving, the paddings would fall and we would have to reset. The second difficulty was getting him to open his mouth and mimic that he was talking. We fed him a few food granules each take to get him to chew. For most of the takes, you could see the food but a couple of takes actually worked pretty well.
