Flat / Квартира

Credits

cast

Dronik Vladimir

Director

Biography

Born in the city of Cherepovets, graduated from a technical institute. In his student years, he played in an amateur theater, where the actors themselves were also involved in staging plays. In his mature years, he developed a passion for cinema. New acquaintances in the film industry prompted a desire to touch this art: first as an actor in small episodic roles, and then to go through the process of creating a film as a scriptwriter and director.

Directors Statement

For the scriptwriter and director (all rolled into one), this work became a "trial balloon" to assess how difficult and at the same time interesting it is to dive into the filmmaking process. On the computer disk, there had long been several stories based on real stories of people: once heard, put into the text and seasoned with a share of fantasy and irony. One of the stories was chosen as a test subject, it seemed the easiest to implement. It all started with the search for locations for filming, which took a huge amount of time. Finding a suitable apartment and two entrances (and they were in other buildings), as well as a cafe where it was possible to film, turned out to be quite difficult or expensive. As a result, they filmed quietly where it was impossible. The actors were also selected for a long time and carefully. First, the main character was approved, of many applicants, she seemed the most daring. A man of strong build was needed for the role of Gennady, he was played by theater actor and part-time boxer Artem Anashkin. The role of the Girl's Boyfriend and the Girl's Friend went to classmates of the leading actress. Since the director has only modest theater experience and the actors of the main roles are also theatergoers, it was decided to organize the work on the set in their own way. The fact is that the film contains rather long dialogue scenes and in order to preserve the energy and not break the scenes into smaller ones - it was decided that when placing the camera and light on the actor, the scene would be played out in its entirety from beginning to end, like in the theater, or at least until the actors got confused. If they got confused, they started from the same place or a little earlier. Then the light and camera were rearranged, the angle changed and the same thing was played out again from beginning to end. The result was several long shots of different sizes of each actor. The necessary pieces were cut from these shots during editing. The only downside to this decision was to allow the actors to improvise during the process. As a result, the script went off-track at some points, which had to be corrected during editing.