So here’s a little dilemma I ran into when storyboarding Maid’s Room.
Ants are a big theme in this film. The trouble is, they’re small. Sure, there are big ants, like carpenter ants that are pretty common around here, but they tend to be lone roamers. (That’s a carpenter ant in the picture above.) You never see them swarm around a spilled drop of ice cream.
Sugar ants are small. The only other film I know that uses ants is BLUE VELVET, but Blue Velvet has them in close up with slow motion and weird sounds. Plus, those are BIG ants. I’m not looking to use the ants in the same way. This isn’t about this world of horror lurking just out of vision. It’s more of a natural idea, that in the end, nature’s going to get all of us.
So my idea is to try to avoid showing ants in extreme close ups. They are small, but they do swarm, so I’m hoping that a swarm of ants will show up on film and be recognizable as ants without rubbing them in your face. I’m not sure this will work, so when the weather gets a little warmer, I’ll shoot a little video just to make sure. Better to know now that figure it out on the day of the shoot.
