Three Seditiosas Went To The Market

The past three or so weeks were incredibly intense. The shooting of most of the critical scenes, the preparations for them, the tension prior to shooting, during the production and the exhaustion after each of the shooting days was hardly bearable… but the team made it!

There were lots of people in the set for most of the time, Jac was going mad, doing his job, big time, directing a bunch of actors who were having their very first experience under the famous director. All of them eager to show their best.

The shooting of the big sequences was complicated, 2 thirds of the film were shot in two weekends, that’s four days!

A sequence is normally made of one or many scenes, sometimes a sequence is shot with ONE take and it is called A Sequential Shot, where there are no cuts, just the camera moving along following the entire action. But not in our case. In the particular case of the Market Sequence, it looks like one scene but it’s actually many scenes taking place in that set, each with one particular theme. In one scene Yahel and her companions arrive to the Market and proceed to look at things.

Elements of the story are developed during this sequence, we learn a bit more about Yahel and her thoughts as she talks to Judith, Magdalena, Joanna and Deborah, each responding or adding to her comments and sometimes sharing their own ideas. They even discuss an issue forbidden to women, The Temple.

And as they move on, their attention goes to a different action or scene, the arrival of a slave trader dragging his beautiful slave by her chains.

That’s the moment when things take a turn for the worse. Yahel’s and Judith’s reaction when they see the slave being dragged to a post and the arrival of the Romans, who are greeted by the high priests, sets the stage for the confrontation that leads to the arrest of the three women. A very difficult moment in the production.

Until that day all the filming was pretty much standard. A nice long shot there, a medium shot here, a close up over there, going over the dialogue a few times, making sure our protagonists look as beautiful as they are, nothing really complicated.

For the Arrest Scene the cast and crew were facing a moment of action. A soldier is sent to take care of Judith who just pulled the whip away from the Slaver’s hands, offending Claudia, the Roman Aristocrat, wife of none other that the Governor, who was interested in purchasing the beautiful slave. As Judith confronts the slaver, Yahel gets busy freeing the slave. You just can’t go around freeing slaves in front of the Romans, specially if you of them has the power to have you killed on the spot.

The Arrest Scene was tricky. It is an action scene, where the soldier attacks Judith, sword in hand, dropping his spear in the process, Magdalena picks up the spear just in time, while Yahel grabs the soldier’s wrist before he stabs Judith… and in a quick action Magdalena stabs the soldier with the spear killing him. All that had to take place in an instant and it required many, many shots to have it right.

As the soldier falls dead, the other soldiers quickly take over, they are about to kill the three women involved in the melee, but they are stopped on their tracks and are ordered to arrest the women instead and to dragged away to their doom.

The plan was to finish the Market Sequence on a Saturday and go into the next sequence on Sunday, but the shooting of most of the scenes before the arrest took a long time, so the soldier’s attack and the Arrest Scene were left for next day.

That Sunday was very exciting. Everyone had fun as the scene was repeated, from different angles, with two cameras running at the same time.

The soldier was killed, the women arrested and dragged away many times over. Jac was satisfied with the number of takes he had to cover all the action. The Market Sequence was finally completed and the time had come for the Scourging Sequence.

After the market sequence was done, all hands were on preparing for the following weekend. There was a meeting of the minds to discuss some details and go over what was needed and so on.

Jac had a moment of creativity when talking to Beto first, and to part or the crew later. He was discussing the scourging and his concerns.

He mentioned the scourging in Justine, where three beautiful ladies suffer the whip. First, Amy receives 50 lashes and after that she’s taken to the stocks, where she narrates her story to her sister. When she’s done with the story, we see Bea first and then Mila taken to the yard to be flogged in front of Justine and her sister. One after the other.

Jac’s point was that in the case of Seditiosa there would be three ladies scourged, one after the other and that means that maybe it would be a bit heavy for the audience having to watch each flogging in that way. Kind of boring, maybe. Beto said, in his clever way, what about all three at the same time.… pause.

That discussion came up later, when the plans were being made to shoot the Scourging Sequence, which happened a week later and I will be discussing it very soon.

I’ll have a lot more to say soon, how the last sequences of the film were shot, what happened there and more.

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There’s a nice new little clip at Patreon, shot during the Arrest Scene. There will be more in the coming days!

And we will be setting up a pre-order page for the film!

Our loyal supporters will receive their copies of the film at the end of August. Pre orders will be fulfilled shortly after and the film will be officially released a month later… or more. As I mentioned before there’s an International Film Festival interested in premiering this majestic work of cinematic art. That festival is in November and it’s already official, they will be having a retrospective of Jac’s and Amy’s films! A great deal for us.