Bridging the gap between two worlds

Hidden is a fantasy thriller set in an alternative Stockholm where the main character finds out that he’s actually different from the human species. He also begins a hunt for his origins that lead him into an all new world.

It was an international production and they are always a challenge because you have to marry different working cultures.

On this production, I had a Swedish crew that was going to work with a Hungarian crew for a specific duration. My big challenge, which I loved, was also to create a working environment where both working cultures could thrive. For me, it’s important that, regardless of which country you come from and what working culture you’re engaged in, we find a way to do great work together.

Our challenge: to keep everything centralized and organized for our pre-scouting options

At the very beginning of the project, we needed to see where we were going to shoot: was it going to be in Sweden only, abroad, or a bit of both? We needed to set up a platform to keep track of all the options we were considering. That’s where SetKeeper came in and we started to use the platform for pre-scouting.

“SetKeeper made it easy to present and compare locations. In the locations department, we could compare locations and start selecting the ones we wanted to keep.”

We got in touch with different production service companies around Europe, including Czech Republic and Hungary. They would send us pictures of different locations that they thought could be suitable for our shoot. I could then keep these pictures organized in SetKeeper and able to easily present them to my creatives. At the end we decided to shoot a bit in Stockholm but most our locations were actually shot in Hungary.

“With SetKeeper, you can know the status of a creative choice right away just by looking across the board.”

We also used the casting department and the part that I liked with SetKeeper is that you can change the confirm status of your different choices. So, if you like a suggested actor for your cast, you can tag them with “callback” or “confirmed” while if you didn’t like them, you can directly click on “rejected”.

I would have liked to use this during production for the location department, but in this case the Hungarians, who were running the department, weren’t so comfortable in starting with something new. So, we used this feature for casting and pre-scouting, only but not for the actual scouting part.

Once we decided to shoot in Hungary and to work with a Hungarian team for locations, we then had to go back to Dropbox, which was not always the most practical way of doing things. We had difficulties in finding things because they had set up different Dropbox’s accounts for different locations… I would have preferred to have everything centralized on SetKeeper.

“With a system like SetKeeper: everything is centralized, there is a certain structure and you can find things quite easily, if you put your mind into it.”

SetKeeper also helps to keep your scripts organized and I especially love the fact that we can import them from Final Draft. It saves us a lot of time as we can update everything very quickly. I think it really helps especially on TV series like Hidden where there always is a multitude of episodes and script versions.