"I'm here." Text Message

When we first began planning Missing Eva, my group agreed that the text message shot would be one of the easiest scenes to shoot. It was just a close-up of Eva's phone with a simple text from the stalker popping up saying, "I'm here." This shot ended up being one of the hardest ones during the 2nd day of shooting, and it ended up taking way more time than we initially thought. 

The first challenge came with deciding what to put as the name on the text message. We didn't want to reveal the stalker's name, as it would give away too much about his character. We needed something that kept him mysterious, while also hinting at his role in Eva's life. After a long discussion, we decided on "Mystery Man". This worked perfectly, implying that Eva doesn't know who he is—adding to the suspense of the story. Once we had the name decided, we moved onto the cinematography. The plan was to have the camera focus on a close-up of Eva's phone, which was laying in the car, with the message appearing on the screen. The real problem came when we tried to actually send the text. 

A screenshot of the message attempts

We had our sound designer sitting in the backseat, who was sending the text message from her phone to the phone we were using for the film. It was very difficult for us to perfect the timing of this shot. There were many attempts where the text message wouldn't appear at all on the screen. Other times, we'd get "iMessage" instead of the actual message, or the message would appear too late. We tried a lot of things to make this shot perfect like fixing the phone settings and positioning the phone to make sure the message would show up correctly. This took a lot of trial and error, and sending texts over and over again until we finally got the exact shot we needed. The entire process took much longer than expected, and we learned that even a simple shot can come with challenges. 

A still from the final shot of "I'm here" messages.