about the film
Scratched was written, produced, photographed, directed and edited by QLD filmmaker Travis Bain. The movie was funded entirely with a credit card, shot entirely on Mini DV and post-produced entirely on a desktop computer for an extremely low budget.
Filming a bedroom scene for Scratched
In 2000, Travis was living in Brisbane and working as a movie journalist for youth affairs website Tribe. He was assigned to cover the 2000 Brisbane International Film Festival (BIFF). He travelled to and from the festival every day by train, one hour each way. To pass the time, he wrote a screenplay on the train: Scratched, a darkly comic thriller about five ordinary people infected by greed.
“It's a universal story,” Travis says. “It could happen to any of us, anytime, anywhere. We’re all human. If a big enough carrot is dangled in front of us, we’ll do whatever we have to do to get it.”
Writer/director Travis Bain lines up a shot for Scratched
Scratched tracks the fortunes (and misfortunes) of five disparate university students as they spend one insane summer night searching for a million-dollar “scratchie” ticket hidden somewhere inside their rambling six-bedroom “Queenslander”-style share house. For Travis, a winning $50 scratchie ticket provided the seed from which the storyline germinated.
Tamsin (Emma Dean) and Jones (Kamyra Orchard) discuss filthy lucre in Scratched
“I won fifty bucks on one of these things,” he says, “and I thought, gee, it’s amazing how something so small can be worth so much. You can win a quarter of a million dollars on some of these tickets. I just find it amazing that a little piece of printed cardboard can be worth as much as a house or a luxury car. I thought it’d be interesting to dangle a million-dollar carrot in front of five very different personalities and see what happens.”
Pizza purveyor Sheru Bharadwaja delivers pizza to the scheming housemates in Scratched
Scratched was written specifically to meet certain criteria so it could be produced on a tiny budget. It had to be set indoors. It had to be set mostly in one location. It had to feature a small ensemble cast. And it had to be devoid of any expensive visual effects, stunts or action sequences. From the outset, the success or failure of Scratched rested largely on the strength of its script and its performances, not on flashy computer-generated effects or car chases.
Lorenzo (Andre Seager) enjoys a quiet stogie in Scratched
By BIFF 2000’s closing night, the screenplay was finished, and Travis decided to commence pre-production. The next few years were spent honing the script, drawing hundreds of storyboards, auditioning and casting local actors, recruiting crew members, scouting locations, buying props, and preparing for Day 1 of principal photography. Despite various setbacks, principal photography eventually got underway and continued for about three weeks.
Travis and his team filmed Scratched at a variety of locations around Brisbane, using a borrowed 3CCD Panasonic digital camcorder, a boom microphone hired from QPIX, and a borrowed tripod. Skateboards and wheelchairs were used as dollies. Ordinary 200-watt household light bulbs were used for lighting. Costumes were sourced from second-hand clothing stores. Crew members (consisting mostly of film students or film school graduates) wore multiple hats. To save time and money, Travis not only directed the movie but also operated the camera.
Lorenzo (Andre Seager) threatens the Looter (Jimi Halliday) in Scratched
Principal photography mostly took place at a house in the Brisbane suburb of Kelvin Grove, which belonged to the grandmother of one of the supporting actors. Since the movie is set almost entirely at night during a tropical cyclone, the windows of the house were covered with black polar fleece and storm sound effects were added in post-production. The house wasn’t entirely soundproof, so noise from cars, power tools and crested pigeons often “leaked” in from the outside world. (As a result, the cast and crew of Scratched now have a pathological hatred of crested pigeons.) By the end of principal photography, thirty hours of footage were “in the can.”
Writer/director Travis Bain and 1st A.D. Sophie Gromansperg on the set of Scratched
Post-production was carried out entirely on Travis’ garden-variety home computer using off-the-shelf post-production software such as Adobe Premiere. Travis edited and sound-mixed the movie himself over a period of many months, often toiling late into the night. The first rough cut of the movie clocked in at 90 minutes. An 85-minute cut screened at the 2005 Melbourne Underground Film Festival and the 2005 digiSPAA Digital Feature Film Festival in Brisbane.
Mortal enemies Jones (Kamyra Orchard) and Lorenzo (Andre Seager) face off in Scratched
Between 2005 and 2010, the movie was trimmed further and underwent extensive colour grading and digital noise reduction, and some new insert shots were filmed in Townsville. The current, final cut of Scratched runs 78 minutes and is now available on a special edition DVD.
