What were the most challenging and rewarding scenes for you — referring to how you felt while directing/on set, and then when seeing the film in the final cut?

One of the trickiest scenes was probably when Tom locks the boy in the car and has a fight with Gemma that causes a rift. The exterior of Yonder was a set built in Belgium and the interior was a set built in Ireland so maintaining the emotional intensity across both countries and cutting it together was tricky but I am happy with how it worked out in the final film. We also only had one side of the street, so all the reverse angles had to be shot into the same background but with the 9 removed from the door, the hole taken away, the car and lighting flipped. Which added to the challenge of creating that scene.

The driving sequence showing Tom and Gemma arriving into Yonder (and trying to leave) was also very challenging. The set was three houses long, so we could only drive a short section of it. The driving scenes had to be shot across two countries and three locations, combining aerial shots that would later be replaced with matte paintings, the actors’ close-ups shot in a real housing development with the deep background rotoscoped and shifted in hue to match the set and the car driving in the warehouse in Belgium. We had to add reflections into the windows of the passing houses to create the illusion that there were houses on both sides of the street. It was like a weird puzzle that had to be pieced together to create a disorientating journey that the audience could track.

Finally, the scene in which Tom and Gemma are separated and calling out for each other had to be shot on the same little section of set. So creating the sense of distance between the characters through sound, music, editing, and lighting was challenging but I like how it turned out. Simple but pretty effective.