All a-flutter

For “Lights, Camera . . . “ we ask a craftsperson to talk about a specific scene in his or her latest film. This week, set decorator Charlotte Watts Charlotte Watts writes about wrangling butterflies for “Bright Star.”

“Bright Star” is really one of those films that comes along and sets one tingling as soon as you read the script.

The butterfly scene was an anxious time for us. In it, actress Abbie Cornish was to lie on her bed as scores of butterflies flutter about, landing on her, the walls, the furniture, everywhere, much to her delight. Kay Raven, the butterfly wrangler, made us all very aware that there is only so much you can do with a butterfly on set and they do have a very limited life -- one day!

In total, we only had 80 butterflies to work with (dictated by the budget). We had these butterflies especially bred for the one day of filming, so there was no room for error at all.

From the research, we knew there had been an indigenous butterfly on Hampstead Heath, where the story takes place, that had similar markings to the popular admiral red and brown butterflies, but director Jane Campion and production designer Janet Patterson wanted more color than that. We tried to get hold of the common blue butterfly, but, unfortunately, we were filming in the wrong season; so we ended up with more tropical butterflies that were larger than the indigenous English butterfly, but in the end it was a good decision because they added to the surreal atmosphere of the scene.

Kay daubed small amounts of sugar water around the set, and cinematographer Greig Fraser lit from outside the set so as not to fry (or frighten) the butterflies. Our props department had also constructed a net cage over and around the entire set as we were petrified that the creatures would all die or escape on the first take.

But the butterflies turned out to be very resilient. They were not camera shy and did not seem to be bothered at all by the rather hectic environment of a busy film set. In fact, they ended up surviving way past their filming day. They even did some second unit filming the next day. I suppose the butterflies knew it was a film worth hanging on for.