Wars Of Attrition

You Might Be If You Stick Around - The Making of Stranded

2011-10-23T14:49:00.000-07:00

I finished writing my making of Stranded essay several months ago but never put it up on line...partly due to some worries over my very honest depiction of working with someone on the film. Having had some feedback from people, I've decided to put this up on the blog now, though much like with the making of Creak with a name change to mask any potential comeback...

Take a deep breath, it's another epic...

I had a tutor at college called Trevor Ellis, who was very much in to European art house cinema.I had no idea who the directors were who he used to talk about and it all sounded very alien to me, being a teenage horror fan. I do remember him showing us the beginning of one of his favourite films, which I think had a montage which featured a woman freewheeling on a bike, perhaps intercut with a blender going off…I’m sure there were other things, but it was the image of the bike wheel spinning round which for some reason stuck with me...and the tick tick ticking of the bike chain as the bike freewheeled along a road...

Stranded began life in the summer of 2006 – along with The Crunch, which was written at the same time, I hoped that these two simple-ish scripts would get me back into film making. And it was that image of the bicycle wheel which came back to me which started me thinking about wheels spinning round as the opening to a film, but a series of different wheels, all travelling in the same direction and all of them eventually come to a halt. But what wheels..?

I’m guessing I chose the main wheel of a wheelchair as my late granddad was invalid and would use a wheelchair on day trips and when he needed to. His wheelchair was often borrowed for various periods to help me shoot tracking shots on my post college films. Then I thought of a wheel on an old lady’s shopping trolley bag – again, perhaps recalling my grandma and her endless trips to the shops (probably instigated to get away from my granddad for a few more hours!) A car wheel seemed pretty obvious, but I had a definite feeling that it had to come to a halt on gravel, giving a crunching grinding sound.

So, I had an opening, but then who did the wheels belong to? It’s the unfathomable writing process, so I have no concrete idea where the characters came from. It’s possible I already had the title at this stage – Stranded was taken from the Roxy Music album, with the line “You might be stranded if you stick around” belonging to the album’s lead track Street Life. So I had some wheels…which became stranded. Who became stranded and why?

I don’t know why I decided on 6 characters and 3 story lines, it’s just the way it fell. There are some personal aspects to the characters of this film which I suppose I only saw later from a distance – the “playful” violence of Chad was possibly inspired by some of the antagonism from my own brother when he was a teenager. We didn’t have a violent relationship, but there were a couple of memories that I could say inspired Chad’s volatile attitude towards his brother. Both Chad and Algy were inspired by a desire to show a pair of people who seemed to have fallen between the cracks of society and existed in their own world. I wanted Chad in particular to be one of those people who was a nobody who thought he was a somebody within his own limited life circle – someone who frequented the rougher pubs, came from an abusive background, a chancer, a thug, a bully…though someone who more often than not became a victim at the hands of those tougher than himself , and continued this circle of violence down the pecking order against those he saw as below himself – his brother included. Someone who was constantly angry at the world at the cards life had dealt him, despite some of those cards being those that he had chose for himself. The brothers’ dialogue about “The Kingfisher” chip shop did refer back to my home town – the Kingfisher was a chip shop known to us…and Chad’s complaints about the chip shop owners being Greek did unfortunately refer to my dad, who seemed to be always moaning about the chip shops not being as good since being run by Greeks.

Algy definitely borrowed some aspects from my granddad – those which show Algy as having accepted his physical status in life and finding some joy in simple things. Perhaps the reality was he was actually frustrated, but the impression I had was that my granddad seemed happy enough sat in his chair in the backgarden, or even sat in the lounge window he could watch people going by. Although Algy was supposed to be mentally retarded to some degree by his accident, he wasn’t stupid – his ability to complete puzzles showed he had the mental capacity for some things. There was also an intention that Algy was actually much more knowledgeable than Chad, but Chad could not or would not listen to Algy, unwilling to accept that his brother, who in his eyes was physically less than him and therefore lesser in all aspects, could actually be more intelligent that Chad. Algy’s puzzle books seem to be a throwback to my childhood – I really used to enjoy doing wordsearches and found them really easy. I have a childhood memory of being on Sutton market with my mum and while she was looking at a clothes stall I looked down at a wordsearch and spotted the one word the owner of the stall hadn’t found – she was really chuffed, she said she’d been looking for it for ages…so Algy’s joy at finding one last missing word was probably inspired by this event.

Writing this I realise that there may have been another influence on the two characters – at the top of the street where I grew up lived two brothers with their parents – Richard and Anthony Robinson. I couldn’t say for sure whether they were actually poor, but their parents seemingly showed little affection for them. The garden of the house was always overgrown, with the back garden having a burnt out Volkswagen Beetle in the tall grass, if my memory serves me correctly. Their mother was usually seen over tarted up and heading off to the pub at night. Generally the brothers were left to their own devices to make their own entertainment with each other. Anthony suffered an accident when the fair was in town – as the story goes, someone told him to pick up a pound very close to a moving ride. He did and was hit by the Speedway ride, which resulted in him becoming epileptic. How much truth there is in this story I couldn’t say. But I do wonder what happened to them both. They seemed the perfect example of people who could easily fall through the cracks.

Gwyneth was definitely inspired by my grandma, as her mental health had been deteriorating over the years to the point where she didn’t know I was her grandson and would usually mistake me for my dad (her son!) Although my auntie had told me there was a very ugly, nasty side to my grandma’s dementia, where she would swear and shout, I had never seen it…and the way she would lapse into old songs from her youth seemed to give her a brightness, a joy of life. This aspect influenced Gwyneth’s paddling and splashing by the shore, though this was changed during the shoot.

There hadn’t been any particular conflict over my auntie’s decision to put my grandma in a home – it was sad, but was definitely for the best both for her and my grandma, so the conflict that Dugald faces was a complete work of fiction. The “twist” at the end where it is revealed that he is her son was never meant to be a really dramatic rug pulled from under your feet moment, but something which hopefully made an audience re-apply a new meaning to the scenes with Dugald and Gwyneth.

There were some personal aspects to Gwyneth’s dialogue – her exclamation regarding “Star Trek” lollies did refer back to the lollies which I remember being on sale during caravan holidays I had with these grandparents when I was a child (I think the one with Spock on the wrapper was just an orange lolly, not particularly sci-fi or exciting.) Her repeated mention of her husband not being here now was a definite line I’d witnessed my own grandma say following the death of my grandad. The reminisces at the shoreline of going out at the weekend were also based on my grandma enjoying remembering working at the John Players factory in Nottingham. One of her lines which was not inspired by my family, but by one of my heroes was the line about “You always know what you’re getting with vanilla” – this philosophy was apparently the inspiration for the title of “There’s always vanilla”, George A Romero’s 2nd feature film which I’ve never seen and still can’t be seen anywhere.

With Lorna and Amelia, the initial starting point was that the car breaks down and I guess I must have been partly inspired by Debbie, who did the make up for Stranded and The Crunch, who always seemed to be having car trouble and had a teenage daughter…so using that as a starting point, I developed it into becoming an issue of a distant mother and daughter relationship (which is as far from Debbie’s relationship with her daughter as you can get!) I guess the car breaking down also could have harked back to my first car, which was always breaking down in its later life. I had to carry a wooden mallet in the car to tap the starting motor in case it got stuck and Debbie always seemed to be having car trouble.

As with The Crunch, I’d got the names for the characters from the two Pan books of names that I’d picked up from a car boot several years before. As they were printed in the 60s, they have very out of fashion names in them. I like the meaning of the names to have some relevance to the film, so I’m sure most of them apply to some degree, possibly with the exception of Algy – I’d never heard of the rhyme about “Algy met a bear” until I saw it in the name book and thought it was an unusual element to add, a comfort song which Algy’s late mum used to sing to him.

I did make a mistake with the script structure, which would come back and bite me at the editing stage. I approached the whole thing quite mechanically and had a table of scenes and wanted to make sure that each story element had the same amount of scenes devoted to it. I also wanted to try and keep a repetitive pattern, so the film would always go from Chad/Algy to Lorna/ Amelia to Dugald/ Gwyneth. This approach didn’t seem an issue at the script stage.
After writing the first draft, I was concerned that nothing much really happened to Algy after he was left – in a fit of enthusiasm at finding a missing word in his wordsearch, he accidentally knocked his ruler to the ground - so I decided to write in a dramatic rock fall, where a huge chunk of rock would have crashed down off of the cliff and smashed into the beach in front of Algy, just missing him. I guess I was a little drunk on the semi-professionalism that I felt I’d achieved with The Crunch and thought I would be able to find a CGI artist who could achieve this effect. For myself, I thought it would be good to have a film which involved an effect and get some grounding on how to achieve such an effect.

However, my good friend Mark felt that a) it felt really needless in the script and b) if the effect was bad, it would be detrimental to the whole film…and after some time mulling it over, it did feel like an over ambitious element which could easily go wrong and delay the post production of the film…and if I couldn’t find a CG artist, it would make the scenes shot a bit useless. There was also a worry to me that we would have to actually film very close to the cliffs, which have signs up saying danger of falling rocks. I didn’t want art to imitate life…and filming so close to the cliffs would have removed seeing the wonderful backdrop of the cliffs. So in the end I went back to script and changed it so Algy knocks the ruler off when he is spooked by the sound of stones crumbling down the cliff face. Not particularly dramatic, but much less goofy and patronising than the first draft’s “simpleton gets over excited.”

The script wouldn’t be completely locked down until the beginning of 2008 – in the meantime I contacted a paraplegic society who very kindly supplied me with information regarding what mobility and functions Algy would actually have, though I still used some dramatic license where I had to.

Since writing it I’d also gone out looking for locations and decided on Newhaven beach – from the car park you could walk along and be under some dramatic white cliffs, which were perfect for Chad and Algy…then steps from the car park lead down to a sandy beach enclosed by a sea wall. Access to the sea wall was unfortunately closed off due to health and safety, which would have denied us getting some striking long shots, but both locations seemed pretty apt.

Finding an ideal layby for the car was not so easy. In an ideal world I would have loved to have filmed up at Beachy Head and exploited the bizarre barrenness of the area, but there wasn’t anywhere off the beaten track enough where no cars would go by. There was also a concern that the location would be an hour or so drive away. So I looked closer to home and explored the Poynings/ Fulking area beneath Devil’s Dyke in Brighton and found a layby which had enough space to work around with a camera crew and had some good backdrops of the sweeping hills and a vista beyond of fields and pylons. It wasn’t as utterly remote as I’d always hoped and there was an issue of passing traffic every so often, but it seemed like the most ideal location.
After having a successful shoot with Terry as assistant director on The Crunch, I asked him to get more heavily involved with Stranded as more of a producer role, just so I had someone else who I could rely on to help get things together for it. So once he was on board, I took him out to the location I had found.

For a start, I had never really thought about the tide affecting Newhaven beach and when we went there on a location recce I couldn’t believe that the whole “basin” of the beach was full to the brim with seawater. Oops. So that was something we had to consider. Until we saw the second obstacle – since writing the script and discovering the location, the beach had been closed on health and safety grounds, as the concrete wall was crumbling due to sea erosion. So we lost our sandy beach basin location all in one fell swoop. Looking further down the pebble beach, we decided that the Dugald and Gwyneth scenes could be shot there, with Chad and Algy still further down. In all honesty, I had had concerns about shooting on the sandy beach as there would have undoubtedly been other people there during the shoot which would have tampered with the feeling of isolation that I wanted the film to have.

After shooting The Crunch in March of 2007 I was determined to get Stranded in the can before the year was out, leaving me the winter months to edit and finish both films. I needed to bust a gut to get the film cast, so I began the casting calls in August, posting the film up on the usual suspects of Shooting People, Casting Call Pro, Mandy etc and got a strong response back. Unsurprisingly, there were many people interested in the role of the teenage daughter, which showed how many girls there were straight out of drama school looking to get show reel material.

As with The Crunch, I did some casting sessions in our kitchen but as there were several actors and actresses who were based in London I felt I had to go to London to do a casting session. Not knowing anywhere in London that I could use for free, or that I could direct people to easily enough, I “brilliantly” decided on the Wetherspoons pub in Victoria train station, which was far from ideal, but I did the best with the situation and the people who came down to meet me seemed gracious enough, despite the circumstances.

I took the week of my birthday off work as holiday, which was mostly spent desperately trying to finalise the casting. There hadn’t been a massive response to the Gwyneth casting call – I drove round to a woman’s house in the New Forest to audition her, tried out my friend’s dad’s partner, in Brighton I went to see a retired woman who’d decided to take up acting. For the role of Dugald I’m sure I went to a house in Horsham to see a man, who mostly was a magician and did an audition in his garage/office. I also recall some random enquiries – one woman in particular was neither young enough to play down to the teenager, nor play up in age for the mother, which had me querying which role she thought she was actually suitable for…and whether she’d read the character descriptions in the first place!

In the end the casting of Dugald and Gwyneth was easy – both who I chose for the roles seemed very well suited, with Andrew MacDonald and Barbara Long receiving those roles. Amelia was a tough call to make as I was torn between two actresses, but I went with Natasha as her performance piece on dvd showed that she could easily play up in age to a woman in her mid to late 20’s, as well as play down from her early 20’s to a teen and bring that acting maturity to the role. Tina Tracey seemed very well suited to play the role of Lorna.

The hardest decision was with the casting of the two brothers – I had several actors, all who had given great auditions, but none of who I could see as a pair. I was concerned that with the time constraints of a short film that I needed to use some quick visual shorthand to establish the relationship between the two characters and felt they had to have some sort of similarity, rather than having to rely on exposition. My worry was that if they looked too utterly unalike then it would be assumed they were carer and patient, rather than siblings, bringing to mind Lou and Andy from the then hit comedy series Little Britain. I realise now that this was a mistake – I should have simply gone with performance and worried about the visual difference later…after all, not all brothers do look alike. But at the time I chose Jamie Alderson, who was an actor from Brighton, with Robertp Aldredi who I auditioned in the Wetherspoons pub in the role of Chad, as together they did look as though there could be some sort of sibling connection. This would unfortunately be a decision I would later regret many times over.

With the casting finalised it was probably very late September. I was still desperate to get the film in the can and figured the last weekend in October fell on the end of British Summer Time when the clocks would be going back for winter. I was concerned about the weather at the end of October and the potential loss of light as winter encroached but decided to still go ahead, otherwise the whole film would have to be postponed until the spring of the following year. So the plan was to shoot Saturday and Sunday, then the following Saturday, after which the clocks went back overnight.

All the actors were available. Or so I thought. Then Roberto told me that he wasn’t available at the end of October, despite always stating my intentions to shoot the film then.

So that was that. See you in 2008.

I wrote “Goodnight, Halloween” immediately after the postponement of Stranded and shot the first two thirds of the film in March 2008 as it was prepped and ready to go…and the postponement of Stranded had created trouble in locking down dates with the actors. Finally I managed to get dates sorted but these weren’t until June. This gave me more time to work on the look of the characters.

I’d always separated the characters out into two loose sets – I always saw Algy, Amelia and Gwyneth as full of life in their own ways – Algy had not been destroyed by the accident which left him paralysed and still found a joy in solving puzzles and being out on the beach, Amelia, despite her snide and spoilt demeanour, at least speaks her mind and feels alive, especially in comparison to her mother who seems to be shrinking away from life…and Gwyneth has found energy and joy in the reverie of her past memories. So with this in mind, I wanted them to be bold and stand out from the others and chose them all to have the colour red in their outfits. I wanted Algy to also wear a checked shirt as a symbolism of his bodily “imprisonment.” Amelia was difficult, in that I wanted her to look as if she was where teenage fashion could be several years from when we were shooting – it had to be slightly risqué enough to feel it was winding up her parents as well has having a teenage tribalism to it. She also had to look super groomed as you’d expect from someone who feels money is no object. I had no particular vision for Gwyneth, apart from the red, and wanting her to have red elements to her make up – rouge, eyeshadow etc.

So I wanted the other characters to feel bland, wiped out by life, disappearing into shadows…though I accept that Chad’s character doesn’t live up to this. You could argue that if Amelia is full of her life in her own spoilt way, then so is Chad in his kicking against the world way. But I always felt that Chad was a man who was consumed by the actions in his past and lived a horrid, repetitive dead existence. So his colour were meant to be dark. I also had the idea of having his appearance show him with black eyes and a bust nose, so we immediately feel he’s potentially a nasty piece of work, though I always felt in a backstory sense that Chad had bitten off more than he could chew, possibly being boastful and come a cropper as a result. Lorna was deliberately dressed in shapeless beiges and it was intended for Dugald to look stiff and dull in browns, possibly slightly smart as if he’d dressed up to take his mum to the beach.

So a smattering of ebay, some visits to charity shops and car boots and a raiding of Minda’s wardrobe and we seemed pretty sorted for most of the characters – it was only Gwyneth’s costume which was proving elusive, as Barbara was very small framed and I was struggling to find an old dress suit which would fit her. But as the first block of shooting was to be Algy/Chad and Gwyneth/ Lorna, I could worry about that later.

Debbie did some make up tests – she practiced Chad’s black eyes on Terry at our house and we had a session at her flat where we practiced on Natasha and Tina. We took reference photos so
Debbie would know what to recreate on the shooting days.

The week of the shoot Terry and I visited an equipment hire place in Brighton as I needed to hire some radio mics – I knew that I wanted to get some very long shots of the actors, which meant that if I wanted to capture that performance at the time I would need some radio mics. This was a decision with best intentions, but one which would come back to bite me on the eventual shoot.

Compared to the stress and worry I had before shooting The Crunch I felt a little more relaxed about Stranded – I was mostly working with the same crew again and we’d all become good friends since shooting The Crunch and the Goodnight, Halloween shoot had cemented our working relationship into a solid unit. I also had a new crew member to add to the mix – Gus Kerswell – who I had met at Movie Bar, the film night in Brighton. Wisely I hadn’t worried myself too much about the weather upfront, although the forecast was not good for the Sunday…but like Van Morrison used to say, it’s too late to stop now!

The first day did not begin as smoothly as I’d hoped. Crew all descended on our house early as planned but both my actors were massively late. When I’d cast Jamie he was living in Brighton, but had moved to London since the postponement of the film, which meant I had two actors both who were having issues with trains, blaming cancellations and other reasons. This unfortunately meant I had a bottleneck when Debbie came to do the make up, as the intention was to stagger the arrival of the actors to avoid such a scenario. Roberto immediately got our back up while we were preparing the food for everyone – while we were making cobs for everyone he now told us that he had an aversion to gluten, this despite me asking all members of the cast and crew for any dietary requirements way upfront.

Quick as a shot, Minda took it in her stride and told him it was no worries as we had a friend who was a celiac. Minda started cooking up some gluten free pasta for him – he watched her put in the pan and on the boil, and THEN asked if it was gluten free pasta as he didn’t like that. Right. Several deep breaths later, we asked him if a salad was okay and he said it was fine. Realising he was fussy I started running every frigging ingredient past him until he cut me off saying “LOOK. It’s just wheat, and eggs. OKAY?” And so it began…

By the time the make up was done, drove to the location, unpacked and headed over to the area under the cliffs it was already hitting midday. I heard Roberto already grumbling about stopping for food, which hacked me off – he was one of the reasons we were behind and he already wanted to stop. It wasn’t to be a good omen.

We shot chronologically following the script, which was important to me, as it was supposed to reflect the passing of time across the day, ideally with the sun moving across the sky. So the opening image, of Chad pushing Algy over the hill was the opening shot. We hooked up the actors to the radio mics, so we could get this tremendous long shot and capture the authentic performance, but began having issues with one of the radio mics. Aware that time was passing and we were already behind, we had to attempt to record the dialogue with just one mic strategically positioned on Jamie and hope for the best.

Of course, for this particular shot, it’s so damn far away you can’t see the actors’ mouths anyway, so it could have easily been dubbed. But I was still very resistant to this idea at this stage – it was something which had at the time been suggested to me to save the diabolical sound recording of The Crunch, but was always concerned that a performance is much harder to recreate afterwards.

We finally managed to get the cameras rolling and watched Roberto struggle over the hill with Jamie and down the other side of the hill and out of the shot. I suggested we get another take – Roberto complained to me, hoping that we wouldn’t be doing much of this. Hadn’t he read the script?

CHAD, a man in his late 30’s, pushes his brother ALGY in his wheelchair across the dips and mounds of the dirt path

Okay, it never says hill, but it was never likely to be easy pushing a wheelchair along a dirt path, was it? Once again, Roberto had my back up.

I’d shot The Crunch with split screen elements, then Goodnight, Halloween was envisaged to show a desktop of webcams and news windows, creating an image of split screen against a backdrop…so drunk on this split screen obsession I had initially approached Stranded in a similar fashion. It would have been much more subdued compared to The Crunch, but I thought it would be really great to have made a “split screen” trilogy. However, it soon became apparent that this really wasn’t feasible – the late start seemed to have knocked everything in to hat and I was struggling to explain to Anthony, the DOP, quite what I wanted and why. So I tossed this vision in the bin – realistically it was for the best and I did agree with Anthony that I would actually have a stronger diverse showreel – a bizarre split screen drama, a horror thriller and a straight drama told conventionally. But it felt sad that we were already running late and my vision was forceably scrapped.

The next few shots seemed to go without too many memorable issues – the radio mics were continuing to be an issue, which wasn’t an issue on the close ups but for the full shots it was difficult to find a place where Toby could get the boom close enough. I was also concerned about Roberto’s accent for Chad. It was very gruff, almost to the point of being cartoonish and also seemed inconsistent between takes and shots. I did try to direct him to a consistent accent but nothing seemed to be sinking in. He already seemed to be showing a short attention span and as I was already running behind schedule doing take after take just wasn’t an option if we were to get everything done in a day.

We were at the mercy of the public and several times people came walking by, some walking dogs…luckily we had Jenny, who can convince anyone to do anything, so went on the charm offensive and simply asked them to walk behind us so they wouldn’t get in our shots. Brilliantly everyone obliged and seemed full of encouraging smiles to us.

It was possibly around this point where Divagate reared its ugly head. Roberto had told - not asked – Terry to “Get me some juice.” Already it felt like Roberto had made a bad impression on the crew – he gave an air of being above us, instead of with us. No one was being paid for the film, we were all in it together for our own reasons, so it seemed ridiculous for anyone to throw their weight around. Terry told me afterwards that he was ready to punch Roberto and to hell with if he walked off of the film. It felt like Roberto would continue to drive this wedge between everyone and him as the day progressed.

Jamie understandably had concerns with Roberto’s aim throwing the stones at his legs – I’d always intended to pick up some football shin guards, but never got around to it. In the end Jamie was out of focus in the background when Roberto was throwing stones, then framed tighter so his legs weren’t showing in the shot (and didn’t actually need Roberto to throw anything.)

We reached the point in the script where Chad walks off, leaving Algy for the day. The tide was annoyingly in over at the location where Chad goes back to the scene of Algy’s “accident” which left him paralysed, so we concentrated on doing the majority of the Algy scenes. This was also a bit of a godsend – Jamie had shown himself to be focussed and dedicated to the film and I hoped that his scenes would be quick to do and help us catch up on the schedule. Roberto in the meantime propped himself across two chairs and slept.

Time was already of the essence, though there was a situation which occurred here which annoyed me. Jamie accidentally rubbed his face with his hand, smudging the make up. Pretty much all of us turned to inform Debbie and get her to come and touch it up. She was sat down on the beach where Roberto was sleeping and had watched Jamie smudge the make up. When we confirmed this, she didn’t seem to exactly spring out of her chair to fix the make up so we could carry on. I love Debbie to bits, but her speed with the make up and the fact she can get easily distracted was increasingly becoming an issue after the make up for Goodnight, Halloween had taken so long. Finally she got up and sorted the make up and we could continue.

Jamie was a good sport with the falling out of the wheelchair scene – we did several takes where Terry literally tipped him out of the chair, sending him sprawling onto the ground. We got some really good looking shots here too – the one where Algy is in the foreground, with the wheelchair (admittedly improbably very far) behind him looked dynamic. There always has to be a however though…and Anthony’s lack of a monitor, filming in blazing sunlight and the peculiarity of sometimes looking at an upside down image on the camera screen would cause issues later at the editing stage.

With Algy out on the floor and the tide out it was the best time to go and do the scene with Chad on the rocks. If I was to keep the chronology of the day, I also needed some time to pass before going back to Algy again.

Unbelievably Roberto seemed very slow to respond when asked to get up to film this scene. I regarded this scene as his scene, one where it’s only him on screen, possibly could show some pathos and poignancy and really give a performance. Surely that’s motivating to an actor? But no, it was with frustrating slowness that Roberto finally focussed on what we were doing and several of us left the beach base camp to go further up the shore under the cliffs.
As we approached the rocks Roberto could see that it was a wonderfully cinematic location which looked great in the light. He put his arm round me and congratulated me on such a great location. From anyone else I may have taken this as a compliment, but by now I regarded it as almost patronising from Roberto. I wanted to throw his arm off my shoulder and tell him to fuck off.

Having no sound on this sequence sped up the shoot and the full shot of Chad approaching the rocks looked magnificent. Getting the close ups of Chad and his feet was more hazardous than I expected, involving myself and Anthony straddling slippery seaweed covered rocks. Quite why we didn’t just get the close up of Chad on stable ground I don’t know.

We returned back to the base camp to do the sequence of Algy alone on the beach, singing the nursery rhyme which had inspired the naming of the character. Both shots were simple to do, Jamie was once again focused and so were able to get on to the final scenes.

By now we were losing the light so we had to really crack on with the final sequence, but Roberto was continuing to drag his feet. He’d never heard Roxy Music’s “Street Life” and I didn’t have an iPod with me to play it him, so him laughing and singing the line “You might be stranded if you stick around” sounded forced. A shame, it was something I really wanted in the film. I could see that Jamie was getting agitated with Roberto’s slowness and lack of attention – he had plans for a meal with his girlfriend and the later we were, the later he got back to London. While setting up the close up of Roberto’s dialogue Roberto turned around and walked off while Anthony was trying to get the focus right. Jamie asked he under his breath where Roberto was going and I had to admit I had no idea. Anthony and I shouted to Roberto to come back as we were trying to pull focus and only after grabbing some snacks Roberto came back. Ironic that he complained about his gluten issue but that didn’t affect him eating cookies and biscuits all day – even he was joking about how he was eating them. It really was like dealing with a child and I really wondered how accurate his cv was – how did anyone put up with this lazy attitude on a professional, paid shoot?

When Jamie was no longer on camera he’d understandably decided there wasn’t a great deal of point in putting energy into his acting – as long as he simply delivered the lines as written, then there couldn’t be any re-takes due to him messing up. Anthony was extremely concerned by the light now and the sun did eventually fall behind the cliffs just as we were getting to the last images.

All that was left to do on the location was the sound recording of the last lines of dialogue – by this point Jamie seemed to have given up, delivering the dialogue is such an utterly flat manner as if he’d lost the will to live. In yet another display of bone idleness, after shooting the final image of Roberto pushing Jamie away in the wheelchair, Roberto had crashed out on the grass and seemed to make no effort to get his arse off the grass and come to us to do the sound recording.

In Roger Corman’s book “How I Made A Million Dollars In Hollywood And Never Lost A Dime” there’s a moment where at the end of shooting the climax to his film “Gas-s-s-s-s-s” he quietly said “Let’s go home.” There’s something in that downtrodden sentiment that I couldn’t help but relate to. We packed up, we went home.

On the drive back Jamie mentioned that he would be interested in going out to LA and Roberto told him he should do it, especially with the women out there...even when Jamie reminded Roberto that he was in a relationship, Roberto seemed to be still encouraging Jamie to go out there to play around...for some reason Roberto also seemed to mock Jamie for saying he was going to stay in with his girlfriend with a bottle of wine, as if a bottle of wine was something for lar-de-dar fancy folk. Very odd behaviour, especially as Roberto seemed more lar-de-dar than any of us.

Unfortunately, we had the prospect of Roberto staying with us for the night. As usual after filming, we invited everyone back to ours to have a drink and wind down after a long day shooting and this night in particular we were desperate for people not to leave us alone with HIM. Everyone else had picked up on this vibe and Toby was the last to leave, albeit very reluctantly and already at a late hour. We still hadn’t eaten so ordered a Chinese, which Roberto again seemed to abandon his dietary requirements and took advantage of our generosity. It was a difficult, uncomfortable meal and Roberto had asked/ demanded to watch Wimbledon – it turned out his friend had a spare ticket for Roberto for today’s games and Roberto seemed to relish informing us that he had chosen my film over his day out to Wimbledon, insinuating that I should be grateful.

Much that we were desperate to go to bed, Melody our rascal cat had decided that tonight, of all nights, would be the one when she would go walkabout. Maybe she was trying to stay away from Roberto too, it wouldn’t surprise me. We had no cat flap so we had to stay up until she finally came back around 1am. Not a great ending to the day.

As I lay in bed that night, I couldn’t help but feel that I had monumentally fucked up. I had cast this cretin not only in my film, but in the major role which links all three storylines. He acting was worryingly inconsistent and his accent was all over the place, flailing aimlessly between an almost comedic gruff voice and some camp anger.
Naturally, it took me a very long time to get to sleep that night. Tomorrow’s shoot was already giving me the fear.

Fear can be one hell of a motivator and so the second day began with a desperate eagerness to get the second day’s shoot complete as soon as possible. As with the day before, our house was the meeting point before the shoot. Tina was one of the first to arrive – I remember her turning her nose up at vegetarian bacon and finding the idea of it hilarious, a depressingly typical response from meat eaters which has the habit of getting our backs up. Despite this initial bad impression Tina turned out to be very friendly and fun to work with.

Already in the morning there was a definite division between members of the cast and crew, or should I say a member. While everyone else hung out in the kitchen getting their make up done, drinking tea and bonding Roberto sat alone in the lounge, more interested in watching Wimbledon than getting to know today’s cast and the crew better. Again, it felt like he was very much aloof and above us all with this attitude.

Eventually we headed down to the location at the bottom of Devil’s Dyke with an ominously grey sky. After setting up we managed to get two shots – Roberto walking down a country lane and his reaction to seeing Natasha leaning into the car bonnet – before the heavens opened. We all fled back to our convoy of cars to shelter from the rain. After a while it looked like the rain just wasn’t going to stop. Jenny, being very pragmatic, suggested we drive back home, eat the food so it hasn’t all gone to waste, then if the weather clears up we can return to the location and shoot as much as possible.

It was a plan, but only the food eating took place. By mid afternoon it was obvious that we wouldn’t have time to shoot everything even if it did stop raining. Roberto eventually leaved to go back to London, cheekily grabbing some more snacks and fruit for his train journey, pushing our hospitality again. After dropping him off at the station I got back home where a few of the team where still hanging out. Looking out the patio doors I saw it had not only stopped raining but there was now a gloriously clear blue sky. Bad timing.

The reschedule of this shoot couldn’t take place for another 2 months or so due to availability of cast and crew, so we finally reconvened around late August. Having already been made fully aware of the way Roberto “worked” we decided on a plan to shoot all of the shots without him, including reaction shots, before he arrived on location. This suited Roberto, as he would only be there for the afternoon.

The morning of the shoot didn’t start too well – somewhere we’d mislaid the tights that Natasha wore and in hunting for them Minda got very upset with me, unhappy about me bringing on this additional stress when our wedding was less than two months away. I felt awful and selfish, but there was nothing I could do now everyone was here at the house and the wheels were in motion. Still, my lack of consideration and my attempts to put things right would have to have an impact on the production in the future.

We returned to the location and it had to be said we were like a well oiled machine – instead of Toby doing the sound, we now had John Thursfield, who had saved and done the sound mix on my previous film The Crunch, so he was new to the team but we all worked effortlessly well together. Both actresses put in great performances and amazingly there’s nothing which sticks in my mind as going wrong with this part of the shoot at all, which is evidence of how well we had worked together.

After racking my brains to think of something, the only thing which comes to mind was when we almost caused a slight car accident – Debbie, not only doing the make up, was asked to perform a drive by in her car for when Natasha informs her mum that a car is coming. Debbie was parked around the bend, just out of shot, but almost collided with a car when she pulled out on the call of action. Luckily nothing happened and in the end this shot didn’t make the final cut – as too many cars were going by us when filming this day it seemed stupid to highlight a particular car approaching them when it wasn’t a rarity, so it became an aspect of the script which was unfortunately dropped, making this pair not quite as stranded as I would have liked.
Avoiding this potential accident, we were working so well that we had finished all of the shots without Roberto way upfront and had to kick back while we waited for him.

I can’t explain why, as it is utterly inexplicable, but as soon as he came on the set suddenly the wheels of our well oiled machine fell off. Suddenly we just all weren’t communicating as well and confusion seemed to be setting in. We kicked off with doing the reshoots of the two shots we’d managed last time – Roberto walking down the lane and his close up as he spots Natasha, both of which went okay, though Roberto had a bizarre tendency to walk so far up the lane that we ended up with a ridiculously long shot as he approached, kicking stones, stopping to pick up things to throw, mooching around…and several takes of this seemed to take much longer than necessary.

I think my one breaking point, which I internalised on the day, was the 3rd shot of Roberto that we shot, which completely baffled me and cemented that I couldn’t possibly direct this person and expect him to listen to me. It was a close up of him as he approaches the car and required several simple steps – step into frame at your mark, say your line, listen to Tina, say your next line, step out of frame. Take 1 – steps into frame saying his line, steps out of frame saying his line. Take 2 a similar story. I didn’t know how to simplify it anymore. Possibly the worst aspect of this shot was also Roberto’s performance – his end line of “Lucky I came along, isn’t it?” was somehow turned into some supercamp query that felt more akin to Dr Evil putting his little finger to his lip than some gruff chancer who is attempting to put on the charm.

I know Anthony and I were struggling with some of the shots in trying to find a way to compose them and it felt like we were both failing at times to communicate as effectively as we had done in the past. We had a three shot of Natasha, Tina and Roberto all looking into the bonnet, where Chad almost manhandles Amelia shunting her closer to the bonnet. The look of annoyance on Natasha’s face as we shot this suggested that Roberto had suddenly taken a bit more of an interest in his role and put his hands much lower than she would have liked. Unfortunately for Natasha, after struggling with this shot in the edit we removed it, meaning she went though that for nothing.

Another performance faux pas came from Roberto as he got into the broken down car – before sidling back into the driver’s side, Roberto had to deliver the line “Just keep an eye on the amps and acutes, okay?” (another odd line, taken from the Roxy Music lyrics.) Roberto’s delivery was once again a mixture of am dram anger and high camp. I remember my eyes flicking over to see the expression on Terry’s face – a poker face expression, but his eyes couldn’t hide the horror at Roberto’s performance.

With two thirds of the film shot, everything was put back while I shifted my focus to our wedding and with us then in October after that the final third of filming would have to wait until spring 2009. But things would change before then.

As I'd said previously, I'd cast Andrew McDonald in the role of Dugald. However, I was massively determined to shoot all the film as much as possible in one block, and when I got in touch with him after the first weekend's filming he told me that he was booked for a touring play or something, so would not be able to do the filming date I had pencilled in. As a result, I had to let him go...the irony being that no doubt he would have been available by the time we got around to filming his scenes.

So this meant I had to find a new Dugald and luckily I found a great actor named Courtney Spence - we met at the Starbucks in Purley just off the A23 and he'd gone to the effort of dressing in a way he thought the character would. I liked Courtney immediately and liked his performance - the interpretation of Dugald was different to Andrew's – Andrew’s I felt was always with gravitas, a weathered man who had been eventually run down by his life, whereas Courtney's felt very much like a weak character, henpecked and bossed around by his wife, or his mum, or whoever. I think both interpretations were equally valid for the character. So Courtney was in, but of course I didn't end up filming with him for quite some time.

So at the beginning of 2009 I started making plans to lock down a filming date for the final section of the film and immediately ran into trouble with Roberto. I'd asked everyone when they were free and Courtney had immediately replied stating that May was completely out for him due to a prior commitment. What followed afterwards was an endless back and forth of trying to get an answer out of Roberto, as it turned out he was not available for most of April nor June, but could we do May? This despite constantly telling him that May was definitely out...

Due to the non availability of everyone, it seemed the only option was to shoot Roberto's shots separately with Dugald and Gwyneth shemps, then have a Chad shemp when we shot the other stuff. It was definitely not the way I wanted to do it, but there just was no other way. Roberto was resistant to this, even when I told him it was the only way (and would usually ask if we could film in May FOR THE UMPTEENTH TIME.) We had a certain date in mind to shoot Roberto's shots but he was very flakey getting back to me, resulting in him sending me an email which had this lovely bit to it...

"may i remind you that this project was supposed to be shot in 2007 and it is now mid 09 and we are still trying to wrap things up with one days filming..bearimng in mind that i am not local and live in another city not to mention that i have other things on at the moment and coming up."

Grrr...and his failure to commit to a date wasn't helping to wrap things up.

Out of desperation and anger at his snooty attitude, I drafted an email where I pretty much laid into him where I had been straight with communication all the way through and where he had been unhelpful and delayed the project. After reading it, Minda highly suggested that I rethink my approach, so I edited it down to a more "just the facts of where we are" email. Unfortunately it still had the threat of removing him from the film...I'd been thinking of how I could rid myself of him and his crappy performance and had the brainwave of animating over the top of him, so we could still use the precious footage I had but dub Roberto's dialogue performance out of the film. In my head, I saw it as Murdoc from Gorillaz, crossed with the animated Johnny Rotten from the Great Rock and Roll Swindle. A downside to all of this was of course finding an animator wanting to get involved for free and the amount of time it would take, delaying the final film by probably another two years. I know stylistically it would be jarring, but there was something I found quite strikingly interesting about the idea.

Terry also wondered if the film could exist with just the two other stories and without the Chad character, but I felt that would have not worked - the Amelia and Lorna storyline would have been strange without Chad "fixing" the car...and what would have caused the climax at the end of the Dugald/ Gwyneth storyline?

I can't remember what exactly happened next - looking at my email box, I did send several emails fighting my case and for why the organisation was difficult and I did send him an email stating that if we didn't hear from him we'd assume he wasn't interested in finishing the film...what happened after I don't know, as the next email I have from Roberto is him confirming a date and asking for the script again. Thank god.

So, it looks like after all of this we filmed on the final weekend of May - we decided to get together early afternoon and even though we only had 10 shots to do, with the usual Cassini delays expected to make it a longer shoot than necessary. It was an odd shoot, as we had Jenny filling in for the lines of dialogue from Gwyneth and Terry wearing the same jacket for Dugald and filling in those lines. I finally got to use my friend Paul's deckchairs, which I'd "borrowed" from him early the previous year, denying him them all across the summer!

To be fair, the delays we suffered weren't only down to Roberto - being such a glorious day meant that everyone and their dog was down Newhaven beach. We'd decided to film by the seawall, which I hoped would provide something visually dense but also would mean there would be less chance of people wandering past that way. Unfortunately we had to sit and wait while people left the frame in the background and someone had put a ladder down so people could get up on to the seawall, so we had a constant stream of people going up there...and the usual noise disruptions you would expect from this. I was nervous that none of this footage would fit together, especially the ice cream scuffle - trying to fudge a fight between two people when only one of them is there wasn't easy.

I tried to remain as upbeat as I could, indulging Roberto with some of his ludicrous suggestions - he wanted to walk away from Dugald and Gwyneth and raise his arms outstretched in some kind of messianic pose. I had no idea what the fuck he was thinking with that, but let him do it his way and my way for the sake of a quiet life.

Once we'd got the actual footage, we then had the job of getting Roberto to dub A LOT of his dialogue from the previous days - the issues we'd had with the microphones meant a lot had to be redone, including the end lines which Roberto had delivered with such disinterest the previous year. So we all camped out by the sea wall, Roberto with my iPod playing his lines of dialogue and John doing his best to record them while various background noise dragged out what should have been a simple task longer than I had hoped.

By the time we'd finished and packed up we were still hitting early evening - much later than I had wanted the shoot to go on for (but predicted accurately as always by Minda - she knows my shoots ALWAYS last longer than I hope.) I had massive doubts about what we had got, especially for the fight scene. But importantly Roberto's involvement with Stranded was finally over. Good riddance to bad rubbish.

So, the plan was to film two weeks later and at last the entire film would be in the can. But there was still plenty of space for another fly in the ointment...

I'd contacted everyone at the start of the year regarding the filming dates but conspicuously Barbara, who was cast to play Gwyneth, had not got back to me. As I'd been so busy with the shepherding of Roberto I hadn't given it much thought. But with Roberto out of the way I was now concerned that she had still not replied to any emails or texts regarding the film, so finally phoned her up. I think she was in the middle of cooking when I phoned...she told me that it was looking unlikely that she could do the filming as she was due to be cast in a play...a touring play...so she would be tied up for quite some time. After pressing her on this further, she started telling me things like "I think my creative juices for Stranded have dried up", dredging up a similar feeling to Roberto - Barbara had been cast way back in September 2007, had been privy to the organisational chaos from the group emails as I struggled to sort filming dates and I think she'd decided to wash her hands of the whole thing.

What bugs me so much about this is that she never got in touch with me to tell me she was bowing out, which she could have done at anytime, and the touring play was most likely made up to try and let me down gently...after all, why would you give reasons you can't do it, then give reasons you don't want to do it?

So, that was that - I'd now lost my actress. Greeeeeeeat.

Luckily, Courtney recommended his friend Jan Hargreaves to me so I got in touch with her and went up to audition her at her lovely flat in London. She was very proper, very friendly, very sweet and very dedicated to her craft. She played the part brilliantly and she was obviously suitable for the role. On a nice aside, she had never played opposite Courtney despite them being friends for many years, so it felt pleasing to put two friends together on screen.

Schedules and availability meant everything went back and back again, leaving me panicking that we wouldn't get it shot that summer...and the idea of the film dragging on ANOTHER year was too frightening to contemplate. I went back up to London where Jan and I helped sort out her costume - she had loads of clothes up in her attic so after a bit of back and forth we had a great costume which nicely cost nothing! It perfectly fitted the red theme that I wanted and she looked great.

After the pain of the year with Roberto and then having to recast Barbara, we thankfully commenced the final day of shooting Stranded on Saturday the 5th of September. After a bit of a late start I'm pretty sure we got down to the location to find Courtney and Jan had been there ahead of us...not very professional and I was worried about making a bad impression with them both. But it seemed like after all the misery I'd had arranging this film today everything was on our side - the beach was very quiet for the most part, the weather was glorious and the footage was looking great. Jan and Courtney were both fantastic and the shoot was going really well.

Debbie had a friend who ran an ice cream van and managed to come into the car park for us to film the scene with Courtney buying the ice creams, with the crew making up the extras queuing for ice cream. This was a pretty easy shoot, although it always seemed difficult to make ourselves heard over the noise of the ice cream van's engine. As I recall Gus and Terry busied themselves by eating lots of spare ice creams from each take...

We were pretty much ahead of ourselves and had a pretty lazy dinner for once. Anthony kept nudging me, telling me that we should really get a move on while the weather was good. With no clouds in the sky, I couldn't see what his problem was.

Half an hour later I was cursing myself for having not listened to Anthony. Suddenly the glorious blue skies had disappeared, replaced by an endless thick greyness which the sun could barely shine through. It also went cold, VERY COLD. It was such an unbelievable shift from just an hour before - we were all now wrapped up as best we could as a bitter wind took hold. Jan was already suffering from a chest infection and this sudden drop in temperature meant that we had to change the scene where we see her barefoot paddling in the sea, as she understandably wasn't prepared to do it. So we shot it more as if she was dancing on the edge of the shore. Anthony had a plan to shoot the scene as best he could and attempt to create a less greyed out image, creating a more brown sepia image...but it was still a staggering contrast to what we had shot earlier and worryingly nothing like the footage we had of Roberto. Anthony had a specific way in mind of shooting this scene, which meant fudging where the actors actually were and where they were looking in relation to the sea, which I remember caused confusion with all of us. I'd be in a similar situation with Anthony before when shooting The Crunch, but that had worked out fine, so I had faith in what he was proposing, even though the actors were struggling to grasp what he meant and tempers were fraying as the temperature dropped.

As Jan's coughing fits became more and more horrid to witness I found myself confused over whether to abandon the shoot - I didn't want to put her health at risk and put her in hospital with pneumonia. I remember having a discussion with Gus, Terry, Jenny and Anthony over what to do, as I knew the decision was mine, but I almost wished it wasn't. In the end Gus seemed to make the clearest point - if we did abandon the shoot, when would we reconvene? The answer to which was depressingly “Who knows?” and would have inevitably been the following year. Jenny also suggested that it should be up to Jan whether she wants to carry on and when asked she fantastically agreed to carry on, as long as we tried to hurry the shoot along as best we could.

With everyone focussed intensely on shooting the final scenes and a flurry of activity to make sure Jan was as comfortable as possible we cracked on, shooting the return to the deckchairs then finally reaching the ice cream scuffle. We saved the shot of the ice cream crushed in Courtney's face until last to save on redoing the make up, so did all the shots around that and then the final lines of dialogue between Dugald and Gwyneth. We filmed them leaving the beach, Courtney carrying the deckchairs under his arms. Jan went and sat inside a car to warm up while we shot the final shot of Courtney getting splattered with ice cream, (or more the fake ice creams – the ones Courtney carries are more tissue paper covered in squirty cream...with the one in his face being more just cream.) A messy final image to a messy, sticky production.

Despite the issues of the day I felt the shoot was a success and I was really happy with the way we all pulled together and worked together. Once again I was very proud of the crew that I'd built up around myself. I'm not sure, but I think I slept well that night.

Terry and I had been working on the edit during all this time - conveniently he worked up the road from where we were living at the time, so would pop down on his dinner hour when I was working from home and do a little bit each time. We wouldn't get that much done, by the time we'd taken off his walk there and back, quick cup of tea and natter etc but bit by bit we chipped away at scenes. This piecemeal approach was also bolstered by a few evenings dedicated to getting the edit done.

The edit had always been tough as viewing Roberto's performance back in the colder light of day made it seem even worse than it had felt during the shoot. Between takes his accent and approach would lurch dramatically. To keep our spirits up we would end up creasing up laughing and shouting at the screen at particular bad performance gems. So we took the decision to remove as much of his dialogue as possible, which in effect created a better performance by turning him into this mostly mute ignorant brute. It wasn't what I had set out to have and I was dismayed at losing some of the dialogue that I liked in the script, but I had to admit it was all for the improvement of the film.

It also became apparent that there was an issue with the first day's shoot - on the opening shot Anthony hadn't switched on the ground glass filter (which helped give the footage a filmic look) so this shot looked odd...and it later transpired that there was a smudge on the right of the lens, which resulted in some strange blooming and softening of the image whenever anyone was in focus in the right of the frame.

Cutting the dialogue and trying to get something which worked was a real challenge - we struggled with the final scene of Chad and Algy where Algy is placed back in the wheelchair as we found we were missing some movement, so in the end this was solved by going for a jump cut when Chad kicks the wheelchair back over.

There was one serendipitous moment during the scene where Chad is throwing stones - I dropped the footage down roughly without checking where the dialogue was for the scene and remarkably it seemed to fit really well, especially where Algy asks Chad if he loves it at the beach, which Chad now responds to with a disbelieving look. Much better than Roberto's original caveman NOAAA!

Editing Algy falling out of the wheelchair was difficult too - out of all the shots we had where Jamie falls towards the camera, Gus was visible on the left of frame in all but one of them. We also had a front shot of the wheelchair falling where Terry tipped Jamie up out of the chair, with a view to zoom cropping Terry out, but it was still obvious that someone was pushing him over. I think in retrospect the problem with this sequence is that the chair is never tipping in the full shots of Jamie reaching for the ruler, so the close ups of the wheel coming off the ground looking a bit odd.

The Amelia and Lorna footage was mostly easier to edit as we had consistent performances though in one wide shot which had to be used we saw that John's boom mic and shadow were in the frame. Looking back at the footage of this scene there perhaps wasn't as much coverage as I would have liked - the physicality’s of the location didn't give us that much room for manoeuvre and I think at times it can feel very static. As mentioned above, Debbie's almost crash was cut out of the film in the end anyway - it didn't make sense highlighting a particular car coming when other cars were passing them by and we really needed a couple more shots to make the sequence work - I think it really needed a shot from within the car, passing Lorna and seeing her look hopefully at the car. In the end we used a shot of Natasha that I think would have been before the sequence, but seemed to convey some restrained seething about the situation she was in.

Editing the Chad/ Amelia/ Lorna scenes was again a challenge - after putting up with being felt up by Roberto, the shot where he shunts her forward didn't make the cut - it felt awkward and was difficult to cut to the next shot. Roberto's performance when he sits in the car was as awful as it was on location, so we decided to cut to start the scene with them looking into the bonnet and Chad already in the car. Unfortunately we had to keep some dialogue, so Chad's line of "happy to help" had to stay, even though he sounded like a different person. We justified it to ourselves pretending that he was acting all different and "charming" around other people.

So we came to putting in the Dugald and Gwyneth pieces which was something to look forward to - up to this point the film felt like a frustrating sticker book where you have so many gaps and you can't get a feel of what it should actually be like. As with the Amelia and Lorna footage, editing these scenes were mostly straight forward though our concerns with the footage from when the weather turned were still prevalent. All we could do was edit it as it was and hope for the best when put together. There is an unintentional gag during the sandwich scene - Courtney ate his cheese and piccalli sandwich too quick and like a cheapskate ass I hadn't made any other spares, so he had to eat cheese and beetroot which is easy to spot on screen. But I justify it to myself thinking it could be interpreted as how ditzy Gwyneth is - she gives him the wrong sandwich and he's too polite to say anything.

The ice cream scuffle did of course give us headaches - looking back at the footage we realised again we were missing two or three shots of movement to get Chad out of the deckchair, approaching Dugald and make him fall over. I was also hoping that the shot of Chad approaching the Dugald shemp would have just been dirtied with a slight bit of Dugald’s shoulder, but Anthony had got all of Terry’s head and shoulders in...and zoom cropping didn’t solve this issue. We tried to ignore the shifting colour cast for now.

I don't know how many different versions of this we tried but none of them felt satisfactory. In the end again it fell to a jump cut as I tried to make a gag out of it - Dugald threatens, next instant he's got an ice cream shoved in his face. Thankfully I've come across other people who find this moment blackly funny. But even with this the scene felt like an absolute mess - I did want it to have some confused aspect to it, of Dugald lying on the floor spluttering, Gwyneth shouting out, Chad stomping off...but I don't think it comes across intentionally confused, it feels like an amateurish patchwork making the best of a bad job. (Which it was, in all fairness.) On an aside again to Roberto's performance and Terry's approach of watching everything, the first shot of Roberto in this scene where he rubs his nose, looking bored was actually before we shouted action, but felt much better than when he was actually acting...

There was also an issue with Courtney's accent in his final scene - suddenly he's going on about "not putting her in an 'ome" which seems weird after he's been so properly spoken. So let's pretend it's because he's dropping his guard (and his aitches) now he's being straight with his mum. Yeah? Anyone?

We put it all together and had a 24 minute cut of the film - considering the script was 23 pages I thought this wasn't too bad, but knew we had to cut more down. We'd also initially followed the structure of the script for the edit and now that was causing problems. My main issue was that Amelia and Lorna's storyline seemed to finish halfway through the film, which felt a bit odd. There were other issues with how some of the other scenes juxtaposed with each other...so we cut the final dialogue between Lorna and Amelia and for the gag factor placed it after the ice cream scene, so you have Chad being a thug followed by Lorna's "We can be grateful he came along." We also chopped Lorna's dialogue around when Chad is looking in the rear view mirror...which does sound odd, but seemed to help.

With some more snipping here and there we managed to get it down to the final cut of around 21 minutes. We locked this off in January 2010, which I can't remember if it was just after my first child Logan had been born or just in time before.

What followed was a much longer period than I expected - John was doing the sound mix, but inbetween work, teaching, jury service, World Cup, PC failures and learning ProTools (of which Stranded was going to be the test subject guinea pig.) It took much longer than I had hoped, especially as we weren't dealing with sound as bad as John had had to salvage when doing the sound mix for The Crunch. I was hoping he could have done the majority of it without me there and although he did a lot he did want me there a lot to go through stuff, which was difficult to arrange due to work and family commitments, so this would drag things out even longer.

We did have to get Jamie back in to ADR some of the beach dialogue as it was unusable - so he went into John's spare room with my iPod and went through the lines over and over. It took a bit longer than I had anticipated, but that was down to there being more dialogue that needed dubbing than I first thought. We also had to get Natasha back to dub just one line, which we didn't have the iPod for (it had broke in the meantime) so she had to watch the dialogue on John's PC then we dashed outside his front door and waited for a break in the traffic for Natasha to deliver her line. Typically the traffic didn't seem to want to stop but eventually we had the one line which John felt would fit. It didn't and he painstakingly broke the line down into individual word components to get the line to fit, but it was well worth it as suddenly a scene which felt jarring had true resonance.

Despite John's best efforts there were still sound effects alluding him, in particular he needed proper recordings of the wheel chair. Kevin, who had hired us the wheelchair for the shoot originally, seemed to have disappeared and so we racked our brains trying to think of a cheap way of getting hold of one. My old work colleague Peter Ward-Edwards suggested we try the Red Cross and luckily the Red Cross in Worthing had wheelchairs that they hired out. So, a quick drive to Worthing, drive to John's, push him up a mud track near his allotment, flick the brakes on and off, kick it over a few times, drive it back to Worthing, drop a fiver in the charity box and the job was a good 'un.

It was probably around October time when I went to John's and heard what was an "almost" complete sound mix. I sat there, listening intently to it all and was almost in tears by the end. At the start of the year when we'd finished the edit I was very disheartened about the film - frankly I felt it was a turkey, an absolute folly on par with a film I'd made many years ago and that I was finishing it just for those involved...but hearing John's sound mix, suddenly it felt like most of the seams were covered, that the film flowed rather than jarred and that it now had an audio atmosphere to match the wonderful visuals. Getting this sound mix coincided with some bad news from John regarding other projects, but I felt that John had in a sense saved one of my films again.

With the sound mix in theory in the final straight I now went looking for a musician. I hadn't wanted to start this process until I had the film in a state which showed it off in the best possible light and with this sound mix I felt it was ready. So I advertised on Shooting People, asking for links to melancholic, atmospheric music and was contacted by about 30 people. Due to other commitments it took me several weeks before I finally sat down, headphones on and listened to what people had to offer...some people certainly seemed to talk the talk, showing them stood in front of giant mixing desks, other people confused the issue by sending me links to Hollywood blockbusters which they had re-scored - I understand the theory but I found it a bit irritating. In typical fashion I had people send me a basic email with a link to their website, with no effort to highlight particular tracks which they felt were melancholic and might be of interest, leaving me to trawl through websites looking for something which might be relevant. There was also an awful lot of keyboard strings on tracks - it seemed that for a lot of people the idea of melancholic was to have these awful sounding synth strings. Piano was also unsurprisingly ubiquitous, but I was adamant that I wanted to avoid piano as the lead instrument as that felt like an obvious choice.

What probably wasn't an obvious choice was choosing a musician who only had two tracks on his showreel and which were both for animation. But there was something about Billy Payne's work that I liked immediately, with one of the main qualities was that it all felt like it was organic, with real instrumentation rather than based around synths, something which I felt was important for Stranded. So I got in touch, sent him the film and he was overjoyed to be asked as he was keen to have more than animation on his showreel. Brilliantly, we both seemed to be on the wavelength when it came to suggestions about the score - my comparisons to Bjork's Anchor Song, the work of Talk Talk and Mark Hollis and something that felt "coastal" all seemed to find a home with Billy. I gave him a deadline of late November to have the score to me as I wanted to have the film to show at the last Son Of Movie Bar, the film night I ran in Brighton with Terry. Billy assured me this deadline wouldn't be an issue as he was about to quit his job and concentrate full time on composing.

Over the coming weeks Billy would send me sketches and drafts of tracks to be used, stings for the end of scenes - he said he'd been watching Mike Leigh films to see how they were scored, which felt positive - and each time I'd badly synch up a quicktime file with iTunes on my laptop (as my Mac was bust at the time) to get a feel for the music he'd written. Billy eventually delivered the score on time and think he did a wonderful job - the opening theme, with the clarinet, felt perfectly melancholic and downtrodden for the film.

So the score was in the bag, John was still tidying up the sound mix...and only other aspect which had been a difficulty throughout the year was the grading of the film. I had always hoped Anthony would grade it - he is always keen to grade work he has shot and had even done a grading test of footage from the second shoot over two years previously. But when I initially started chasing up the grade with him at the start of the year he was suddenly very busy. Annoyingly there was one period where he admitted he could have got it done, but had completely forgotten about the grade. He was then booked up with work which meant the very earliest he would have been able to do it was at the end of the year. I did want him to grade the film, but I was clear that this film HAD to be finished in 2010 as I couldn't face it going on into another year (ah, wait for the irony again.)

So I asked Terry if he would be up for doing the grade and he was. Terry was already keen to have a go at correcting the overcast shots from the final shoot - he felt he'd be able to keyframe the sky back in as well as sorting out the sky on some other shots and removing John's boom mic and shadow. Unfortunately we had real trouble getting the footage from my Mac to his PC - no matter which way we tried it nothing would work, which seems to be a symptom of HD footage on Final Cut Pro. This kept delaying this work throughout the year as no one could provide a solution, and Terry didn't want to rip the footage from a dvd movie as there would be a loss of quality. My Mac breaking towards the end of the year didn't help matters.

Terry had been involved in a film where he met a DOP called Darren Berry, who I got to meet at Son Of Movie Bar one night. We got on well and he said he could probably find a solution to our problem with this footage. Eventually I was able to get my Mac repaired and tried to follow Darren's advice until it seemed my Final Cut 5 didn't have a particular output which his did, so I took him the Stranded file to help extract the footage for Terry. In the end Darren's solution had to be to export an uncompressed file of the film, which was over 100gb, onto an external drive for Terry. With both their other commitments it took several weeks before Terry had the footage...and by this point we were in the final quarter of the year.

Terry admitted he was working in unknown territory for himself as he'd never attempted anything like this before. He did some test footage which he sent to me and although there were some issues I think on the whole it was an improvement over the footage we had - as it stood the footage looked brown, sepia tinted...but Terry managed to put a hint of blue back into it which made it feel at least a touch more consistent with the rest of the film, even though the scenes still stuck out as looking differently.

However, it became apparent that Terry wouldn't have his footage ready for the December screening, which I was determined to do even if it was just a preview screening of an almost complete film. The run up to the screening was fraught - I'd been struggling to get my external hard drive back from an editor who was involved in another film I'd just shot (that's a whole different kettle of fish) as I couldn't do the titles for Stranded without it and I felt that any showing needed to have the titles at the beginning and end. I managed to get it back but upon receiving my repaired Mac I had issues with the software I had lost, which impacted on getting the titles done. Luckily they were sorted in time for the screening.

John sent me his near to finished sound mix with Billy's score - John said he still wanted to add some wheelchair squeaks and do some panning split, but apart from that it was done. However, John had done this without me being there and had decided to remove the vast majority of Billy's score, leaving only the beginning and end and the ice cream scuffle with any music, apart from some stings at the end of the scenes. I had admitted to John that it was a lack of confidence in myself that pushes me to put more music in a film than is maybe necessary, but I felt John had gone too far the other way. I really felt the score helped the film to work emotionally. So for the screening I put Billy's score back into the film, layered on top of John's sound mix, which did cause some skewed moments where the stings and music rubbed against each other, but it was the best I could do in the time frame.

After all of this typical last minute work it looked like the screening wasn't going to happen anyway - no matter how much I tried, the film would not export out of FCP for me to burn to a dvd. It took around 8 hours for the film to export, only to find an error message at the very end of that time and despite my best efforts over the weekend, trying different settings, attempting to run a low quality versions out nothing seemed to be working. After doing some research it seemed that the error message I was getting was quite possibly due to a corrupt render file and one possible solution was to copy the whole project into a new project and re-render it, then export it...but doing this 16 hour job, with time also needed to burn the film to dvd meant that even if it did work I would probably miss the screening anyway. It was very stressful and dismaying that after all this work I wouldn't get it shown.

Anthony turned out to be the saviour as he was coming along to the final Son Of Movie Bar and he suggested that he would bring his Mac book and we could run it off the hard drive. I had to hope and pray that there would be no issues with the output to the video projector and luckily there weren't. Unfortunately there were many issues with the screening - as the hard drive was missing render files it meant that Anthony had to run it in safe mode, which meant the film juttered and stopped completely on more than 3 occasions, causing us to faff around to get the film going again. Most galling, after all that effort, was that Billy's sound file was sat on my desktop and was never saved to my external drive, so the whole score was never there for this screening anyway.

Despite the haphazard nature of the screening, the film got a very fine round of applause and I got some very positive feedback afterwards, some people saying it was the best thing I'd done and that this could be the one which could help secure me funding for films in the future (a sentiment that Terry had expressed several months previously once John's sound mix was in place.)

(Several weeks later I would see Gus and he told me he thought the screening was brilliantly apt - a bit of a disaster with best intentions only just kept together and seemed to be a perfect summation of trying to make this film.)

With Christmas heading towards us everything went quiet on the film until the New Year...John's work commitments meant that it became increasingly difficult to get hold of him to do the final bit of work that needed doing, nor did he want to do it without me being there. With Anthony once again booked up with work until late May I had to look elsewhere again for the grade - Terry was unsure of what exactly I wanted with the grade, so expressed a view of only doing the colour correction work. Darren had shot a recent short for me and was going to be grading that, so I asked him if he'd be willing to have a ganders at Stranded just to help bolster the image that we had.

It took until around March when John and I were finally able to get together and sort out the final mix, which in itself felt a momentous occasion. In the meantime Darren had received the film footage and had started work on the grade but Terry was still struggling with the colour correction. He was also working on the shot to remove John’s boom mic and shadow but even once that was done he had trouble getting the footage exported out to Darren – more issues of PCs and Macs not talking. Eventually Darren received it all, but told me he wasn’t too sure how well it worked and would have a go himself...

With various work commitments, the grade continued to drag its feet until I saw a couple of film competitions I wanted to enter Stranded into, in particular the Aesthetica competition – with a mid June deadline, I managed to push Darren to complete the film just in time for this date.
Unfortunately Darren was unable to perform miracles on the colour correction footage – he had removed the brown, sepia tinge to the footage but there was nothing he could do about the lack of sky. His attempts with the ice scuffle scene were a bit more successful – never quite creating a complete colour match, but at least felt a bit richer compared to the original image. Another issue he had discovered was that the smudge on the lens from the first day’s shoot turned out to be more like a flaw on the lens as it was on all the other footage to, but to a lesser degree, and as a result worked really hard on trying to balance as best he could the left and right sides of the frame. On a more positive note, the boom and shadow shot was completely sorted – I couldn’t tell for the life of me where it had been.

Darren also uploaded the film to the Faster Productions Vimeo page while I awaited the hard drive back to burn the dvds and once this was done I sent an email out to everyone involved so they could finally see what they had worked on.

And that was that. Almost 5 years since it was written, almost 4 years since I started casting it...the second film to get me back into film making was enough stress at times to put me off film making again for another 5 years.

I’m writing this just several hours after it being uploaded to Vimeo – Minda and I sat and watched it together, enjoyably we’d reached the point with this film where we could mock aspects of the film and the characters, which felt fun.

It’s probably too soon to really evaluate the successes and failures of the film, There are technical issues which grate – the lens smudge/ flaw which tinkers with the image and there’s quite a bit of lip flap in the last scene where the sound wasn’t fitted properly, I still really don’t like the sound effect for the car starting (or failing to start) – it sounds very much straight from a cd, compared to the other foley work that John did. The shift in colour temperature in the shots towards the end with Gwyneth and Dugald are really unfortunate, but were beyond my control unless I’d had the conviction to attempt yet another day’s shoot. I wished we’d had more coverage of certain scenes, I wished Courtney didn’t say “Put you in that ‘ome” at the end, as that dropped H really bugs me...as does his line fluff with the photograph. Above all else I guess I’m still annoyed with Roberto’s performance – I think the performance we created in the edit was massively beneficial, but I wish we could have removed even more dialogue from his dreadfully camp accent. The fight scene at the end is still an uncomfortable mess which makes me wince. Also, it struck me tonight where some shots and scenes could have easily been tightened up and shaved of a few seconds – something which has only come to me nearly 18 months after locking down the edit. Ah well.

But on the positive sides, I genuinely feel like it has a real mood and atmosphere to it. Billy’s score is great for the most part (not so when Algy falls out of the chair, where it doesn’t have any tension building, I really don’t know how I missed that at the time) and really sets the film up. Apart from those shots on the beach, I think the film generally looks very special – the colours of the clothes look vibrant, the sky is a glorious deep blue in places and the locations and backdrops have a life of their own too, which was a really important element to me. I think generally, despite Roberto’s dreadful moments, that the acting is pretty good and in the case of Jan I think exceptional. It was a very difficult edit, but I really feel I learnt a lot editing with Terry and it was fun coming up with creative solutions to the issues we were having. I’m still hoping it will be the one which will take my filmic career even up a tiny notch and looking at it now I really think it has that potential.

And now, in keeping with the end of the film, I’ll put on my most campest flim flam voice I’ll end this making of by telling myself to shut the fuck up.

Different joke, same fucking punchline: The post-production of Creak

2011-10-04T13:22:00.000-07:00

Ah yes, here we are, almost a year since the shoot of Creak, a year since the planned super quick post production to show the film at the Halloween Son Of Movie Bar...then the last Son Of Movie Bar...then...then...then...

So much for the plan of not having a long post production period...

This episode began the night after the Creak shoot - Sheila phoned me and asked if I'd be interested in her partner Dave editing the film. Dave was a professional editor, done lots of TV, made his living editing but is also a film maker in his own right, having been involved in a high profile feature film earlier in the year. So the answer was hell yeah! As I was concerned about myself having the time to hit the deadline, having someone full time working on it should guarantee it being done on time.

Darren naturally had all the footage on my hard drive at his house in Brighton, which was about 10 minutes walk from Dave and Sheila's. I tried to get them both liaising to pass the footage on, to save me facing cross Brighton traffic and a 20 mile round trip but things still seemed slow getting the footage to Dave. Dave asked me to transfer the DAT audio to wav or aiff and get that to him. 22nd of October - "Deadline easy." Cool.

I was still a bit confused about how much or how little he would be prepared to do on the film - was he to grade it or would we need time to wing it back to Darren? Would he do a basic sound mix as he went along? I also needed time to get the film to my friend Paul to do the music...

Dave said "Can do as much or as little as ya like - I never cut without sound though...I get four weeks for an hour of exec approved drama usually so ten minutes is doable quickly and I can upload cuts for you to have a squiz at."

2 days later I was still unsure if Dave had the video footage, but I put the sound files into Dropbox for him and sent them over...

The next day I sent another text, checking that he had everything he needed and asked him to copy Paul in on any edits so he could start doing music for the film.

No reply...so the following day another text asking how it's going, then having to check an email address as Nick couldn't get the title sequence to him. Thankfully I get a different email address.

The next day I get a text telling me he's sent me an email - "small warning it's a bit frank mainly just about efficiency given the tight deadline." So I read the email, which I initially take to heart - he tells me how the clapper isn't in shot sometimes for the clap (which I had been concerned about during the shoot), the loudness of the clapper, the inadequate haphazard slating system...I do accept it was friendly advice, but I always presumed myself (and hopefully Terry) would be editing it, so the fact that the clapper was a shit show wasn't a massive issue, as we were there on the day and knew what we had. He was also concerned about the DAT sound not synching up correctly and it being very hissy, so asked for the source DAT tape so he could take a look at it. All in all, the messy production end was making headaches for him. He'd also just been doing some crazy long shifts on editing jobs, which was a surprise as I'd been told that he had no work lined up and could concentrate on Creak.

2 days later, now the 1st of November and a catch up text asking how things are. No reply.

Scuttle sideways to the 6th of November - still heard nothing back, infomr him I've forwarded some sound bits. Ask how the edit is coming along, whether the DAT was ny better...and any idea when I'll get to see anything?

9th of November - let him know I've sent some more sound stuff. Ask how things are going...

The next day I ask him if anything in particular is holding it up, not sure if he's up to his neck with other things...and say I'm just getting cranky in case it misses the final Son Of Movie Bar.

I get a reply the next day saying he'll call me tonight.

But it's the next night...

So Dave is having some trouble, big trouble involving legal issues over the feature film he was involved in, massive financial implications for him and his company - shit show all round due to someone in the production being useless. He basically has bigger fish to fry and I completely understand that he has to take any paying work to make up the financial shortfall over this idiot. I realise that the titles for Stranded are still on that hard drive that he has, so I need it back to have a version of Stranded to show at the final Son Of Movie Bar. I ask if finishing the film for the end of November is unfeasible...and that I look forward to seeing a cut.

17th I drop a quick text enquiring whether there is a cut of some description, as I was seeing Sara that night and wanted to give her some feedback.

22nd and I get a reply telling me to come over and get the hard drive that night. Tells me I'll see a cut this weekend, but film madness and his daughter needing a trip to hospital have understandably affected his communications back to me.

I went over that night and surprised Sheila when I knocked at the door. We chit chatted for a bit...then as it didn't seem forthcoming I asked if Dave was in. No, he was still in London and Sheila didn't know anything about a hard drive. While I was wondering if I'd made the journey for nothing she called Dave, who was on the train and audibly swore at forgetting about me coming round. Luckily the hard drive was there.

28th of November I bit the bullet and send a text saying I'm going to take over and try to do a cut of Creak so I have to something to show the following Tuesday. I state I was really looking forward to collaborating, but the reality is that he has much more important matters than my daft disposable film, so no hard feelings and hopefully we can work together again in the future. I also enquire about the DAT tape and its whereabouts.

So despite saying forget about it, I get an odd text the next day - "So Tuesday the 7th? That's what I thought. That's cool. I'll have a cut before that." Then it turns out Sheila has been ill (she was feeling rough when I saw her several nights ago) but tells me "so best you do a versaion as well as me for sure"

???

The oddest thing was to come next - "BTW it's important to me that Sheila signs off on any cut that's made public as she is in line for future stuff that we need to consider someone viewing by idle search (maybe alter her name etc.)"

Which was weird. I'd always been straight with Sheila over the production values/ level of the film and that it was supposed to be a bit of fun. So I sent a bit of an epic reply as I was still confused about where he felt he stood and what completeness his cut was going to be...

"Hi Dave. Bit confused and concerned so got a lot of questions - if you do get a cut done for next Tuesday when will I be able to see it? How soon will I knwo to let cast and crew know it is definitely screening? Is it supposed to be the final cut or just a cut? Is it realistically going to have time to go back to the composer? Have you used any of his bits that I forward by email? Does it need anymore music aspects? Have you contacted Nick about the titles? Have you approved the credit I've give you?

I think I've always been very celar with Sheila regarding what to expect from the film, it was always supposed to be just a bit of fun. Her performance was great, so even if the film came out as garbage she would still be shown in a strong light, so this talk of signing the film off seems to have come out of nowhere. If she is that concerned about the quality of the final film I don't mind if she wants to go under a pseudonym. I just want to see the film finished and as I haven't seen any of the film it feels like I'm the one in the dark, so I can't answer if you have concerns of her appearing in something of such low quality.

I will work on my own cut as a back up which may not be ready for next Tuesday. When we spoke before on the night of the last Movie Bar you had said something would have been ready if you hadn't been so ill as you had only needed one more day. Was this version scrapped because having the DAT provided you with better sound?"

I added again that I was sympathetic to all the legal crap and family illness he'd been going through.

3rd of December - snow is causing havoc in the UK. I text Dave again asking if something will be showing at Son Of Movie Bar as Sara needs to book a baby sitter.

5th of December - once again ask for confirmation immediately if a version will be showing as Terry and I wanted to publish the final line up. He replies telling me he won't know until tonight - then asks "Aren't you doing a version fella?" As the internal hard drive of my Mac had failed I hadn't been able to do an edit and my priority was on getting Stranded ready to screen.

6th of December - two texts sent asking for any last minute news. No reply at all.

18th of December I ask about the whereabouts of the DAT tape...and also ask if Dave and Sheila will be joining us for our usual pre Christmas mulled wine extravaganza...

27th of December I once again chase up the DAT tape, stating I really want to get Creak finished as early as possible in the New Year. I get a reply back saying he's still in legal shitsville - planning to retrieve the tape from London this week, unless I fancied the trip up there...not really, and suggest that his people in London just whack it in a jiffy bag to me...

3rd of January, say I'll be in the vicinity of their house today and could swing by and get the DAT tape if it's there?

9th of January - still chasing the DAT tape, get a reply back saying he'll have it on Tuesday. I ask if it'll be there on the Wednesday morning as I can get it then?

12th of January - ask about Wednesday again, told they are both out early as Sheila has gone back to college. He tells me he'll get her to text me. She doesn't.

14th of January I ask if he's around this weekend and try to meet up to get this tape.

Luckily I finally did meet Sheila on the 19th and get the tape back.

The sad thing about all of this faff was that Sheila sent me a text saying that Dave was really excited about working on it. For sure I'm sure all the legal headaches got in the way, but I'd just got cheesed off with the lack of just a simple text back letting me know what was (and wasn't) happening.

Off of the back of all the talk about "final cut approval" I'd got myself into a stupid paranoid mess and was convinced they thought the film was SO bad that they figured the best thing to do would be to withhold the footage and make it as difficult as possible for me. I'm sure it wasn't anything like this, but that's where all this to-ing and fro-ing got my brain thinking. My brain is a strange place. If you visit it, there are odd flitting shadows flying over white walls just out of the corners of your eyes.

The other sad thing was that I'd rekindled my friendship with Sheila over the previous years, we;d been to their kids birthday parties, Dave had been very supportive of our film efforts for myself and Terry, showing us his studio space in the heart of Brighton...and I think that they're sorta embarrassed by this whole thing, or embarrassed about the film, or something...as I've barely heard anything from them all year. I told them when Stranded was online as I'd like them to see it, I kept them informed of Creak to which I had no replies. Sad. I mean, I was hacked off at the time, but it feels it's business, not personal. I've kept the door open, but they seem to have forgotten where we live.

So, the edit came down to Terry and I. Hilariously, it took us about 3 nights, working a few hours at a time, to have an edit assembled together, which did make all of the wait for Dave's cuts look a bit strange. But putting it together wasn't that joyful - it just felt that it didn't work. Putting Paul's fun synth noises and string aspects together made a difference, but it just didn't have that creeping dread I wanted. The Pioneer felt too static and one inexplicable moment which I loved, where we see the Pioneer at the bottom of the stairs, then somehow being upstairs just behind Sara, had to be removed at the movement was far too human like and just not odd enough. And as Toby was coming down the stairs it wasn't possible for him to try and walk backwards (plus we had Sara in the same shot)

I also realised the end scream of Sara was too short and not very dramatic - she really needed to be screaming in slow motion or something for the creak to work, as all the screams were just too short.

It was a struggle, but I had to keep telling myself that I'd always planned this to be disposable - if it didn't work, don't worry, just move on. So after some tweaks that I did on my own, I decided that this was the final cut at around 5 minutes long.

I passed this back to Darren for him to grade and I went looking for a sound designer. I advertised on Shooting People, pushing the need for a quality sound designer to help bring the horror to the fore. I had 3 people whose work I really liked, all very keen and went with a guy called Justin.

Everything seemed fine on the emails with him and he was promising the sound mix pretty swiftly, which was good as Darren had said the grade shouldn't take too long. And Justin was quite accurate, he didn't take long. Because it seemed like he didn't do much at all.

He had already re-iterated what Dave had said regarding the audio, that there was some very strong hiss which was causing some real issues and there wasn't much he could do about that. But the sound mix he sent me didn't seem to have anything of any foley added to it, and if anything a horror film is really created by the sound design - wasn't that what my advert originally said?

The reason he hadn't done any of this was, simply, that it was too much work for an expenses only gig. Oh. I thought it had always been clear what I wanted and what to expect. What I didn't expect was a whole new soundtrack. Justin informed me that my soundtrack was, frankly, "not very good" so took it upon himself to record me a new score. Now, this is very generous, beyond the call of duty, but I really would have preferred him to have done the foley stuff instead of this. And I can see that some people may see Paul's music as being a bit basic, or a bit odd, but I really liked the John Carpenter/ Delia Derbyshire synthoid squelch about it. But, to be fair, I did give Justin's music a try and it felt far too generic, too I AM A HORROR FILM SCORE. I watched it with Justin's music and with Paul's music and the latter was simply better. Frankly.

So after a little bit back and forth and telling him that I wanted a sound mix with Paul's stuff and without, as a back up, he finally sent me that probably to get rid of me...

I still don't really know what to do with something like this etiquette wise. Yep, Justin did give his time for free and I understand the DAT wasn't very clear. But should I have gone back to one of those other two original sound designers and asked them to have a go? If I did that, would the credit be shared? Or if nothing remained of Justin's work, why credit him at all? If this was a paid gig, I think it would be much easier, but when it's expenses only...well, I just don't know. Perhaps I should have had the balls to just go and find someone else, to help MY film that I've already invested time and money in, but I guess I chickened out. Maybe they would have had the same problems as Justin and I would have ended up with a similar result.

That was at the end of March...it's not THAT long ago, but I can't figure out why things took so long now. I know I was pushing Darren to concentrate on Stranded more, as that was the film I was most keen to get done so that definitely took the focus off of Creak.

A version was finished and up at the end of May which I passed on to Sheila for her final credit approval. Or disapproval. She came back to me and said she wanted to be credited as Sheila Stout. Yes, Sheila isn't her name. In fact, Sheila isn't the first pseudonym she gave me. I'm guessing Sheila was so impressed by Creak that she didn't even deem it worthy of her proper pseudonym. I never understood this pseudonym thing - it was never going to be put on Youtube as CREAK STARRING SHEILA STOUT, the credits would have probably only been on something like Shooting People, so I can't imagine that many people randomly coming across it. And as I said to Dave (also not his real name) her performance is good, so at least that aspect isn't anything to be embarrassed about. Oh well.

Again, I don't know where the next few months went - when Darren and I looked at the film we were both taken back by how ugly a particular shot in the lounge was, where the free standing lamp in Jim's lounge severs the frame into a 1/3rd and 2/3rds..neither of us could understand how we hadn't noticed it at the time. Darren was determined to fix this and spent ages trying to chroma it out to match the dark blue of the curtain, but after much effort the overspill of Sheila's out of focus hair made it an impossible task. He added a filter to help remove the grain from the darkest of shots too.

As he wanted to practive using sound studio software he asked if he could have a go at the sound mix too, which I was happy to let him have a go at.

In the meantime Nick had sent me a finished Sincerely, Psychopath ident which was great but there were some changes I wanted. Unfortunately, due to work commitments this still isn't done.

With the film pretty much done I asked Chris Regan, who had taken over the running of Movie Bar, if he'd be up for showing it. There was a desire to leave it for the Halloween screening, but I was concerned that the start of November would be getting closer to the birth of our 2nd child, so requested an October screening.

Will I ever learn not to book a frigging screening or premiere until I have a copy of the finished disc in my hands? Darren's focus was understandably elsewhere as he was having to pack up and move back home and I think we were both hanging on just another week, maybe another week in case Nick did finish the ident on time. Once Nick told me that it wasn't happening, I told Darren just export the film as it stood.

Nothing like leaving it close to the wire - he wasn't going to have the time to upload the film to Vimeo upfront, so I'd be getting the dvd on the afternoon of the screening, meaning Chris wouldn't have checked the film upfront...and possibly neither would I! Then around mid afternoon Darren contacted me with some bad news - I was assuming the disc had been burnt over the weekend, but it wasn't...and he'd just had a massive hard drive failure. He'd been able to reassemble most of the film, but only had the original titles with Sheila's original name on it. Due to the specifics of not wanting to be credited under her real name, I was reluctant to show the film with the wrong name. There was a chance the screening would have to be cancelled.

Luckily Nick still had the file to hand and managed to Dropbox it over to Darren...but then my plan of picking up the dvd late afternoon had to be abandoned due to a prior commitment. In the end we picked up the dvd from Darren's house from his housemate about 20 minutes before the screening.

Sara, Toby and Nick managed to make it along to the screening, which I was really chuffed about. Brilliantly the film was missing the Faster Productions ident and fo some reason the opening exterior shot of the house...not a great start.

I realised earlier that day that I probably hadn't watched the film in nearly half a year, so it was weird coming to it again. I sat there thinking it doesn't work and then the woman sat in front of us jumped at the Pioneer's kitchen reveal. As Paul had said he'd jumped at that bit when doing the music, it felt like maybe that was a succesful scare.

Despite my feelings about the film, the screening went well with several other people admitting they jumped at that moment. Chris and several others felt that I really should submit it to horror festivals, when I wasn't too sure...maybe I will.

Looking at it, I don't think it works, and for a fundamental reason which my wife spotted earlier on - the protagonist isn't scared, so neither are we. At least Sara joins Sheila halfway through the film, unlike the awful film I saw on Shooting People where it's just the man who isn't scared searching the house, but really it should have been Sheila refusing to get out of bed and making Sara the one who is already shaking with nerves and searches the house. Another reason I think it doesn't work is that I think it must be very hard to get a creeping sense of dread into a short horror - you need empathy with characters and I think it needs a slow burn build, something you don't have the running time for with a short film. It's possible to do a disturbing horror short, or a gorey repulsive one...but creepy? Maybe I'm wrong. I can also see why they say horror and comedy are the hardest genres to edit, as it's very hard to remain objective in the edit and be able to tell if something is actually working to scare the audience.

One great thing is that the screening really seems to have energised me, I've been thinking of the other Sincerely, Psychopath films and I'm now very keen to make those become a reality. Thank you Creak.

Where It's At: Part 14b

2011-10-04T12:57:00.000-07:00

So I've just noticed it's been about 10 months since I've written anything on this blog.

Blimey.

It's been a frustratingly slow year in places. Two planned shoots have fallen through - the first, for the 2nd Sincerely, Psychopath film was due to take place around June time...but after meeting with the actress who was super keen with the role, I decided I didn't want to be buried prepping another film when both Stranded and Creak were lying annoyingly unfinished...so that was postponed as I concentrated my efforts on getting those two finished.

Unfortunately Stranded took much longer than expected - after its hilariously bad piecemeal preview screening fuck up at the final Son Of Movie Bar, I had hoped it would have only taken another couple of months before it was done. Not so. Getting the final sound mix out of John took longer than expected, due to our constant logistical nightmares to see each other...and on one stupid occasion I made it over to his flat only to presume I had brought the wrong music edit over and went home with my tail between my legs...only to discover later that it WAS the right sound file. Sheesh.

And then after all that there was some lip flap at the end of the film which I had never really picked up on but should have done and asked John to try to fix as best he could...

The grade also proved to be problematic for Darren and Terry - Terry's efforts to fix the overcast aspect of one day's shoot didn't work out. Darren told me there just wasn't enough information there to save, so did his best with it and to try to match the footage with the ice cream scuffle. He did his best, but it's still noticeable. What can you do?

So with all of this, it was June when I finally had a completely finished copy of the film, I think almost 4 years since I started casting it. It's been sent to about 15 film festivals, had a few knock backs already...we'll see...

With a desire to at least shoot something this year, I turned my attention to Pick-Ups, an idea I'd originally had to shoot with Mark in Copenhagen as a daft one day affair. I described the idea to Terry while we were editing Stranded and he seemed to really like it. So I quickly wrote a draft of it, intending it to be a 3 minute film and, like Creak, a "disposable" one day shoot. Slowly pieces came together but then to cut a long story short there was a change of lead actor, who then fractured his ankle, and with the birth of my 2nd child looming closer I was reluctant to recast and shoot closer to the due date. So that one was been postponed until the New Year, meaning I won't have shot anything new this year...:(

Goodnight, Halloween will hopefully be moving forwards - the footage has now been passed to Mark Tew, quality film maker and all round nice chap who lives in Worthing. After a delay for him to get some super snazzy computer to handle the heavy load of the HD footage and the usual bloody Mac/ PC driver shenanigans getting hard drives and footage to show, then downloading updates etc he's finally got the stuff. He's just shot a fun short called "House Trafalgar" that I featured in as an extra and he's planning on editing them both in parallel, taking a break from one to look afresh at the other. It's still a long way off, I reckon the middle of next year at the earliest, but good to know it's moving forwards and with someone who is a strong editor and can cast a real critical eye over the footage and film.

Gettin' Some has finally had some movement, after starting the year with a full head of steam that slowly dissipated. I was probably slower than I should have been with Mark and I watching the last cut of the film together while discussing it over Skype, but eventually we got through it. I recently went back to it, got the film down to 65 minutes, watched that and went back to it removing more footage and putting some back in, some which had been removed since my original assembly edit. It's still around the 60-65 minute mark, but I think if I tidy the titles I might be able to hit the magic 60. It mostly shifts along with some pace now although the edit has finally opened my eyes to the fundamental flaws in the film. The ending also feels a bit messier than the mess it originally was, as if the film just stops...but it doesn't feel like there's a great deal of leeway of what to do about that.

As a result of this edit my episodic plan has had to go out of the window - one for timelines, but most importantly due to the change of running times for each episode - one episode in particular has gone from around 12 minutes down to 5. It probably makes more sense to just get it out there as an hour long film. So I've got a bit of a plan on the back burner for a Winter premiere onine.

So the only other incomplete project is Creak...which was finally premiered last night. But that's for a different post.

The past untethered (at last)*

2011-01-31T14:43:00.000-08:00

Nick Gripton's wonderful dynamic poster image - Gettin' Some has a face at last!

*Almost...

The end of November was a hectic time for me as I desperately tried to get a version of Stranded together for the final Son Of Movie Bar. It was after getting the almost final sound mix of the film that John, the sound designer, told me that he was no longer going to be able to do the sound mix on my feature film "Gettin' Some" - as paid work had dried up for him, he was going to concentrate all his efforts on a radio drama that he'd been wanting to make for quite some time. He did offer me the work he had started on the first 7 minute segment of the film, in the hope that I could maybe find someone else to take over the project.

I couldn't blame John - he'd had a nightmare of a time saving the sound for The Crunch and Stranded had taken him much longer than I think he'd hoped...all in all he'd put in many hours of work on my films for free and I'd probably run out of favour for now.

So, during the drive home from John's flat I brought myself to a sad decision - that was it as far as I was concerned with "Gettin' Some." Having been through 3 sound designers over a period of 6 years, all who had either given me mixed results or eventually pulled out of the project I just couldn't muster the energy or enthusiasm to go through the whole sorry charade again...and with each passing year, the technical deficencies in the sound and picture of the film become wider as modern technology advances.

I decided that I would have a go at adding the foley into the film and with the help of some online tutorials attempt to add some effects where necessary to the audio. And then I would finally release the film online episodically, as I had been planning for several years.

As much as I was feeling a heavy sigh of relief at coming to this decision, I also felt deeply saddened and upset. I'd been carrying on with this film for over ten years and had never given up on it and coming to this decision felt in some way that I'd been beaten. Much that I can kick myself for giving up, many people had always been surprised that I had been battling on with the film for such a long time frame and I think 10 years is a pretty respectable chunk of my life committed to a film. It was a realistic way of looking at the situation, but didn't make me much happier.

However, I did regain some enthusiasm when I had the realisation that for the first time since completing the edit there was no longer a locked down version of the film. I'd finished the edit of the film over 6 years ago and since then there had always been a sound designer or grader somewhere beavering away on it (or not, as is most likely) which meant I couldn't go back and tinker with any of the edit. But now was a chance to try and put some of the knowledge I'd gained in the meantime back into the film.

It also gave me a chance to right a wrong involving my original edit - I'd never asked Mark, my best friend who lived on my bedroom floor for a year to shoot the film, his opinion and input into the edit, a decision which he has been upset about. Now I could go back to him and we could look at the current edit, look for any possible edit decisions (within the limited range of footage I could still use) and freshen up the film, hopefully helping the pacing of it at the same time.

This sudden burst of renewed energy for the film also coincided with Nick Gripton (once again, super talent alert at http://www.nickgripton.com/) supplying me with a poster for the film, something he'd been waiting to get around to doing for over a year. I'd always expected some kinda indie schmindie type poster for the film, reflecting it's ragged roots, but Nick came up with a super slick dynamic looking poster with the thinking that the slicker it looks, hopefully the more people will want to check the film out.

I'd been waiting on a poster image for so long - I was keen to start a Facebook group dedicated to the film but didn't want to do so without having some identity for the film. With Nick's poster I was able to do that and then went scurrying into the woodwork attempting to contact as many people as possible who were involved with the film, pointing them to the Facebook group as their primary source of contact and information on the film.

With Mark being in Denmark the logistics of us getting together to discuss the edit weren't that simple, but we managed to arrane a Skype conversation and went through the first 35 minutes of the film. At times this was a painful process, as it was still hard for me to hear what was best for the film, though not best for me and my sentimentality for the film...

I've yet to put these editing thoughts into practice, having once again got bogged down in Stranded and Creak's post production (another farcical turn of events which is finally back under some degree of control) but my current hope is to have the first 7 minute episode of the film up online around April time, with the rest following monthly afterwards.

After all this time I'm still proud of the film - regardless of the technical issues I've always believed the film has entertainment value and is an incredible achievement, showing what can be done when you have a) dogged determination and youth and b) not much of a clue.

This year could be the first year in 15 that I don't have a film in post production. The prospect of being free from ongoing projects, stuck in various stages of post production, sounds absolutely wonderful to me at this moment in time, especially as my film making doubts have started niggling back into my headspace again.

Roll on into 2011...but not too fast that I don't get everything done!

What's That Noise? - The shooting of Creak

2010-11-27T14:10:00.000-08:00

Darren, myself and Toby check out a shot of the Pioneer.

Mood lighting with Sara, myself, Toby and Darren.

The opening gag image of Sara switching on the light.

Heather and Ellen, disturbed at 4am.

We 3 beards of Hovian are...Terry, Darren and myself...the hair bear bunch.

I never find that it’s the greatest start when the director is running late to the location and finds members of the crew waiting for him outside, but that was my auspicious start to shooting Creak. Despite my best efforts of an early start I still ended up leaving home after I’d intended to, picked up one of my cast and headed over to Hove to find Terry and Darren waiting on the steps of Jim’s house.

We quickly unloaded the car then I went to park up at Hove station and walked back to the house thankfully to find everyone chatting in the kitchen and the kettle on. Worried that we had a ridiculously sized shot list and probably nowhere near enough time, we got on with blacking out the windows in the bedroom and clearing various bits of furniture and clothing out, but remembering to leave some clutter so it didn’t look too tidy. I was also able to put up the pictures of the doorways though whether it was debateable whether any would show up on camera.

The rest of the cast and crew arrived and I felt increased pressure to ensure we were finished on time – Sheila arrived dressed up as it turned out she was going out for a meal with her fiancée after the shoot, Jeanette was also planning to be out at night, Terry had plans and I wanted to get back home as soon as possible. We about had the bedroom ready so we quickly got on with costume and make up – there unfortunately wasn’t a great deal for Jeanette to do with the make up – I wanted Sheila to look very pallid, though she is already pale and in retrospect I probably didn’t make her look as sickly as I would have liked, so losing the gag of her looking like a monster. We also hit a snag with her costume – Sheila astutely spotted that the chequered pattern on the pyjamas I bought would most likely play havoc with the camera. I knew that the new generation of SLRs which were capable of HD footage had trouble with certain patterns in particular and one quick test later Darren confirmed that the pyjamas were going mental on camera.

Unfortunately Darren had also left an aspect of camera equipment at home (might have been the focus ring) which meant we would have to cross Brighton against busy Saturday morning traffic before we could commence shooting. Despite some discussion about going out into Hove to find another pair of pyjamas, Sheila said that she had brought a vest so if we could get some tracksuit bottoms she could wear them…so the trip across town also included calling in at Terry’s flat to get his tracksuit bottoms (bought with best intentions for running, but never used!), which meant we pretty much lost an hour before shooting could even begin.

Once we got back from the sojourn Sheila got in costume, more resembling Sporty Spice from the Spice Girls than I would have liked (which I guess to some could be classed as monsterous in its own right.) After a long period of setting up, we were finally ready to shoot the first shot – worryingly it had already gone midday and I really felt that the shot list might as well go in the bin there and then. It was also decided that due to time we wouldn’t slate everything completely accurately – we were just going to slate scenes and takes, with no differentiation for the shots in a particular scene. As I would be editing, possibly with Terry’s help, this didn’t seem to matter too much as we would be aware of what we had shot on the day.

It did feel like that first shot took much longer than I had hoped – despite rehearsing it several times, I felt Sara kept turning over on her side before her cue to do so, making the shot and sound obsolete. However, she did seem to be throwing herself into the role really well, immediately establishing a touchy feely warmth to her character and between her character and Sheila’s. I really felt the way she played it had some truth to it, especially the way she was flailing an arm out behind her, trying to nudge her lover into action. I chatted with Sara several weeks later and she admitted that she kept jumping the gun, acting before I had called action, as she had never done film work before, only stage, so was unaware of much of the film making process.

There was also some unfortunate truth to Sheila’s reluctance to get out of the bed – it was very chilly in the bedroom and in some shots she’s lying under the covers wearing her coat. Sara also only removed her jeans when absolutely needed for the shot in an effort to retain some body heat.

Ironically, we shot the film on a very bright and sunny day, which didn’t feel that cold outside – it was certainly warm enough to make the binliners on the bedroom windows come unstuck during shooting, which showed that in a sense we may as well needn’t have bothered with blacking out the bedroom windows – we never really saw the bedroom windows and the curtains in the room were very heavy with a separate layer of blackout cloth, resulting in only a tiny amount of light spillage at the edges.

With the loss of cold cream look for Sheila, it also meant I had to abandon the plan to have her lying on her back with arms crossed, looking vampiric. But this also meant that we could immediately drop three shots of shooting directly down on them from above as they lay in the bed on their backs. With the reversal on Sheila, we were able to capture an end shot of the scene at the same time where Sara looks hurtfully at Sheila.

We did have some issues with this reversal shot of Sheila as we decided to use the same set up for a shot at the end of the film where Sara comes back to bed and apologises to Sheila. At the end of the shot Sara switches off the light, putting the room back in darkness which allows the Pioneer to enter the room. But as we were using a separate lamp to light Sheila, precariously hand held by myself (so the lack of crew does become an issue) it resulted in Sara and I having to synchronise the lights going off, which wasn’t as easy as it should have been and resulted in many more takes than probably necessary. I do remember at one point Terry and Jeanette becoming obsessed with my face’s shadow on the bedroom wall, which in its hairy, stubbly state looked positively Neanderthal like.

I was determined to wrap all the shots which didn’t require the Pioneer before breaking and it probably wasn’t until way past 2pm when we were at this stage, possibly closer to 3pm. While the kettle was on we got Toby suited up as the Pioneer for the first time. I was definitely glad that I had gone with the pads idea – perhaps they weren’t as noticeable on the arms and shoulders, but they did seem to accentuate the joints at the knees. For some reason the Pioneer reminded me of some creature from a 70s episode of Dr Who – depending on your take on these things, that’s either a great or god awful thing.

Sara had made a fun request that she didn’t want to see the Pioneer’s mask until we shot the final image of the film, which was her reaction to seeing the Pioneer. I thought if it was possible then this would be a good idea and could help create a genuine reaction in her performance.

After the break we returned back to the bedroom to shoot the Pioneer’s approach. I’d always hoped to shoot Toby walking backwards, then reverse the footage to ensure that any movement of the Pioneer would look a bit off, but after we had trouble with just a simple shot of him crossing the frame it seemed more apparent that his approach would have to be abandoned. I tried with the other two shots of him (his claws outstretched to Sara, her almost POV as he approaches the bed) but the later shots were done in such a way to make this idea impossible to achieve.

So all this time we were shooting the shots of the Pioneer, Sara had been lying in the bed keeping her eyes closed to ensure that she had never seen the Pioneer’s face. As we came to the build up of the final image, it felt that Sara was genuinely building up the fear in her head, especially as several people were voicing out loud how potentially disturbing the mask was. Even with the laughs we were having with the look of the Pioneer, mostly involving Toby being some pan dimensional porno creature come to join in with the lesbians, Sara’s terror was still accumulating.

Unfortunately the terror had perhaps risen a little too much by the time we did the first take, as Sara immediately pulled away from the Pioneer, clawing her way away from him and out of Darren’s framed and focussed frame. So we did several more takes, one where Sara did a fabulous scream, but it’s a shame that the initial reaction of the first take wasn’t captured how I wanted it.

With the bedroom shots done we hotfooted it downstairs and blacked out the lounge, almost having the opposite issue with the curtains downstairs when it seemed that they didn’t completely close, leaving some of the bin liners exposed. With some selective framing we were able to get around this issue. The family pictures went down and the doorway pictures were repeated again on the shelves and hung up in the lounge, again, possibly not to be seen.

The lounge shooting went pretty easily as it was really only 3 or 4 shots – looking over Sara’s shoulder through the doorway at Sheila and following her through, resting over Grace’s shoulder for a reversal, then the reversal of this on Sheila, a shot of Sara emerging sheepishly from behind the curtain and then the final shot, which did involve several takes and run throughs.

Jim’s hallway has a fantastic large mirror in front of the lounge door, which both Darren and I had expressed a wish to use somehow in the film, as it would be foolish not to use such a great visual element! So Sara leaving the room involved following her movements over her shoulder, waiting on her as she switches off the lounge light, then as she moves away she reveals the Pioneer, now stood in the darkness of the lounge, reflected in the mirror. As Toby couldn’t see what the hell was going on with the mask and the light off, I had to basically nudge him into the shot at the right time, while trying to ensure that you didn’t see some pale hand manhandling a trans dimensional being. After several takes which had timing issues we finally got it.

One overriding memory I have of this sequence was Sheila taking it easy in a chair in the lounge while we worked on this last shot, meaning she had a constant, almost a little too close, view of Toby's lycra clad trans dimensional ass.

The original plan was to go into the kitchen next – prioritise all the key scenes with dialogue – but it still wasn’t completely dark enough outside to pass for the middle of the night and as the shots would reveal the patio doors of the kitchen we couldn’t black them out. So instead we moved on to the hallway bits – firstly we did Sheila’s and Sara’s descent up the stairs, which involved Darren and myself squeezed on to the landing two thirds up the stairs, with me on the stair below to pull focus and Sara having to attempt squeezing by us and the camera set up as she reached the top and the Pioneer revealed to have stepped out of the lounge.

I have to admit I wasn’t as focussed as I had hoped for the shoot. I knew my wife was having a bad day with my son and I couldn’t help but be worried about them both. I hadn’t prepared upfront as much as I had hoped for the actors’ direction anyway and so some questions about the style of delivery ended up being given muddled answers. Getting the shoot over and done with on time so I could be home as soon as possible was a definite motivating factor for me. I do like to feel that I still did get footage and performances that I was happy with and wasn’t prepared to accept just any take for the sake of it.

We filmed the shots of Sheila’s search of the upstairs which were 3 very quick shots of her switching lights on and off, followed by the dialogue between her and Sara at the top of the landing. Now it was dark enough we could remove the bin liners from the hallway window and film without any worries about showing the bin liners. While upstairs we also got Sara going back into the bedroom and the Pioneer’s inexplicable descent from the stairs above Sara once she turns off the light (which again required some synching between myself and Sara as I was inside the bedroom, hidden behind the door, switching off the bedroom light as she switched off the hallway light.)

So, all the upstairs shots were done and we returned back downstairs, grabbing some simple pick ups of Sheila and Sara’s feet descending the stairs. Although we never go into the second reception room we quickly got the shot of Sheila checking out the room ensuring we had covered her full exploration of the house.

With these simple pick ups done, we could go into the kitchen for the last shots. We focused looking away from the patio doors filming Sheila’s tired entry to the kitchen where she struggles with the lights not working, then suddenly working, followed by Sara’s tiptoeing into the kitchen for the dialogue. The dialogue here seemed to take some time and quite a few takes and I had to provide a noise to cue Sara jumping at the sound of the fridge, a noise which had the danger of making her laugh rather than flinch, as I initial did a cappuccino coffee machine type noise which is the odd sound our fridge makes at home! Flicking around for the reversal, we got Sheila’s mid shot at the patio doors, then Sara’s reversal into the kitchen, which also doubled up for Sheila’s reversal of hitting the lights and the audience catching split second glimpses of the Pioneer being repelled by the light.

Almost at the finish line now, so everyone else helped clear the house and return it to normal while Darren and I caught the final few shots – two exterior shots from the garden, one where Sheila is seen at the patio doors and the Pioneer’s mask is dirtying the frame and a similar shot looking directly into the kitchen at Sara nervously left alone in the room.

And with that we were done – Darren went outside to capture the opening and closing exterior image of the house – while we packed up. Sheila’s partner Paul arrived on set while we finished off tidying and they were thankfully able to get on their way to their meal, mostly on time. In fact, I was completely gob smacked that we had finished at 9.10, just 10 minutes after I had aimed for us to finish.

The packing up took much longer than I anticipated – Darren’s equipment took quite some time to dismantle but after dropping a car load of people off back at home I finally got back around 10.30. My wife was a wonderful sight to see and I was so happy to see her still awake so I could share with her the experiences of the shoot.

I was determined to get the shoot done in a day to a standard I was happy with and I felt I had achieved that. Despite my worries and knee jerk reaction of having to throw the shot list away we did actually get the majority of the shots I had hoped to capture. The small group of us on the day bonded really well and all pulled together to ensure we got what was needed for the film. I had 16 days to get the film edited and completed for my planned screening of it at the November post Halloween horror special of the film night Terry and I run. 16 days would be enough to quickly edit a 5 minute film, yeah?

As has become depressingly de rigeur with my films, nothing ever seems to go as planned.

Yoko spilts up the band - the birth of Sincerely Psychopath and Creak

2010-10-21T13:07:00.000-07:00

Always read the label when using latex paint - your telepathic powers are in danger

Nick's very disturbing test image for the "Sincerely Psychopath" ident

It's been many months since I've written anything for my blog - not that there haven't been any developments, or that I haven't been doing anything film related, just that it always felt like the last thing I had energy for - that any mental faculties left at the end of the day were reserved for creating a new script or something, rather than "just" my blog.

So I have to list some updates on the state of affairs with several projects, but that feels like treading old ground. It's much more interesting to talk about something new, so I'll talk about "Creak."

"Creak" is a short script I wrote back at the start of the year just after the birth of my son. I was pretty pleased at the fact that I managed to crank out a quick 5 minute short over an evening as I often struggle to create such short, punchy scripts. But with the birth of my son, I knew the days of throwing money at productions like I did with "Stranded" and "Goodnight, Halloween" were over for the time being. So any future films would have to be much simpler affairs and preferably shot in a day.

I'd had an idea the other year to try and do a series of horror shorts under the banner title of "Sincerely, Psychopath" - so I'd keep Faster Productions for the more "serious" (ahem) work, while Sincerely, Psychopath was a testing ground for quick shorts which would be aimed more at getting online asap rather than sending to festivals...and most importantly, films which wouldn't get bogged down in endless post production work.

So Creak is the first production to fit into this - I'm reluctant to call it a horror, as there is no blood and gore, so creepy is a level I'm aspiring to...though whether it ends up being creepy is yet to be seen. It's inspired by an event that my wife and I experienced at our last house, where we were awoken in the middle of the night by a very loud creaking sound, which seemed impossibly close to my ear and for which we could find no explanation. We had no neighbours one side and couldn't figure how the sound came from the house next door. But we did a midnight search of the house anyway...

It's not the most original script (one friend said it seemed more like a shooting exercise) though it was never intended to be mind blowingly original, but more an excuse to do a less serious, fun shoot. I really wanted it to be back to how I used to make films at college - a bunch of friends having fun. It wasn't to be entirely like that, though it was by the end.

I was looking to shoot it at a friend's house and it needed to be a house with stairs and several floors, otherwise creeping round a studio flat is a bit too quick. In an ideal world, the most perfect setting for the shoot would have been the house where the inspiration took place, but that wasn't an option anymore...and our current house could have been used at an absolute push, but I just couldn't see it working, even with some fudging of scene locations. So I set my eyes on my friend Jim's house in Hove and as I started planning this at the start of the summer, knowing at some point that he would be going on holiday with his family, leaving the house unoccupied.

With this, I got an inital shooting date of around mid August which I'd managed to get the thumbs up from with my usual crew and my new cast - Sheila and Sara, both of whom I'd known for many years. Sheila makes a living as an actress, whereas Sara used to dabble in a bit of drama and had expressed an interest in being involved (in fact, I think she had found out a touch too late about the role of the witch for Goodnight, Halloween.) Both were local, which would ensure keeping costs down.

Unfortunately the August shooting date didn't happen as I think Jim and I had got our dates mixed up and the actual date they were away wasn't convenient for me...so shooting was postponed. I wasn't too dismayed as I was determined not to get too stressed from trying to organise this film. Whether I did manage to shoot the film was dependent on them going away on holiday again later in the year, but if they didn't and I didn't get to shoot the film this year...well, oh well...

But then he hinted at them being away in October, so with a new date in mind I tried rallying the cast and crew again. Here the wheels started to come off - Anthony was already committed to a feature which would take up all his time, so my cameraman and his equipment were gone. Jenny, production design extraordinaire and generally brilliant person to have around on a shoot was only available after the shoot she was working on, so would get down to the location at around 8pm - the time I was hoping to be winding things up. As I'd cast one of my sound man contacts as the creature (aka The Pioneer) in the film I was hoping that John, who had done the sound mix on The Crunch and two days of Stranded, would be available to do the sound, but he gracefully declined. I'd also made the decision to use a new contact, Jeanette, as the make up artist instead of Debbie, my regular make up artist, as I wanted to help Jeanette build up a new portfolio of work.

Though hopefully Terry and Gus would still be available as my regular crew members, it all felt very strange. We'd all worked together on various shoots in the last few years and I really felt like I'd built up a core, dependable, talented crew. Suddenly the band had split up. But I had realised in the last few months that I had to face facts - that Anthony and Jenny were becoming increasingly in demand, mostly with paid work - and that it would become increasingly difficult to assume that they could continue to work on my films, especially as paying work would always, understandably, take precedent over my unpaid work. They were continuing their career ascent (rightly so, as they are both supremely talented) but I would need to find some new blood to help me with my new horror ventures.

All the same, I did feel like Yoko Ono. Maybe I'm the only one who's actually sentimental about the group that I had working with me.

Luckily, Chris Regan, film maker/ writer and all round lovely bloke and one of the regulars at Son Of Movie Bar, had been making a film called Jenny Ringo and the Monkey's Paw, which had involved quite a few people I knew and from that link I was introduced to Darren, DOP on Jenny Ringo, and, following hearing only positive things from various people, asked him if he was interested in shooting Creak. Luckily he was and he was available.

It wasn't the most ideal situation, but I asked Toby, who was playing The Pioneer, if he could also record sound whilst playing the creature role, especially as most of the creature shots didn't involve any sound recording. Thankfully he was up for this.

Then a new issue reared it's head - the date I was aiming for turned out to be unsuitable for Sara due to commitments with her son, which meant that I had to start looking for a new actress. Then it was also looking shakey from Sheila, again due to her family commitments. From having to almost replace my crew, it now looked like I was going to have to replace my actresses.

I provisionally lined up two replacements if it turned out they were needed but then was hit with another bombshell. Jim and I had got dates mixed up again, meaning the only weekend I could shoot was the one prior to what I was aiming at, leaving me with around 2 weeks to prep for the film. It was either this or nothing.

Fortuitously, this meant that Sara and Sheila were available, so the casting problem was solved immediately and very luckily this change of shooting date didn't affect the crew availability too. It seemed that everything was still go.

There were still some issues I needed to sort - the costume for The Pioneer most pressingly. I'd been thinking about this since the start of the year and all the time I kept thinking about the moment in M.Night Shalamayamayamayamananananan's "Signs" where the alien is caught on the video camera at the kids party. So I was looking for an ominous black figure shape. But I also wanted something else - maybe some giant claws, almost Wolverine-esque. The head I wanted to be elongated, tall and narrow, accentuating the height of the figure. I'd had one idea of green screening the figure in, so it could be stretched in post production to look disturbingly skinny, but I was adamant that I didn't want to do any post production effects on this film - all in camera or not at all.

Of all places, I wasn't expecting Facebook to provide the answer. I manage to detune from the adverts on the sidebars of most websites, but luckily one day I did see one out of the corner of my eye on Facebook, advertising "Morph suits." I checked ou the website and this seemed to provide a brilliant, simple solution - a black spandex costume that gives you a very peculiar looking all black, featureless figure. It would certainly provide a good starting point for the creature.

It's a job that I would have asked Jenny to get involved with had she been available, but as it was I figured I would have to try and do the best I could with my limited talents in creating the creature. Although I'd been planning the film all year, naturally it was only when I had my reduced prep time that I suddenly had to start buying everything in. The morph suit was speedily dispatched and, naturally, I had to try it on and found it really left nothing to the imagination...I hoped Toby wouldn't be too prudish about this! One disappointment with it though was the white lettering of "Morph Suit" emblazoned on the back, which could potentially have been troublesome for any shots behind the creature.

I purchased some halloween monster claw gloves from ebay which were nowhere near some magnificently huge Wolverine talons, but would have to do..however they were lurid shocking pink, so I needed to paint them black sharpish. I had a vague recollection of Jenny once warning me that rubber needed to be painted with silicon based paint (or something like that) as normal spray paint would dry hard and crack when the latex or rubber was moved. She couldn't recall what paint it was that I was supposed to use, so one internet search later pointed me towards an American website who sold it ready made. Unfortunately their minimum despatch was $25 worth of goods (plus shipping) which was too much. Back to the internet which lead me to the first place I should have looked (ebay, what else) and soon I had a bottle of black latex paint winging its way towards me through the post. Upon receiving it, there was a very peculiar warning label on the bottle, telling me of potential "psychic" dangers from using the paint...

Although it looked grey, it dried black and so the claws were sorted. They were a bit loose on the cuffs, but that would have to be sorted on the day.

So now I started thinking that Toby was a skinny fellow - hence me casting him in the role of the creature - but I was worried that was exactly what he would look like - a skinny bloke in a spandex suit - so I wondered if wearing some sort of shoulder and joints padding would help accentuate his joints and bulk him out. Not wanting to spend any money unnecessarily, I initially contacted a local rugby club, asking if they would be willing to lend me some pads for the shoot in return for a credit etc. As of writing this, I've still yet to hear back from them, once again confirming that no one seems to want to have any manners in even sending a polite no thanks back when you're a film maker with no money - much easier to just hit delete and pretend you never received it. So I asked friends on Facebook and my work colleague up in bonny Scotland, who is an outdoors enthusiast, had some knee and elbow pads he could lend me.

As for the shoulder pads, I had my eye on several sets for sale on ebay, but most would finish at around £30 plus postage, much higher than I was prepared to pay. Then one set appeared which would have to be collected as the seller wasn't prepared to post the pads. I realised I could add the journey on to my work day after hours whch would mean a two hour round trip, though this was something I was prepared to do. I won the pads for the princely sum of £5.50, then the seller got in touch to offer me postage for a fiver - realising I would spend this in petrol alone, nevermind the tedious drive, I jumped at the chance.

Then my wife's eagle eyes spotted a set of knee and elbow pads on a carboot for £4, probably about the same it would cost to send the pads back to my colleague in Scotland. One purchase and email later and the pads were mine, with his set staying at home in north of the border.

The final aspect for The Pioneer was the mask - I dropped an email to Nick, who was finally coming to the end of doing the animation effects for Goodnight, Halloween, asking if he had any suggestions. He recommended his friend Thad, who I had met many years ago. Nick put us in touch with each other though contact was worryingly sporadic - Thad had no internet connection at home, I didn't have a phone number and I had no idea he was even working on it until I finally got an email a week later. I'd deliberately given him an earlier deadline than necessary, but then I got all confused and worried that I had told him the original shooting date, not the new one for a week earlier. At the same time I was about to call him he sent me a text, stating that the mask would be ready for Friday and he would come over from Hastings to deliver it (I had no idea he was over there - I thought he still lived in Brighton.) He wasn't able to send any pictures of the mask, stating that I'd just have to cross my fingers and hope I liked it. Part of me wished as a back up plan I'd bought this strange rubber gas mask I'd seen on ebay from the same fetish style shop which had sold me the latex paint...

I went to Brighton to meet Thad - the mask wasn't quite what I was expecting. It definitely had a disturbing quality to it, though he had been more heavily influenced by the African tribal mask pictures I'd sent him than I had been expecting. In a way, I'd realised a little too late after making contact with him was that I really just wanted some strange knobbly super long almond type shape for the creatures head, making it more abstract. He's also painted it in a brown wood colour as I stupidly never told him I needed it black. Considering the less than ideal way and the timelines that Thad had to make the mask, I think it was a great effort and the design and craft (it's simply made from corrugated cardboard) really did grow on me, especially after we'd given it a black make over.

That was the creature but my actresses would, in theory, be easier. With Sheila playing the alpha male of the lesbian relationship I wanted her to be wearing a manly pyjama suit - one which had a suit style collar. As Sheila is extremely small framed I had to try and find a pair that wouldn't swamp her, nor be too low cut on the chest. After many weeks of looking on ebay and various cheap clothing establisments, my wife spotted a pair on ebay just days before the shoot. The snag of only posting them "Second class - 7-10 days delivery" was circumvented - amazingly, the seller offered to post them recorded next day special delivery for the same cost, which is either generous or they are cheeky with the postage anway...nonetheless, this ensured I had them just in time a day before the shoot.

I'd wanted Sheila's character to have gone to bed with a cold cream application on her face and have her lying vampirishly on her back, so she looks like a monster...in a monster movie. For Sara's character, I had a similar gag planned - I wanted her to wear a t-shirt with Nick's Godzilla illustration that he created for Son Of Movie Bar, so we'd see her wearing a monster...in a monster movie. Nick sent the files over for me to print onto a t-shirt, but after my wife had some doubts over using the image maker liquid that she had, we instead bought some t-shirt transfer paper and printed the design out. Minda, always much better with an iron than me, put the t-shirt together and it looked great. So much so that during the shoot Sheila asked if we did any t-shirts in girl's sizes!

Minda and I also searched ebay for a fun pair of sleep goggles with the eyes open for the opening image of Sara turning on the light - an idea I was going to abandon when Minda reminded me this was very similar to Breakfast At Tiffanys...oh well, if you're going to steal, steal from the best...

The tagline I'd had in my head for this film was "It's 4am and somewhere, something has opened..." -I felt that the Pioneer had come through something - a doorway - to our world and I wanted to add a peculiar visual element to the film. I was also aware that filming in Jim's house would show their pictures on the wall, photos of family members etc which I felt would be intrusive to film and also a touch lazy to leave up. So I wanted to put up photos or illustrations of doorways. Not wanting to just have this looking a bit plain, I asked my friend Rich to do some fancy work on the pictures in Photoshop so some were more illustrative...though when he heard that there was a chance his work wouldn't even be seen on screen, depending on our shooting angles, he decided he'd help me do some effects on any pictures rather than doing it himself.

Unfortunately I just didn't get the time to transform the pictures and in the end used just 4 photos taken by myself and 4 from Nick's Flickr stream - as the film hasn't been edited at the time of writing this I'm still not sure how much they are seen on screen, but I do take some pride in doing this detail when it was only ever important to myself and on a film this miniscule size it's almost an inconsequential detail.

I'd done one of my usual scaborous storyboards of strange looking thumbnail people on a copy of the script, but still needed to type this up into a shot list to pass to Darren. Once I'd done this we arranged a date and time to head to Jim's house, now it was temporarily vacant, so Darren could see the spaces I was looking at for filming in.

Brilliantly organised I arrived slightly early with only enough spare change for half an hours parking, leaving us only 20 minutes to look around the house. I discovered that Jim's bed was opposite the window, not underneath it, and looking at the size of it figured it would be a massive task to shift it around the room. So compromises on how I envisaged the film were already taking place. Generally Darren felt there was a lot of nice depth around the house that we could exploit to make the film look interesting, so the recce was a successful one though I felt a little disappointed that things were already not going to look how I imagined them. A greater success was getting back to my car over 20 minutes after my parking ticket expired and not receiving a fine...

The Friday night before filming began was a hectic rush from Minda and I - we'd take it in turns to paint sides of the mask, using the black latex paint as it was all we had to hand (and at least would match the claws in sheen) then drying it as quickly as possible in front of the fan heater, Minda made up the Son Of Movie Bar t-shirt and we were both cutting out photos to put in the frames. Everything was put together in one large box all ready for the shoot in the morning. So the props were ready, but I felt unprepared and had no time to sit and look at the script with direction pointers. Oh dear.

I'd also lost two crew members that day - Gus was about to go on holiday and hadn't got around to telling me and Nick was unfortunately called away on personal business. Unable to find any replacements at short notice, we'd just have to get on with it.

As always, I was incredibly nervous and had been all day (and most of the week.) It took me a very long time to get to sleep that night as my head was spinning with how I would direct, what we would be doing.

So much for the planned stressless, fun shoot...it hadn't even started and I was already heavily stressed...

Baby Steps

2010-04-04T16:00:00.000-07:00

It's been several months since I've updated the blog -my last posts were around the 22nd of January. On this day I finally got The Crunch uploaded to Youtube and got the making of posts uploaded here.

The next day was the birth of my first child.

So excellent timing really. In a way, putting The Crunch up on Youtube did feel like some closure in a way with that film - it had no joy at the film festivals I'd entered it to (think probably around 25) and with it being a year old and suddenly past it's sell by date for some festivals, it seemed to make sense to get it online.

Ironically, since then, it has been shown in Brighton at the Future Shorts event where the local organiser looks for local artists to add a local flavour for the screening before the touring programme is shown. Very nicely Stephen, who runs the Brighton event, became a big fan of The Crunch and spoke glowingly about it after its screening. Sadly, it didn't get a round of applause until he said it deserved one...compared to every other film on the bill which got an immediate reaction! He's pushing the film to the guy who sorts out the touring programme, so there is a chance it could get on there in the near future.

It's also been shown at a new film maker's networking night - "Sex, Lies and Videotape" in Cardiff on the opening night. Due to geography and the little matter of a baby it was impossible for me to attend the screening and I've been unable to get any feedback from the organiser, despite requesting it. Still, it's another showing.

In the last few days it's also been confirmed that it's going to be screened in London on the 15th of April, at an event which takes place over two floors in a converted warehouse, with various other arty aspects going on, which I will thankfully be attending (hell, there's no choice as I have to take the dvd in person!)

I'm pleased that the film is finally getting any airing of any kind - there are more film maker's networking nights across the country I'm going to submit it to which hopefully will show it, so the film isn't a complete lost cause.

I'm less pleased that Youtube shows that most people can't be bothered to watch the whole film - due to the annoying Youtube running time restrictions, I had to split the film into 2. With this, I can see that the first 10 minutes has been viewed over twice as much as the concluding part. I accept that 20 minutes is probably a long time to sit through an internet film, but it seems worthless to sit through the first ten minutes and not bother to watch the conclusion of it all - it makes those first 10 minutes completely redundant. Oh well. Hopefully I'll be able to get it up on Vimeo, where it can stay in a complete form for people to discover.

From The Crunch I move to Stranded. We finished the edit a month or so ago, which I have doubts about. The first half seems to have a pleasing, relaxed pace to it...then the second half becomes disjointed and fragmented. I cocked up at the script stage, having a conclusion to a storyline around 8 pages before the other two conclusions had played out, which in filmic terms felt like one storyline ended mid film with two characters leaving the film. Our struggles to work around the potential film destroying performance of one of the actors continued to be an issue and in the end we had to admit defeat - we just didn't have footage to cut around some aspects satisfactorily.

So I had to make the call and say the edit was over and now it's in the hands of the grader, musician and sound designer...but as I've heard from none of them, I'm thinking realistically the film won't be done until June at the earliest, despite my hopes for a May "preview" screening at Son Of Movie Bar. Never say never, but I'll be surprised...so all that's left for me to do on Stranded at this stage is write the making of, which will be opening a can of worms in my head.

With that film in a sense out of my hair, I've turned my attention back to Goodnight, Halloween, which again seems to be hanging over my head. Nick, who is responsible for all of the desktop animation, is now aiming for an end of April completion date for the footage - even he can't believe it's taken him nearly two years to complete, though the distractions of full time work last year and a heavy workload from Lego this year have scuppered it being complete at most stages. I figured I need to get the final day shot, regardless of whether the desktop footage is complete, so we've got a shooting date of the 8th of May pencilled in. So far everyone can make it, so fingers crossed this will be shot and Teery and I can start the edit of this, which I'm expecting will again be a tough edit.

An aspect which is going to be an issue for the shoot is the lack of a CG artist involved. Having lost the first CG artist to freelance work and masses of paid work, I contacted a CG artist who had been involved in a short shown at Son Of Movie Bar. Before Christmas, he was very much up for it...but several months down the line he is also swamped with paid work, which is great, but leaves me with no CG artist and nervous about how I should shoot the final footage. It probably also means that I lose my tracking shot that I really wanted for the finale of the film. Maybe I will find another before May and be able to pick their brains, if not, well, I'm not sure...it's going to have to be all physical effects and make up, which I'm worried will look naff on screen.

Oddly, Terry spotted that one of the actors from Goodnight, Halloween was in a recent pisstake advert for E4 for the "EPad", playing one of the talking heads. This follows the actor who he played opposite also appearing in a previous E4 advert ("Ladies night in kit"), the leader of the right wing Khristian group appearing in a cereal advert and the newsreader appearing in countless adverts and TV programmes. It's almost like I have an "all star" cast in this one!

I've also been thinking of further ahead for the year - it does feel that the scale of the three films above have got me bogged down. The disappointment of The Crunch getting no festival screening, along with doubts regarding Stranded's viability (both due to running time and quality) has resorted in me thinking of much lower scale projects. There's also an issue of time and spare finances now my son is here, which have also contributed to my thoughts.

So I'm trying to create a series of 5 minute type films, all mostly in minimal locations, with minimal cast and a view of casting local actors so no worries and expense with travel etc. They are all, well, I wouldn't go so far to call them horror, but attempting to be deliberately creepy. The two I've written so far, "Creak" and"Knock, Knock" are not particularly stunningly original, but they're supposed to give me a chance to do something short, fun and hopefully not too long term. With reduced running times and the genre link, hopefully I can get them into more festivals too. (And in yet another one of those ironies which appear to pursue me and out smart me at every corner, I watched a film called "Things That Go Bump In The Night" the other day on Shooting People, which was agonisingly close to "Creak" at times, though I felt it was rather flatly made and acted, with an obvious shock which had no build up and failed to shock...whereas I'm hoping my film will have an odd subliminal creeping dread which reveals itself at the climax.)

I'm hoping to put these shorts together under an umbrella name as a series once they're complete as a way of separating them out from the "proper" Faster films.

As always, plenty of plans and not enough hours in the day...and right now, less than there were before!

Back to bouncing on the birthing ball to soothe a fractious little one...

The Making of The Crunch Part 3

2010-01-20T17:25:00.001-08:00

Jez and Jonathan stand before Richard May's artwork in the main still I used to promote the film
Jonathan as the Kraftwerk quoting Simon

Jez as the downtrodden Victor

The framing of the "coda" sequence, a shot Anthony was very proud of at the time

Here in this final part of my original essay I deal with the protracted period of post production on the film!

As they say, one of the best ways to learn things is just to try them and see how you go. The editing of The Crunch is no exception, though unfortunately I was criminally unaware of so many very simple tools that would have made my life easier, especially when it came to the panel aspect of the film and the synching of the dialogue.

Initially I did do a straight, standard edit of the film which came together really quickly, but in the end I felt that it was boring. In retrospect, there probably was a standard edit of the film which would have worked, but my meat and potatoes editing buried it. I was always concerned that we didn’t get as much coverage as I would have liked, in terms of additional angles rather than additional takes and this lack of choice of angles was something that I felt made the standard edit dull. With what I know now it would be interesting to see what a standard version of the film would look like.

So the work on the comic book version began. It was a long, frustrating process of having to re-render sections even to make the slightest change. I was also concerned about the sound levels, though Dan told me not to worry about that at this stage. It wasn’t all bad though – some aspects came not from the storyboard stage, but instead from looking at the shots themselves. The dynamic slope of the framing when Simon opens and closes the door on Victor was me simply following the angle of the wall in the shot and, similarly, the angle on the kitchenette scene came from matching the angle on the cupboards. Not planned, nor a big deal, but it seems to make it feel more cohesive, almost as if it were planned.

I needed someone to do the animation for the talk about cheese and through Anthony and Jenny I met Phil Cobley. Much like when I met them, when I first met Phil he had the latest issue of Retro Gamer with him – he was really into 2d games and artwork. I knew I’d be able to get on with him fine too! My initial thought for the animation was that it was to be vector based, almost like the original Asteroids game, with the vector peptide bonds and enzymes breaking down and fragmenting much like the asteroids in the game, crossed with the Elekroplankton game on the Nintendo DS. Phil, however, came up with something much more visually interesting and much more fun, which provided a great contrast to the dialogue and also provided a much needed lighter moment in the middle of the film. It reminded me immensely of Shynola’s animation work that they did for the “Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy” and the wonderful work that Rod Lord did on the BBC TV series.

The music came from Kerrie Lock, who worked at a shop I visit as part of my job. In her previous incarnation of “Red Peal”, she donated some tracks to my unfinished feature film. I knew she was a big jazz and electronica fan and wanted something that seemed from the glitchtronica genre, something made of clicks and hums, of disc drives spinning and hard drives whirring. I really love the music that she has written – it has a late night melancholia to it which reminds me of Kraftwerk (though sounding nothing like them) and, to me, fits nicely into Simon’s quoting of Kraftwerk lyrics throughout the film.

My original edit I think took me to about August time and I think had a running time of around 21 minutes.. At that time I was trying to cast “Stranded”, with a view to getting that also in the can so I could edit both films over the winter. I showed this rough comic edit to some people – Dave Lilley in particular felt that he could see a way to cut it down to around 15 minutes, which would help with short film festival entries, but I couldn’t see where 6 minutes could come out. He did say it might result in jump cuts, something I was determined not to do if I could help it, but I was keen to hear his thoughts.

Casting for “Stranded” was complete but then the shooting had to be cancelled due to the availability of the lead actor, so I returned my focus to The Crunch. Dave still hadn’t had chance to send any detailed feedback and in the end had to bow out due to a lack of time. I had another look at the film and managed to hack out some of the running time – a short scene which is in the script went, which would have shown Simon fast asleep on Victor’s desk, almost mechanically snoring away, Victor throwing his fearful glances after the previous scenes’ exchange. In the end I felt it wasn’t needed and it seemed like Victor didn’t seem particular fearful of Simon, nor did the shot of Simon fit in particularly well. I managed to remove around a minute from the phone sex conversation, which admittedly did feel like it went on for an eternity (which was partly the point) but many people felt was just too much.

The problem with trimming the film down with a second here, a couple of seconds here, was that it completely messed up the synch with the other shot. By reducing one shot by a second could potentially create a new two second gap in the timing of the other shot and I would have to find a moment where the footage could be sped up - but not by too much, otherwise it looked bad, though in some places it seemed this was unavoidable. All in all, trying to shed inches of flab here and there was a trying experience. Finally I got a cut together which came in at just over 19 minutes and without radically changing aspects of the edit, I couldn’t see what else could be done, so I decided this was the final edit.

I got back in touch with Dan, as he’d expressed interest in doing the sound mix back when we were shooting, but he knocked back my interest with an email saying he was too busy, doing 60 hour weeks, good luck…and that was that.

I went back to Shooting People and advertised for a sound designer. I had several people get in touch – one guy offered to do it if I’d pay him £200 cash in hand, though I felt it was unfair to pay him when everyone else had worked for expenses only. Then a guy, let’s call him Q, got in touch, who much like Jonathan was just starting out and was keen to show what he could do. Jonathan obviously worked out really well and Q had plenty of experience working in a sound studio, he just wanted to show the world what he could do with sound design on a film. With this enthusiasm, I was easily swept away, especially when he said it was likely I’d have a sound mix for Christmas. To have the film finished before the end of 2007 would have been great.

Unfortunately it wasn’t to be – Q fell ill with the flu before Christmas, which had a knock on effect, so it would be 2008 now. Oh well. Although we communicated back and forth over the first few months of 2008 I had still yet to hear anything of the work he’d done, despite Q saying he would send some rough scenes over for me to hear and give any pointers on. I should have seen the warning signs then, but didn’t. In the middle of March I asked him again how it was going and was told he only had the foley for the keyboard typing to record – he’d understandably been putting it off as it was such a big job. I said I wanted to have the film ready for Movie Bar, the film night I attended, for the 7th of April showing. Q said this was fine - it was good to have a deadline. Good stuff, so I went ahead contacting the local press and putting up posters advertising the film showing.

This is where things started to go badly wrong. Q had got a job working for the BBC in Bristol and had to move over there immediately. He was living in a hotel room and he had no internet access. I had told him I wanted the sound mix at the latest by the 1st of April, to give me plenty of time to export the footage out and get it on to a dvd, as I was foreseeing me having problems with that too. It was also my girlfriend’s birthday at the weekend and I didn’t want to be shackled to the Mac during her birthday weekend. He told me by email he would email the files over to me by then, but ominously said he wasn’t sure that it was even 85% done and that I would want changes. He didn’t send the file. I spoke to him on the Tuesday afternoon and he told me he wanted to post it to me Special Delivery, but couldn’t find a post office in Bristol! I asked him just to send it normal post, but also email the file – normal post would only take 2 days and its better its in the post, rather than lose another day looking for a post office. Wednesday there was still no email waiting for me. I get a text from Q with the two words “Have prob” on it. No explanation. I go chasing him.

Q now tells me that the file that he has with him in Bristol is corrupted and he can’t get it off there. The original file is thankfully safe in London – but – he might have to work this weekend as the BBC are reinstalling their entire system in Bristol at the weekend and he won’t find out if he’s needed or not until 5.30pm on the Friday. I tell him it’s the slimmest sliver of a hope, but its all I have and that I’ll wait to hear from him on Friday.

Friday Minda and I go out with her friend Fiona for the afternoon. Around 5pm we go to a pub for a drink and I have a missed call from Q. I listen to the message. The message I get is “Hi Luther, it’s Q. I have to work this weekend. I’ll leave a message on your other phone.” He didn’t. So that was that. The thing which really annoyed me about all of this was that he didn’t even apologise. I sent him a long text message, stating that I couldn’t believe it had come down to the wire like this, that in over 4 months of him working on the sound mix I’d yet to hear ONE SINGLE THING. I finished my text off asking him “Where do we go from here?”

The answer it seemed was nowhere. I never heard from Q again and its in retrospect that everyone realises he must have been stringing me on all along. Perhaps originally he was keen, but realised somewhere he had bitten off more than he could chew, but didn’t have the courage to admit to me that he needed to leave the project, that he wasn’t working on it, that he just couldn’t actually do what I wanted. Maybe I’m wrong, but if I’d done all of that work, I’d probably want to send it to them, even if it is too late to prove that I wasn’t a complete fraud. But as he didn’t, I only have the conclusion that he did lead me on.

This may all sound churlish from me - after all, Q was offering his services for free - but I've worked before and since with other people for free/ expenses, all who have been much more professional than this, even if they weren't career professionals (as in working paid, full time) in their field.

So, I’d wasted 4 months doing nothing. My edit had been finished for nearly 6 months now and no progress had been made. Once again, I posted on Shooting People but this time made it clear I wanted someone either in Brighton or somewhere in the vicinity that I could meet and keep tabs on much easier than someone in London, preferably with a Spinal Tap style cricket bat. Several people once again got in touch – I had some strange man who’d done some awful chillout type music and had no idea why he was getting in touch. There was a guy called John in Brighton who’d done some good work. There was someone further west who was super keen and then there were two women who had just graduated from a college in Worthing. I watched a piece one of them had done the sound design for and thought it was great, very dense, textured and leftfield. I decided to go with them, much to the annoyance of the guy over to the west, who’d taken it upon himself to source all the sound samples and sound effects I said I required without me ever saying I wanted him to work on the film. He seemed to think I’d been wasting his time when I’d always made it clear that I hadn’t made a decision regarding him working on the film.

I sent Libby and her work partner the files over to have a listen and watch the film, then arranged to meet up for a meeting. I was full of enthusiasm and looking forward to what they were going to bring to the project. We sat down together for a drink then one of them asked “Who recorded the sound?” I explained about Dan. They then oddly asked “What was he doing?” I explained I wasn’t sure, as far as I could see he was doing a decent enough job…why? So the girls dropped the bombshell – the sound is awful, pretty much unusable and they’re not sure if they can use it. They ask if there’s any chance of dubbing the entire film, which I’m very reluctant to do – I really felt there was something in the performances at times which were very much of their moment and would be hard to replicate. They tell me they can try to boost the levels and cut some frequencies to remove the hiss, but by doing this it might change the voices – how do I feel about that? I figured as long as they don’t sound like chipmunks, let’s try it. We part ways, though they give me a clause I must understand – as they’ve just graduated, they understandably only want work on their showreel which is the best possible quality. If they don’t feel The Crunch will scrub up to that, then they will walk. I completely understand and head home, that initial enthusiasm long gone.

I can’t remember how many weeks later it was, or whether it was an email or text. I seem to think it was a text which came in about 10.30 at night. Libby said that they can’t get the sound up to scratch and that they were no longer going to work on the project. That was that. Again. I immediately went straight upstairs and luckily still had the email address for the sound designer in Brighton. I dropped John a line and he was still keen to get involved. Luckily this time around there wasn’t a need to send an advert out on Shooting People.

I met with John in Brighton at Rockola, he was a nice guy who seemed to really know his stuff and made a living from sound design, recording and teaching. It was great that he was in Brighton too as it meant I would be able to work with him on the film and get an idea of what he does. When asked when I needed the film by I didn’t really have an answer, so John asked if August would be okay. After all the shenanigans I’d been though 2 months away sounded absolutely fine. This time, surely this time things will be okay!?

Well, they were and they weren’t. The weren’t is that we had major trouble getting the file from my Mac to be understood in John’s PC – after endless different film types and sizes, Anthony had heard a problem about HD FCP files being deliberately unrecognizable in PC software so suggested a new lot of settings which finally meant John could work with a version which synched up with his PC – up until that point any foley work John had done had been educated guesswork as to whether it was in the right place. Above all, he did manage to save the sound – it isn’t high fidelity sound by any means, but considering I thought I was going to have to dub the film its still a miracle. I was overjoyed the first time I sat in John’s flat and could hear the dialogue for the first time in months, especially after all the trouble I’d been through. No matter how long it took, at last I’d found the man for the job!

Not only that, John came to my aid on some sound recording for Stranded soon after coming on board with The Crunch and he’s become a trusted colleague. Its been interesting working with him on the sound, working through different sound effects together looking for the right effect, both of us suggesting some sound effects with thinking outside the box. It continued to be a long winded process though for both of us and I think at times a bit of a frustrating one for John, as he feels it shouldn’t have taken as long as it has, just something always seems to have been working against us. After all the troubles I’ve had over the making of The Crunch, it just seems par to the course for me.

During this period I showed the film to Terry and he made some suggestions with regard to the editing. As the film running time was locked down (as I’d promised John) it didn’t leave us with much leeway with regard to changing it. Terry’s suggestions though thankfully stayed within the running time – the scene where Victor fails to do more than 8 push ups was changed so it was no longer split screen, which did make a difference. Terry also suggested that instead of the sex line conversation remaining as a 3 piece for the entire conversation, we should instead focus on Victor more. To me this simple change made the scene feel much shorter. Terry also felt an effect was needed for the multiple Victor’s image – he thought it should degrade, or pulse, or shake. After some multiple exporting and importing I was able to add the shake effect that you see, which again added an essential amplification to that scene.

I ran a preview screening of The Crunch at the first Son Of Movie Bar, which was also my first night of running the aforementioned film night I regularly attended and had taken overJ ohn and I were both aware it probably wasn’t quite the final sound mix and it didn’t sound that great over the pub sound system, but then again I’m not sure that the sound is built for that sort of system, or at least couldn’t be built for it without dubbing it and having a much clearer sound recording to start with. Anthony felt that the film needed a grade and kindly offered to take a look at it now it was finally almost complete. He gave it a grade which makes sense from an audience point of view – you can actually see what’s happening now – whereas previously, possibly due to me being fully aware of what was going on, I did a more “hardcore” setting, where everything is deliberately dark and on some shots its almost barely the highlights showing through. My “grade” was much greyer, whereas with Anthony’s tweaking its actually now closer to the original idea of the highlighted figures.

Thankfully I got some kind feedback from the preview screening – despite the sound quality in the pub and the fact you could barely see the screen (not only due to my “grade”, but also due to the heavy streetlight emanating in from outside) I got some positive comments back, it felt that people had picked up on the intensity of it and most people got the whole schizophrenic aspect, though they had to ask me to make sure. I was always worried that people would laugh during the phone sex scene – yes, it is uncomfortable and ludicrous, so I was worried it would be susceptible to school boy sniggers – but wonderfully the audience seemed utterly immersed and breathless during that and the following scene. From the feedback, I’m grateful that the film works – I was worried that the issues with the sound and the comic book panelling, which at times could be criticised for being both distracting and distancing from the drama, don’t seem that much of an issue.

I can’t believe though that it took me over two years since first shooting it and nearly 2 and half years since writing it to get it finished. At times I considered just letting it go at the current state it was at – as Minda often pointed out, it’s a strong effort for my first film in years even in the unfinished states was in – and maybe it would have been best at times to do that. But as with my feature film Gettin’ Some (er…still unfinished) it does come to feel more that once you’ve come so far, why stop there?

I still think the film would have benefited from one more night’s shooting, as I think that would have given us more time to ensure everything was spot on as well as get a little more coverage. I think that would have made a difference to the film. Its odd how close I’ve managed to get some elements to what I storyboarded, others which I had trouble visualising are nowhere near but have turned out interesting all the same. Visually, the film achieves what I set out to do – make something which is hopefully striking, memorable and intriguing. I think the performances from the cast are for the most part very strong and if there are parts where they waver a little, again, that’s where an extra night’s shooting would have benefited. Emotionally I guess I’m too close to it to know if its works completely but the feedback I’ve had suggests it does.

Through this film I met Terry, Anthony and Jenny who not only have become a team of people I have continued to work with and also hope to continue working with, but have also become great friends too. John has also stayed on board as part of the “team” I’m building up around me. Possibly the most important aspects I got out of the film are that it re-energised me as a film maker, gave me more confidence and focused my attention on becoming a film maker again.

Who says it’s all over when you turn 30?

The Making of The Crunch - Part 2

2010-01-20T17:14:00.001-08:00

Hard life on set - Terry, Jim and Dan upstairs at STA
The actors prepare - Jonathan and Jez ready to emote

Jus' like that - the director cracking the whip, even at the make up stage

In this second part of my original making of essay I deal with the actual shoot of the film...

I thought I was going to have a nervous break down. It was about 2pm on the day of the first shoot, an hour or two before people were due to arrive at our house before heading into Brighton and I was freaking out, bursting into tears. I hadn’t directed a film in nearly five years. The last one I had was still unfinished. Last time I had my friends working with me and it was all very casual. Here I was, expecting a bunch of people I’d spent around 30 minutes with each tops to convene at our house, not knowing if we could work together, whether they would like me or whether the whole thing wouldn’t just collapse around my ears. Minda told me it would be fine and eventually I calmed down. At the end of the day, they’d all liked the script, they all believed In the script and me enough to work for just expenses, most of them had met me and no one had gone screaming to the hills as a result (yet) so all I could do was just get on with it.

Of course, one of those things which I hadn’t really thought about was that at any point someone could have phoned in sick. As the cast and crew were so tiny, it only needed one cog to fall off to bring the whole film to a grinding halt. There was a bit of a worry when I couldn’t seem to get hold of Daniel – he was apparently on his way from Bristol, but he was running late. Everyone else was at our house, they’d all been served some veg chilli made by my own fair hand and now we were pretty much set to go…once Daniel turned up. I had no back up plan for doing sound – yep, I had my DAT and old microphone as a back up, but that would have been an immediate step back from the “professionalism” I was trying to achieve with this film. Thankfully he did finally arrive and we all headed off into Brighton around 6pm.

It’s weird. The filming seemed to go by in a blur. I don’t think we rolled the camera until at least 8.30, as we couldn’t really start until Debbie had done the make up and being on her own there wasn’t much anyone could do to help. I think we all chipped in with putting the white make up on the hands and faces but in the end we simply had to wait until she was done and the actors were ready. We also had to dress the office – this involved taking down or covering any STA branding. My friend Rich had supplied me with some of his artwork that I’d had blown up (one of the most expensive things for the shoot) which we had to jigsaw piece together and get up on the walls. Ironically, after all that expense, it’s very rarely seen, with one piece only being seen on the stills we did for the film.

I think the first shot we did was of Victor sitting down in the chair with Simon in the background, sat impishly in the windows. That was Anthony’s idea and I thought it looked absolutely wonderful. Straight away from the lighting Anthony and Jenny had set up through the blinds of the mini office, I knew if nothing else I would have a great looking film.

Jim stayed with us until about 10 to make sure we were all okay then left us to it. The management assumed that he would be with us all the time. Thankfully there were no events which warranted getting him back to the shop, though of course when it came to locking up and setting the alarms I was paranoid that in my exhausted state I’d set them wrong.

I think the shooting plan was to shoot as much stuff as possible in the main office space first and do the opening of Victor asleep upstairs in the staff room at the end of the shoot. We probably had some pizzas around 11pm and therefore had hot pizza and leftover pizza for the relevant shots. We probably did the kitchenette scene that night too, which I remember became difficult due to the cramped space in there – once you had two actors who could barely move about, lights, camera, tripod, somewhere for the clapper person to hide, the director to watch, the camera man and had to somewhere fit in the sound recordist it all became one hell of a squeeze.

We left the first night about 3.30am, with several people staying over at our house. I’m pretty sure I couldn’t sleep, despite being exhausted and I didn’t finally drift off until around 6 in the morning. I was up at 10.30 – not the most refreshing of night’s sleep and with a long night’s shoot ahead of us again. That Saturday was spent hanging around the house – Jez and I sat and watched Switchblade Romance, which was okay, but had a twist ending that made no sense. I remember thinking the effects really reminded me of 80s Italian trash horror films, and in the end it turned out they were done buy Gianetto De Rossi, who did the effects for Lucio Fulci’s more famous works.

Around 5pm we were all back at STA again for the second night’s shoot. This time Minda was back to help us out and she took responsibility to help Debbie as much as she could, as once again nothing could start until the actors were ready. As we were setting up, Anthony set the camera rolling and I vacuumed the floor for the end titles – not the sunrise shot I wanted, but a definite contrast to the rest of the film. Plus I got my cameo too!

We shot the phone conversation using a really ridiculous method – as I really wanted Jonathan and Jez to respond to Liz’s performance, I’d put her lines of dialogue on cd. We were going to play the cd over speakers for the actors to respond to. Unfortunately, the only cd player in the building was in a tiny room downstairs, so we had to have a ridiculous fireman’s chain of myself, Terry and Debbie all pointing back and forth to Minda when she should hit play and pause, as she couldn’t see nor hear when Jonathan had said his lines. We had this dialogue on very loud, which seemed to make the situation even more nonsensical. As STA is on the busy road in Brighton, at the time when we were filming we would have had the usual Saturday night reverie outside. I’m not sure if anyone did look in and wonder what the hell we were doing at that time of night, nor whether anyone could hear the line “Your cock is so big” blasting out of the speakers at high volume. In the end I think this ridiculous method was abandoned and we had the equally odd scenario of watching Jez read out the phone sex dialogue to Jonathan, which also seemed hilarious at times.

I only seem to remember odd things from the rest of the night. At this point Minda and Debbie had gone home, leaving us to it. I was feeling pretty exhausted and my concentration span was low. Jez was pretty much gearing himself up to do his pivotal scene – Victor’s response to the phone chat line and his outburst at Simon – but I was giving him increasingly contradictory information regarding the scene, which I could see was frustrating him. I just couldn’t think straight. Thankfully he gave an absolutely time stopping still performance which had us all really impressed.

It would have helped if time could have stopped still – it was 3am and we still had loads to do. Everyone was flagging considerably by this point – I remember Jenny and Anthony almost losing their temper with each other, purely brought on by exhaustion. Both were struggling to understand what the other wanted and I’m pretty sure I had to try and intervene. Once everyone took a step back it was really clear and suddenly they very quickly set up the shot for the conclusive dialogue between Simon and Victor. I loved this shot, with Simon circling Victor, coming in and out of the shadows to taunt and challenge him. Credit where credit is due, I think it was Jenny who suggested the circling motion.

Although we were shooting chronologically we still had the opening where Victor is awake to do along with the new “coda” ending to the film. This was added close to the shooting date for the film. My friend Mark had read the script, loved it, but really felt it needed something bizarre for the ending of the film…but he didn’t know what. He did suggest a woman, a prostitute, or something coming out of one of the side rooms, suggesting that she’d been there all the time. I resisted changing the film for some time – I certainly didn’t want to add another person to the mix as I thought it was important to keep it as just the two of them - but then thought of something which I felt was bizarre and seemed like an almost post script to the action. So I decided that Victor would somehow metaphysically beam himself back from where he is in the future, dishevelled, a burnt out wreck of a man, looking back at this point where Simon won, or Victor let him win, reflecting and indicating to his “new self” that the events we’ve just watched were a pivotal turning point in his life. Simon is furious for this intrusion and tells him “Get out of here, your time is over old man” (a line I paraphrased from 2000ad – it’s Judge Kraken’s sneer to Judge Dredd in the Necropolis storyline.) Victor’s painful response seems to suggest that this is a timeline which has always been and always will be.

Although most of the people involved in the film felt it didn’t need the “coda” – they’d only just had the lines before we started shooting – I was determined to try and get the footage in the bag. In the end there wasn’t time to dishevel Victor’s make up, not when we still had the opening to shoot, nor did we have any sort of overcoat. Jez put on his thick zip up top, which at least covered the shirt and tie and then just remained in shadow. Anthony set up the shot and said it was the best shot he’d ever done.

So we’d reached the end of the script, but we still had that opening left to shoot, which I was prepared to scrap due to time and exhaustion. Thankfully, mostly everyone told me that we had to shoot it – Jez and Jonathan felt it was an important scene in setting up the relationship between their characters. Instead of dismantling downstairs and heading upstairs there was some supreme resourcefulness going on and it was decided we could very easily shoot in the office space. We used the heavy fire door going into the kitchenette as the entrance to this other room and Victor’s “bed” was simply 5 or 6 bench stools pushed together. He is lying beneath the large window where Simon is sat on the first shot we did, but Anthony’s framing ensures we only ever see what we need to see. It wasn’t what I had envisaged, but it ensured we did have the footage and it did end up looking striking.

This spatial disregard was something which was a heavy feature of the shoot. Although my plan was always to do the split screen comic book panelling I wanted the back up of being able to do a standard edit of the film and I was always concerned about the eye lines between Simon and Victor, especially as where they were sat in reality didn’t translate to necessarily where they supposed to be in the film. Although Anthony did try to put my mind at rest that it was all fine I did remain concerned, simply because I couldn’t picture spatially what he was suggesting. However, his approach made sure that the column in the room that always bothered me didn’t disrupt any of the shots.

We finally finished, packed up and vacuumed and we got back to my house at 6.30 am. Minda got up and we stayed up with some of the guys who left at 8am to get the first train to their respective destinations. I went to bed after they left, meaning I’d been up 22 hours. The next few days I was understandably shaky.

Overall, I was really happy with the shoot. I couldn’t wait to get on with the editing. I told everyone the film would probably be done in 3 months. Even by my own ridiculous underestimations and despite the rule I always try to tell myself (times by three!) it would be much much longer than that before the film was finished.

Shirts and Ties and leave your twenties behind - The Making of The Crunch Part 1

2010-01-20T16:53:00.000-08:00

Make up test with me for Victor
Make up test with me for Simon

Nope, it's not a still from "Give My Regards To Broad Street", it's a test photo from the initial ultraviolet shooting idea.

After a year of rejections for The Crunch on the festival circuit I've decided to upload the whole film to various internet sites, promote it with Facebook and my Son Of Movie Bar contacts and try submitting it to smaller scale film nights in the same manner as Son Of Movie Bar.

With all of this in mind, I thought I'd upload to the blog a slightly edited version of the making of essay I wrote for myself just after the film was finally completed.

This first part deals with the pre-production of the film, accompanied by stills which I've never shown before.

It started with the no budget sci-fi film “Primer.” I didn’t enjoy the film much (though I really should go back and give it another chance) but I did like the image of the men in shirts and ties, just hanging around and talking. So that was the initial image, a two hander drama with men wearing shirts and ties.

At the time of writing it several of my friends had just turned 30 and I was rapidly heading towards it. I know some people have a big issue with turning 30, as if it means their life is over, or if they haven’t achieved everything they wanted before hitting 30 they were somehow a failure. Luckily, I didn’t feel too bad about it, but it definitely influenced the idea for the script – a man in his late 30s, slightly un-shapely, fatigued by life and career, possibly regretful over decisions he has made contrasting with a younger, antagonistic man in his 20s, his carefree lifestyle and exploitive attitude towards his job naturally rubbing the older man up the wrong way – maybe the younger man’s immaturity dismays the elder man, though there’s probably a bitter jealousy, or wishing to be the young man, carefree and full of spirit.

The first draft was very much a straight drama of a night in the office and the younger man antagonising his colleague. I really don’t remember how that draft ended. But while writing the second draft I decided to change the film – rather than it be just a young vs old argument, it suddenly became about sexual politics, or the older man’s lack of sex life contrasting against the young man’s throwaway conquests. Then from that it seemed fun to push it in a “Fight Club” schizophrenic direction – that Victor, cheating on his wife when away from home, justifies it with the persona of Simon, who is out to disrupt the completion of the job and delay the return home. But the lure of the persona, the life that it unlocks for Victor, is too strong and it becomes an internal struggle played out externally as his rational, sensible, possibly staid side fights it out with the impulsive, irresponsible free spirited side.

Along with a script that was written at the same time (“Stranded”) I decided that these were the two films that I would use to get me back into film making, having stopped after shooting my feature film “Gettin’ Some.” Although I still had a 4 year old mini DV camera, DAT recorder and microphone of my own I wanted to try and make these films as professionally as possible. I finally joined the website Shooting People and at the start of 2007 put an advert out looking for cast and crew.

I’d already decided that I wanted this film to be very comic book nature as a definite contrast to anything I’d done in the past. With this in mind, I decided I wanted the actors to have strange make up design on their faces. In retrospect, I wonder if the cover to Randy Newman’s album “Born Again” (an album I’ve never heard!) might have inspired it – it depicts Newman in a suit and tie but with Kiss inspired make up on his face. It seemed a great contrast of stiffness, formality, serious business crossed with the bizarre. So I got together some mood boards – these featured make up from Kiss, the Baseball Furies from “The Warriors”, Kabuki actors, New Romantic/ New Wave musicians like Steve Strange and Gary Numan, Peter Gabriel when he was in Genesis, in particular his make up around “The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway” – and got in touch with Minda’s friend Debbie Harwood, who had a done a theatrical make up and design course.

There was one false start with the make up – another aspect I wanted for the look of the film was an almost pure two tone black/white look. I’d seen stills from the animation film Renaissance and I was also thinking of the comic book art for Sin City, which is all highlights and shadows. This noir look would also add to the comic book feel I wanted but I wasn’t sure how I would be able to achieve such a pure two tone look with little money. A friend had suggested rotoscoping the entire film, but that would have taken forever, much that I loved the idea. I had an attempt using ultraviolet light, with the thinking that this would bring out the whites of the make up and any other whites in the room. We tried it with normal make up on my face, but the only thing which actually glowed was the white sheet of paper on the table – even the white table didn’t glow. Debbie said we would need special UV make up, which was more like greasepaint and was concerned about how we would use it.

In the end the UV idea was scrapped and we went back to designing the make up for the characters. Over one fun evening Debbie practiced on me, with us gradually building up and changing aspects of the make up until we were both satisfied. Although there is a subtext to the make up of the characters (Simon’s is supposed to be cock strutting, beautiful flames and feathers, stylish, curvaceous, sharp whereas Victor’s is supposed to be constricting, blocky, lacking flair…but also disintegrating, mirroring his mental state) the main reason I wanted to do the make up was I thought it would be visually striking. I wanted to create a short hand for people to remember the film and if they recalled it because of the make up, well, at least they hadn’t forgotten it. Or similarly, if someone wanted to see the film after seeing (what I hoped would be) an iconic still from the production then it would have got the response I wanted.

The subtext did carry over to the clothing to some degree – I did want Victor in pinstripes, signifying his “imprisonment” behind bars but I wasn’t able to find him any matching pin stripe trousers. The pin stripe on his shirt in the end was extremely subtle. Simon was supposed to just look super sharp and stylish.

One key element I needed to get in place for the film was the office location. My friend Jim, who at the time worked at the Student Travel Agency in Brighton, had told me there was some space above the first floor of the shop which was used as a staff room/ store room, which I might be able to utilise. When I went to look at this space unfortunately it was completely inadequate, as it was a series of rooms rather than an open office space. (I would come back to use this space on a later film, “Goodnight, Halloween.”) However, the option to use the first floor of the shop was also available – this was an open space but had an unfortunate column blocking some view points. I decided I would use this as a last resort.

Instead, I emailed over 40 estate agents in Brighton. I’d seen many empty office spaces around Brighton town centre, above shops etc, and near to Hove Park was a brand new office complex which was constantly advertising office space available. In my head, this new complex would have been perfect as it had floor to ceiling glass windows looking out. In my email I explained that I had no money for the shoot, though I was willing to put a deposit up to cover any damage. In the end, only two people had the courtesy to reply to me. One of those ended up fizzling out, the other was for a business unit out of town, but there were issues there regarding minimum contracts (2 weeks) and the use of electric, water etc. Of course, the other issues with using an empty space was that it would require total furnishing of desks, computers, general office paraphernalia which would add more cost to the film, which I was worried could get out of control.

Despite still wanting the use of a new office space, in the end I had to use the STA first floor, but logistically it did make some sense – it was already furnished, electric and water etc weren’t an issue and it had a kitchenette area which could be used for a scene in the film as well as feeding and watering the cast and crew.

With regard to the cast I’d had a variety of people get in touch for the roles and invited them to come to our kitchen to audition for the roles. I wasn’t too sure whether people would see this as low rent, or cosy, but in the end it didn’t seem to worry anyone, nor has it since. I struggle to remember all of the people who came, though oddly some of them have turned up again here and there. Alastair Lock, who was a sound recordist/ designer who was a big sci-fi fan tried out for Victor, though I thought he seemed much more different in real life compared to his photo. Jordan Dorn, who I would see years later in a low budget Sussex film that I’d heard of for many years, tried out for Simon, though he was terribly nervous. Terry Drew tried out for Simon and introduced himself as a film maker from nearby Worthing and offered his services of even crewing on the film if he didn’t get the role. I seem to remember one actor using a bouncy ball as a prop for that scene and spent more time chasing it clattering around our kitchen.

In the end I went with Jonathan Laury for Simon – oddly, Jonathan knew of me already. He walked into our kitchen and declared that he knew me from my day job. Turns out he worked part time at Longplayer, a shop I called on at the time as part of my job. He was in a catch 22 situation – he’d just come out of drama school but had no showreel, but as he couldn’t get the work to build up a showreel as he didn’t have a showreel! It certainly wasn’t a sympathy vote that got him the job, he was genuinely the best applicant. Victor’s role went to Jez Foster, whose showreel I had seen and the image of him as a football manager in a huge over coat seemed to have stuck with me. Jez seemed to really capture the frustration and fear of Victor’s character. In the end, Terry did come back to crew where he was an absolute godsend and has gone on to become a great friend and collaborator.

I contacted an actress in London (Jenny Evans) who I’d recently got back in touch with and asked if she would do the voice of Javinia. As she’d already recently played a similar role she declined, but did recommend a friend of hers for the role. So I drove off to somewhere in suburban London to meet Liz, who was back living with her mum at the time, to get her to record the phone sex dialogue. It was very odd – a quiet, suburban area and home, Liz’s mum in the kitchen next door making cups of tea while her daughter reads these ridiculous filthy lines. Somehow it probably perfectly reflects some of the reality of the phone sex industry. I took some photos of her in the lounge pulling over the top poses to cut and paste onto a page of phone sex adverts from a tabloid paper.

I had a fair few people interested in shooting the film, especially when I said I was looking for a noir/comic book/ two tone look on my advert. Several directors of photography got in touch, some with interesting, very slick showreels but none seemed to jump out as having an eye for what I wanted. As another way of keeping costs down, I was keen to try and find someone who had their own camera and few of them had access to equipment for free or at a reduced rate. I was contacted by Anthony Gurner who worked with his partner Jenny Ray and he sent some links to his work which was kicking around on myspace. It wasn’t on a flashy website nor was it a flashy showreel, but the work was fun and most importantly showed a dynamism which I felt would work when applied to the comic book style of The Crunch. He also had his own camera!

We agreed to meet up in Brighton to discuss the film and while walking up to the pub to arrive early I passed a couple in the street, the girl had red hair, and there was something about the pair but I didn’t know what. Funnily enough, it turned out that they were Anthony and Jenny. Jenny was wearing a Rufus Wainwright – “Want One” t-shirt and Anthony had the latest issue of Edge magazine with him, so I figured it shouldn’t be too hard for me to get on with them! I had some storyboard scribbles that I had with me and explained how I wanted to have multiple panels of frames on the screen at each time. I liked what they had to say, I liked them and I liked their work. Result.

Filling in the final gaps – Daniel Yeoman was a sound recordist/ designer living in Bristol who got in touch and oddly on his CV I spotted that he’d recently worked with my friend Dave Lilley on his horror short “The Hand.” He had his own equipment and he got the job of sound recordist. My girlfriend (now wife) Minda wasn’t going to be around for the first night’s filming but would be there to help out on the second and Jim was potentially free briefly on the first night. Terry would be there all the time too.

We hired the lights and monitor from Nick, a little crumpled face man at Impact Media Services near to Hove station. He’d converted some Hi 8 tapes to DV for me a year ago and he seemed cheaper than most of the places in the centre of Brighton, who were much slicker professional places…and with much slicker professional prices too!

All the pieces seemed to be in place for the shoot!

Mixed Bizness

2009-11-19T14:39:00.000-08:00

It has been a while since I've written anything for this blog which has really been down to chaotic things in my personal life - a move of house, the first for 5 years, is one such looming aspect. I've yet to tackle my giant amount of vinyl albums, so let's ignore that for a while (like I have been!)

Since my last posts in September (and the post I wrote below, but never uploaded) there's been various developments, some good, some bad...

Firstly, The Crunch has been rejected from every festival I'd entered it to, which I think was around 16 in total. I was hoping to have entered some more but I just don't have the time right now and I guess the constant rejections are starting to hit home now. I was hoping the European festivals would have been a little more welcoming, but that doesn't seem to be the case. I was also hoping Cinecity in Brighton might have supported it, but in the end I didn't even get a rejection email from them - I guess I knew I'd been rejected when Terry informed me his short had been selected for screening yet I'd heard nothing. Considering pretty much every other festival has emailed a standard rejection email, it's seems a bit poor that Cinecity couldn't at least do the same courtesy. (My friend Nick is attending a screening night and told me he'd seen a couple of the films they're showing already - apparently they are of extremely high quality, so the competition must have been extremely tough.)

These rejections are simply re-enforcing my thoughts about The Crunch - it's simply not good enough. For a festival to commit 20 minutes of their programme time to a film, it better be a lean, impressive 20 minutes and The Crunch obviously doesn't fit that bill. I know there continues to be issues with the sound, which was one reason I was hoping a subtitled version would have worked better in Europe, and I do concede that the running time is too long - perhaps if it was 15 minutes long it would be better for the viewer. But as my first film in years, it felt like I should let the film be the length that I wanted it to be, rather than what would fit a festival criteria better. So I've only myself to blame for that.

Terry did make a suggestion regarding the poor sound - distort the dialogue to buggery and make the whole soundtrack completely nuts, then have the film subtitled anyway as a stylistic decision. It's not a bad idea, but we no longer have the individual sound elements, so it would involved distorting the music too. Part of me also doesn't want to carry on tweaking on this film any longer - it's over 2 and a half years since I shot it and my film life is likely to end up being a collection of never complete pieces of work if I don't draw a line somewhere.

So, I'll try and submit it to some more festivals, but I think realistically it's just not going to happen with the film and, of course, there will come a certain time where it's completion date will have it regarded as old hat and no festival will touch it anyway. I think the way forward will be to have it screened at the film nights in pubs etc up and down the country (assuming they'll take it too) much like the night I co-run. At least it might get a public airing that way.

From bad to good - Terry and I have completed the assemble edit of Stranded, which towards the end was a headache and a half as a result of the way the final shooting scene was shot 4 months apart. But out of all the films I've made, this is the first one where I haven't felt utterly disheartened by the assemble edit - there's a definite slickness to the film, which I put down to Anthony's cinematography and Terry's eye for editing, which has for the most part resulted in a smooth film. My wife praised the film even at this stage, saying it looks great and it does have a certain undeniable atmosphere to it, even without the music and sound mix.

This is all encouraging - time pending we're hoping to have a final edit locked down before the end of the year and we both have ideas where we can shave minutes from the film and perhaps even play with the running order to some extent, all of which is exciting to me as I've usually slavishly followed the running order of the script, usually to the detriment of the final film.

Assuming we can get this final edit to the necessary people for the next stage, I'm hoping I might have a finished film for March/ April time, which would be wonderful.

Positively, I've also heard back from Nick regarding the animation effects for Goodnight, Halloween - he's hoping to finally crack on with it and get all of his work done and dusted before Christmas, which will leave the final day's shoot still to do (hopefully again around March time.)

And on another positive note, John the sound designer finally got the first few parts of Gettin Some and we went through it together. He hadn't realised the film was a feature film - oops - but doesn't seem too put off by it. Fingers crossed that I can finally lay that film to rest next year.

Best to even this out before it gets all too happy clappy from this blog - my proposal to Screen South was turned down flat, as was Terry's. Oddly, what with the rejections to The Crunch, it didn't seem to bother me that much - water off a duck's back now I guess. My proposal is still a film which I could make on my own if I wanted - possibly not to the same level as it would be with some decent funding - but it's not completely beyond my means, so hopefully I may look into making it next year if possible.

There were aspects from the Screen South open day which bugged me at the time though - one in particular, which I keep boring people with, was the feeling that sometimes the last people they want to support with film funding is the people who already make films. At the opening to the day they asked for a show of hands for writers, directors, writer/ directors, producers...then asked for people from other media - painters, photographers, video games designers. A few hands went up and there seemed to be a satisfied reaction to this from Screen South, giving the impression that perhaps they were more interested in supporting people from other disciplines over those who already make films. This is fine in theory, but the question I keep asking if this is the case, is where's the funding opportunity for me as a film maker to go and make a video game? Oh, there isn't one. Dandy.

Now I'm not suggesting for a minute that a video game designer's submission would be approved over mine just because of my background - I'd like to have enough faith in the funding scheme that it does in the end come down to supporting the best idea, regardless of background, but I will be looking out for who and what films Screen South do end up supporting on this year's scheme.

Another aspect of the day which has stuck with me was Ben Blaine's contribution to the discussion panel. Ben is Shooting People's official blogger, who on the Shooting People website encouragingly states that if you've made a film, he wants to see it, which gives an impression of a desire to support film makers at all levels of ability.

I had some communication with Ben as a result of this request, when I contacted him with a view to sending a copy of The Crunch. His reply wasn't massively encouraging - he didn't like the teaser trailer for the film much, stating that the idea of watching 19 minutes of that film chilled his blood. Undeterred I popped the film in the post to him and just when I assumed that was that he sent a reply. He stated he would be honest, as most people wouldn't, and although the feedback initially seemed destructive over time I have accepted what really are his personal criticisms and some, such as his negative comment regarding the sound, I'm all in agreement with.

They asked Ben a question regarding short films, which I'm pretty sure was basically "What things don't you like in short films?" His blunt answer was simply "Short films." He explained that the majority of short films are utterly awful and a complete waste of his time - by example, he stated that standing on a train platform for ten minutes was a better use of his time than some films he's seen.

I just found this attitude really sad and destructive. Running Son Of Movie Bar I get sent films, some of which I don't personally like, some of which I do, but I knew this was always going to be the case. Back when I used to attend the Bang and Trampoline film events in Nottingham, there would always be films which you felt were a waste of time, but it still felt important to support the night. With Son Of Movie Bar, I do like to justify every screening in my head by finding at least one element that I can say I genuinely like - it may just be one shot, or one line of dialogue, or the music, or locations, but usually I can find something which I could hold up and say "That's what I like in it and why we're showing it." I've always said this attitude comes from Alex Cox and his much missed Moviedrome series on BBC2, where he openly admitted that not all of the films they showed were great, but there was always some element of them which made them worth seeing.

Every film maker has to start somewhere - the majority of material we show at Son Of Movie Bar is usually very high and I'd actually rather be showing films with lower production values, as the night is supposed to be aimed at non professionals and amateur film makers, some of which I worry are scared off by the quality of some of the films we show. But I really want to encourage anyone making films to keep at it - there was something depressing about Ben's attitude, I could imagine him saying that some people shouldn't be allowed to make films.

Maybe my attitude is too primary school teacher-ish - everyone should be encouraged to have a go, whether they're any good or not - and perhaps this leads to encouraging bad film makers to continue making bad films...Perhaps I just don't know if I'm a particularly good film maker myself so don't feel in a position where I feel I can judge anyone else's work. Perhaps Ben feels he is already in that position from his short film work, who knows?

Its not where you've been, it's where you're going

2009-11-19T14:34:00.001-08:00

This is a post I originally wrote on the 13th of October, but never got around to uploading...there's some bits regarding the below I'll be posting about and updating on next...

I really shouldn’t be writing this. I should be working on a film proposal.

The deadline for the Screen South Digital Shorts scheme closes in a week and a half. I’d always planned to have something ready well in advance and have time to get feedback from some people, rework it, hone it…but that hasn’t happened.

Perhaps in a way, my momentum has been lost after going to a Screen South open day. There was a very good lecture from a script editor, who talked about scripts (obviously.) She reiterated some points I’ve come across before, mostly in Blake Snyder’s “Saves The Cat” – the idea of the obvious “conscious” desires of the characters, and the underlying “subconscious” desires, which is what the characters need to attain by the end of the film (or equally not, perhaps…)

It made me realise that the idea I’d had gestating in my head for several months was totally half baked – it had a beginning (I think), it had an ending (I think) but the middle really was a series of repetitious events which I realise now didn’t help to move the story along. This realisation was difficult, as it means I need to go back and figure out the story again.

This is one of the hardest parts of writing, that the story which may come out of the tweaks and frustration may not be the one you actually set out to write, or even wanted to write. I worry I may be in that territory with this film.

In the last few days I’ve tried to create a stronger backstory for the characters and the relationship between the father and daughter and somewhere along the way the film has changed, from a melancholic character piece of a lonely old man, to a morality play. How do I feel about this? I’m not sure…

In the last few months The Crunch has been dismissed from most of the film festivals I’ve entered it to. There’s still a couple I’m waiting to hear from, but as my mate Terry has already heard back from one of those festivals successfully with his film (which is brilliant news) I’m assuming The Crunch hasn’t made the bill. Which has made me worry that The Crunch could possibly get the same response from most festivals and that the old issues still remain, that it’s too long and it possibly doesn’t work. As a flashy piece of film making, with the lighting, make up and editing, it’s possibly got an initial wow factor, but after that it’s perhaps unsatisfying.

Perhaps it’s this at the back of my mind which is forcing me to make this Screen South proposal work, even if it’s at the detriment of the story I wanted to tell, as I can’t see how that story would fit into Screen South’s parameters. Maybe there is a way, but I just don’t have the time now to figure it out. Whenever I’ve given the film more and more thought, the daughter has become an increasingly important character, reducing the film from being a character piece focussed mostly on her father.

Still, I think this process can only be beneficial in the long run – I have to accept changes, I have to accept that nothing in film making is ever concrete. Maybe it’s more a plate of mashed potato, it’s solid enough, but can be constantly shifted in to many shapes.

This seems to fit my feelings towards Stranded, which Terry and I have finally started editing the final storyline. With the first scene (or the 3rd scene in the film) edited, I’m already looking at the film differently, that perhaps the current opening isn’t the strongest, either visually, performance wise or scripting. Once we’ve got the film assembled in the script running order, I think we will need to take a look at it and perhaps break some scenes down in to two. I’m reluctant to reduce this film to 30 second sound bite scenes, as that seems to make it a touch soap opera-esque, but at the end of the day that’s probably what audiences feel more comfortable with these days.

Similarly, should I get to shoot the Screen South proposal, in my head I plan to shoot it as a very modern film. What do I mean by this? The best example I can think of would be “Quantum Of Solace” – I found the film interesting, not a complete success, but I didn’t dislike it. There seems to be many many different camera angles, with very rapid cuts – I felt like it had been made for people with attention deficit disorder, which is probably reflective of modern film audiences. It’s not my style as such, but I think it would be good for me to attempt a film in this style.

Okay, I best get back on with that proposal. All I seem to have right now since abandoning my original 1 and a half page story outline (which needs to be 1 page) is a series of snippet lines about the characters. Not only have I got to get this done, but also a director’s statement and a showreel, where they want to see that I can direct a narrative. Unfortunately the only modern film I have to show for that is The Crunch. Yikes.

My mind floats free (for a short while)

2009-09-28T15:30:00.000-07:00

I've usually found that when I go on holiday I suddenly have a fair few ideas for films. Maybe it's being away from work and not having my brain daily boiling away in my kettle head. But last week's holiday to Sardinia with my wife didn't result in the flash of ideas I expected. Not in the usual way.

I'm in the process of submitting a short film idea to the Screen South Digital Shorts scheme - its the first time I've applied for funding since the sorry fiasco of applying to the misleadingly named National Lottery "Awards For All" scheme nearly 10 years ago. So I think I have a short which I hope is moving and artistically valid and falls within the budget parameters. Figuring I have to raise my head above the parapet and actually get myself known at the arts funding organisations I've decided to go ahead and submit it, and if it doesn't work, its one which in theory I would be able to make myself no budget styley. (On an aside, the idea that I'd really love to do - a comic book shoot out - just wouldn't get past them...and probably would cost too much at the minimum industry pay rates they require for the production.)

So I spent an afternoon battling with the application thought process during one of the few sunny hours we got on the beach. I fought with the 25 word synopsis, initially trying to create a logline, then decided it should be the story in 25 words that they're asking for then was left hoping that Screen South know exactly what they mean by asking for such a short synopsis and really aren't looking for some snappy logline. With this battle called a truce (though kinda happy with my summation) I moved onto the one page story outline...a page and a half later, it was still missing my notes about the film and what I wanted it to achieve. Then with imminent rain clouds and a depleted battery that was the end of this writing stint...and as I'd brought the wrong travel adaptor, the end of any writing stint on the laptop.

This resulted in the majority of the holiday being spent working my way through a batch of sci-fi books and most of our time being stuck in our hotel room as late summer thunderstorms pounded Bosa. Neither of us were sleeping too well - very uncomfortable beds, an air conditioning unit which sounded like a jet engine taking off (naturally the room was too warm without it, but not much colder with it...) and the endless interruption from a git of a mosquito who over several nights must have increased its body mass 20 times from feeding out of me. All of this resulted in me having several short, sharp dreams...one of particular striking note had me dreaming that my grandma had died, which resulted in a swift text to check she was okay.

Somewhere in my end this element of rain, of endless water pounding away outside, can't have been too far from the forefront of my mind during the night., which resulted in me having a dream about a J-horror film. I can't remember if I was watching the opening sequence, or a trailer, but I thought it was really creepy. Then suddenly there was a very loud CRACK in the room. Both my wife and I woke up immediately and a check of the room revealed nothing apparently wrong, so we went back to an even more uneasy night's sleep.*

The next morning the explanation of the noise appeared to be a panel from the hotel's summer "stage" being blown over by the high winds. (This stage seemed to particularly sum up the melancholic atmosphere of Bosa at the end of the summer season - it had "Summer 2009" painted upon, reminding my wife of Dirty Dancing - it felt like a sad relic of a summer passed. I really wanted to get a photo of it, empty and finished with for the year, but with the wind working its power I didn't get my photo in time.) So simple enough...but the J-horror idea stayed with me and although not fully fleshed out, I managed to figure out the premise and the amount of characters involved. Hopefully (here's the rub) I'll get chance to write it down some day.

Oddly, I also got a title from the dream - I'm pretty sure it was Giyarbushin, which doesn't seem to mean anything according the internet, so it's some East Asian-ish word my brain obviously thought up. But as the days have gone by, I can't forget the ludicrous title, nor the creepiness of the film.

So I've come back, not with the usual handful of ideas courtesy of my un-tethered brain, but just the one. But hopefully one which could really work. If only I had the time.

*On yet another of my tiresome asides, this scenario was also reminiscent of something which happened one night at home when we were both awakened by a sound which just didn't belong in our house - another scenario which I'm hoping I could make into a quick 3 minute creepy short film.

Two Sides Of The Same Coin

2009-09-06T15:40:00.000-07:00

It's been a hectic few weeks of film stuff and various things in my personal life, the midpoint of which seemed to be this weekend, when we finally shot the final footage for my short film Stranded, closing a chapter on a very difficult film to shoot, one which at times I was tempted to abandon.

The run up to this weekend was as always spent checking the weather courtesy of www.metcheck.com, which is a godsend as it allows you to check pretty far in advance, though in all honesty no weatherman would have probably been able to predict the weather in the last week - from the window I look out on as I write this I've seen blazing sun during the middle of the heaviest downpour, grey derelict skies which belong more in late November than early September and howling winds. All in the space of an hour.

So it was with some trepidation that I approached this weekend, but as long as the weather wasn't raining, that was a green light to me.

I don't know what to say about the shoot - half of it was a great joy, the other half was difficult, stressful and pretty miserable for me.

The shoot started really well despite some minor issues - Anthony, the DOP, had forgotten his clapper so we had to use a quick makeshift chalk one which he had with him. He'd also accidentally left the tapes at home, but luckily had one with 40 minutes of running time left on it which we could use to make a start while Jenny, his partner, quickly whizzed back to the house in the car.

It was taking longer than I'd realised, which wasn't down to the usual technical fluffs, actors' fluffs or general problems in the background, as before I knew it we'd passed midday. In some ways, it was one of the easiest shoots I'd done - the actors were absolutely brilliant - they knew their lines inside out and consistently delivered good performances, which made my life much easier. At times, I felt like a bit of a fifth wheel as there wasn't that much direction I felt I needed to add. The actress, Jan Hargreaves, paid me a nice complement, saying that it doesn't need much direction because the dialogue was written so well and it flowed in its own way.

As a crew, we were all comfortable with each other now, being that this was the for some people the 7th day shoot we'd done together and we were working well together as always, which again Jan observed, expressing that we were a good unit together.

There was a scene in the script which called for the character of Dugald to go and buy ice creams from an ice cream van. I had no idea if we'd be able to find an ice cream van, or how we'd be able to get one for the shoot, and was expecting to strangely never actually show the van. Luckily, Debbie, my friend and make up artist, knows anyone and everyone and anything...she's connected to so many people and had a friend who owned an ice cream van. Sharon pulled up at 1pm, while we were in the middle of shooting the second scene, but had to leave at 2pm, which left us 25 minutes to get 4 shots at the van.

Luckily we managed to get them and then at 2pm broke for dinner. While eating our dinner, Anthony made the point that we should shoot the last scene next, while it was still bright and sunny. His main reason for raising this was we'd already shot some of the last scene back in late May, where Dugald scuffles with the character Chad, resulting in ice cream being shoved in Dugald's face. I was convinced we'd be okay.

I was wrong. We started back to work, shooting the end of the next scene first, as we'd have to move down to the shore for the beginning of the scene. Already clouds were rolling in, killing the bright blazing sunlight we'd been shooting in up until this point - a light which matched the majority of the rest of the entire film. Not only did the lack of sunlight create lighting issues, but the temperature dropped on the beach and the wind picked up speed, creating difficult and uncomfortable shooting conditions. The wind created not only problems for sound, but also in making ourselves heard, which did not help to keep the lines of communication open when people are getting cold, tired and irritable.

We then had to change the script around, as it called for Gwyneth (played by Jan) to kick around in the shoreline of the sea, splashing water around. The sea was extremely choppy and far too violent to attempt to do this and down on the shoreline the wind was ten times stronger than where we were further up the beach. I was also concerned for Jan's health throughout the whole shoot - she'd recently been suffering from a chest infection, which at one point had also put doubt on the viability of shooting and still would suffer from a coughing fit. We all did our best to ensure that she was comfortable and kept as warm as possible, removing her coat only when we were ready to roll and the shot called for it. Asking her to splash around in the water in her condition was a complete no-no.

Instead, the actor's made the suggestion of Gwyneth simply revelling in the sea air and dancing on the spot, which seemed a fine idea though as I write this, I realise it doesn't make any sense as she previously stated her intentions to go for a paddle...but as she's playing a woman suffering from dementia, maybe that gives me an artistic get out of jail card! The two shots of this sequence seemed especially difficult with the conditions and as we were pretending that we were stood at the sea's edge, it required some fudging of eyeline and positions, which Jan struggled to grasp (as did I - whenever Anthony does things like that, I have faith in him that he knows it will cut together in a logical geography.)

This left the final sequence to shoot and a tough call to make. Anthony felt it was pretty much worthless to carry on shooting, as any footage we shot just would not match the Chad footage shot several months ago. Gus, one of the assistants on the production and a fellow film making friend, felt that we should carry on regardless. I was concerned for Jan, worried that she was having an attitude of not wanting to let the side down, even though she may have been in a worse way than we thought. Someone pointed out that if she said was up for continuing filming, then it was her who had made that decision.

Anthony suggested some camera angles we could attempt to shoot from in an attempt to mask the weather change, but it would mostly have to be close ups. I didn't know what to do - I really wished someone else could have made a decision for me. The other thoughts which were at the forefront of my mind were when or if I'd be able to reschedule for, if at all. The prospect of still not having this film in the can this year was demoralising and, frankly, upsetting, as I'd found the organisation of the film to be a logistical nightmare.

In the end, we decided to go for it. We struggled through with the remaining dialogue, including the climatic dialogue between Dugald and Gwyneth, which was touchingly performed by both of the actors, and another difficult tense moment where we were all struggling to make ourselves heard on how best to do a shot to match the previous Chad footage, but we finished Jan's shots and filmed the last shot of this storyline as she walked back to the car to get warm.

Which left us to do "the money shot", where Dugald has an ice cream shoved in his face in a scuffle with Chad. Two shots were done here, a mid to close up and then the final close up of Dugald's face as the ice cream is shoved in. I think we were all surprised by how much the ice cream splattered on Courtney's face and gave unfortunate concerns to yet more continuity errors for the climatic dialogue already shot. In retrospect, I'm also concerned we've shot the mid to close up on the wrong side of the Chad shemp's shoulders. Continuity errors on continuity errors.

But it was done. In a way, the final shot of the shoot summed up most of the making of this film - a mess. This morning I had a terrible post shoot comedown, not knowing if any of the last scene would work. I've got absolute faith in the footage before the weather turned, but who knows how the overcast footage will look when slotted in between the sunnier footage of the other already edited sequences. As the sort of climax to events, I'm not sure if it will work.

The shoot for Stranded seemed to match the title of the film - at times it felt completely stuck. I wrote the film around August 2006, always with a view that alongside The Crunch it would be my return to film making. After shooting The Crunch in March 2007, I intended to get Stranded in the can before the end of the year. Casting took place frenetically over August and into September, in the hope of shooting in October before British summertime ended. This idea was quashed when the actor playing Chad informed me he wasn't available for that week in October, so that resulted in the production shutting up shop until the following spring.

Around June last year we shot the first day, which was the storyline covering Chad and his brother on the beach. The next day we were scheduled to shoot the Lorna and Amelia storyline, but we got to the location, managed one shot of Chad before the heavens opened and the shoot was abandoned. Ironically around this time my original Dugald informed he was unavailable for some time, which resorted in me taking the decision to recast him with Courtney, who we shot with this weekend, meaning in the end the recast hadn't been necessary (though in a way, I'm glad events did turn out this way, as Courtney was a much better match for the role.) We didn't manage to get together again until early August, when we finally got the Lorna and Amelia storyline in the can, but with my wedding approaching I had to take the decision to abandon shooting for the rest of the year, putting the film back yet again to the following spring.

This year logistical problems reared their head, making it impossible for all 3 actors to be available on the same date, resorting in us taking the unfortunate decision to shoot the Chad elements of the final storyline on their own, crossing our fingers tightly that it would cut together. Following this, with the final shoot set to be just two weeks away, my original Gwyneth told me that she had a role in a potential long term play...and that her "creative juices" for my film had long run dry - galling, but understandable as she'd been cast in the film for over 18 months and had yet to shoot her scenes, but damning with just two weeks notice before shooting.

Efforts to recast Gwyneth in the two week timeframe were fruitless and realistically would have been impossible. Luckily Jan came on board thanks to Courtney's recommendation. But then the availability of crew put the film back to early September.

Not only this, but we've had issues with bad sound on the initial shooting day due to issues with mics. We've also had to use creative editing to get around some problems with a performance, which feels like it has compromised the film, taking it further away from what it was intended to be.

I hope Terry and I can make the film work in the edit. I'm aware that music will play a key factor in signposting our emotions when watching a film like this, so that really will be pivotal. It may have to fill in some of the blanks in the way I've been forced to tell the story. After the struggle it feels like I've been through to finish this film, I just hope it's worth it and something that actually moves an audience comes out of it all.

First Step

2009-08-12T15:21:00.000-07:00

My film making friend Paul Macauley wrote an interesting blog on his website regarding first drafts. You can read it here...

http://www.paulmacauley.net/?p=483

Paul makes the point that first drafts seem to be always regarded as a bit rubbish, but why should that be? Why can't the first draft of a script be something super?

Part of this reminds me of the philosophy which Julian Cope documents in his amazing book "Repossessed" (even if you have no interest in Julian Cope and his music, you should still read his books Head On and Repossessed - they are very funny, very entertaining and just such good fun.) By the late 80s, Copey had become a bit sick of spending weeks in studios recording his albums. He started to believe there was something pure and unconscious which comes out of the first take of a recording and so more often that not went with this approach with his subsequent albums.

Now, I'm not saying that this is probably a good philosophy to go with for a film script - there's many logistics and artistic issues which really should be sorted out before the hell of organising a shoot goes ahead - but I can see how it can tie into what Paul is suggesting.

Just this weekend I've finally finished the first draft of "The Reprise", a feature film which myself and film making friend Gus are hopefully planning on raising financing for. I wasn't planning on letting several people read this first draft, as when I was writing it I was convinced it was pretty awful. Most of the dialogue (of which there was a lot) I felt was placeholder dialogue. But I read through the first draft and I didn't think it was that bad...I figured it would be worth getting feedback on it at this stage.

Now, I didn't set out to write an awful first draft - just a feature length script is a very large beast and its often difficult to see two points at one time, nevermind from start to beginning. So I thought the best thing to do would be to just start the damn thing, get past that first page stumbling block and get on with it, knowing full well that there will be much wrong with it. This isn't a case of writing and fixing later, perhaps it's a more of "come out in the wash" approach - many aspects came to me in the middle of writing a particular scene, or after knocking the writing on the head for the night. None of this would have happened if I hadn't just made a start. If I'd got completely hung up on every aspect of this first draft there's a very good chance I'd never have finished it.

There is much wrong with this first draft - I picked up on several points, my wife picked up on several more, some so facepalmingly obvious its embarrassing. I'm still awaiting on feedback from the others.

Surprisingly though I'm really keen to get on with the next draft now, whereas I was telling myself I would need to take a break, do some research, watch comparative films and read their scripts. I still want to do this stuff, but I am honestly surprised how keen I am to throw myself back into another draft, especially as this first draft has felt like one of the most difficult things I've ever written. Usually my writing does seem to come pretty effortlessly, that I can see ahead of where I'm going (and usually too far ahead for me to type quick enough!) But with this script, it wasn't easy at all. It's still something which gives me some doubts about the project, that perhaps my brain is trying to tell me I'm barking for barking up that particular tree.

I'll also admit I've been very lazy with some aspects of this first draft - definitely a Polyfilla attitude of slapping stuff in to plug gaps. But it's got me to the end, where I can stand back and finally see from start to finish and all the bits inbetween and start to make preparations for fixing the script up properly.

So, I think that regardless of whether the first draft is there or not, the act of just finishing that first draft, of getting past not just that frightening ghostly blank first page, but also that terrifying psychological fear of never completing a first draft is something to celebrate. Don't worry about the mistakes, laugh and face palm yourself at that stupid omission, at that inconsistent behaviour. Because you can't fix something which isn't there.

I'm looking forward to getting my hands dirty and fixing my first step with "The Reprise." And I'm happy to have a bad draft to show me where to go next.

Objects In The Rear View Mirror Appear Closer Than They Are

2009-08-12T14:42:00.000-07:00

I joined Facebook over two years ago now. Despite getting several requests from friends, there was one reason alone that I joined, which was a curiosity case...

My unfinished feature film, "Gettin' Some" was actually shot twice. Well, that's an exaggeration - I thought we shot about a fifth of the film before everything went a big wrong with a variety of things and it all ground to a halt. When the dust settled and we picked up the pieces it was with a new cameraman (one of my best friends Mark, who had already starred in "Past. Present. Future." listed below) and in some cases some of the roles were recast.

After I'd finished, or abandoned shooting on the v2 of the film, I moved to Brighton with my girlfriend. It must have been in the first six months of us living here when I got a call from a guy called Matt Mugridge (also known as Matt Herbert, one of them was his stage name...I think the latter.) Matt had originally played the role of Vince in the film, but been recast when he followed the original cameraman on to some proposed projects which never happened, and the full sorry story of what he went through with that business and creative partner can't really be repeated here, though I believe it did end up with going to the small claims court...

Anyway, Matt contacted me asking if I still had the original footage as he was keen to edit it together - at the time, he was still undecided whether to continue pursuing acting as a career, or concentrate on music and teaching guitar. He really wanted to get a showreel together and use the footage we shot.

At the time I had no use for the footage and was happy to send it to him - in fact, I thought it would be good opportunity to see the footage properly edited together, as I had no access to editing equipment. Unfortunately the DAT sound tapes from this period were long gone - I'm not even sure if I ever got them back from my original sound crew (but that is also another story, for another time.)

So I sent him the tapes...and never heard from him again.

Skip forwards several years later - my edit, for what it's worth, of "Gettin' Some v2" is done, but it's still stuck in grading/ sound mix/ sound design hell, which is the state it unfortunately still resides in. Around this time I begin thinking about the package I want to put together for the dvd for the people involved in the film - apart from the obvious stills and deleted scenes, I really wanted to include the original footage, because it's part of the big story of making the film.

So, I joined Facebook and did a search for Matt and there was a picture which resembled him, sat with a guitar in his lap. After contacting him it turned out it was indeed him and that he'd come across some dv tapes in his garage just the other day, which he assumed must be the footage.

Without going into details, it's been a laborious process of getting the tapes back from Matt, but last Monday we met up, as he was down in the south visiting and I finally got some tapes back. I say some, because I assumed we did shoot across at least 6 tapes, but he only had 4, or at least 4 that he had come across, to give me. I can't believe that I've finally got them back.

Out of all the films I've made or been involved in, there's a handful which I don't have. Really it was college group work along with the very first film myself and Mark made messing around in his bedroom during the school holidays ("The Adventures of Agent 009.5 and Fez Head" - amazing, eh?) There was one college project where we drove out into a village in Derbyshire and were told to film footage of the village and area, with a view of combining it with some studio footage to be filmed the following week at the studio set up in Ilkeston College (my course was run in conjunction with that college.) During the field trip I started to get some ideas of what we could do, so wrote a pisstake travel show, a bit like "Wish You Were Here", with one of the presenters visiting the area. As no one else had any ideas what to do, we all went with my script and I sorrowfully had my acting talents on display again as the camp, over the top presenter who had visited the village. I'm sure its awful now, but even so, I wish I had a copy of it.

It's going to be very strange viewing this footage from "Gettin' Some" after all this time - I think the last time I viewed it was at the beginning of v2, when Mark watched the footage with me, declared that he didn't like it, considering it lazy, and wanted to reshoot the whole lot. At the time I was hoping we could have used some of it, just to save redoing it all. I'm not sure if Mark primarily didn't want to share a credit, that the original inferior stuff could be seen as being credited to him, but we did indeed reshoot it all. Ironically, one of the scenes I was keen to keep as it had no issues with regard to casting continuity was actually reshot by myself after he'd left the project to go to the National Film and Television School. There was one scene in particular which followed the script accurately, but for the reshoot the scene had to be rewritten to remove 3 characters from the scene, due to the actors either no longer being available or just to make the logistics easier.

Another reason that I wanted the tapes was that I've written a huge making of document about the making of the film, from it's origins to the endless post production nightmare that it continues to be in to this day (as you can imagine, the tail end of the story isn't particularly riveting.) I don't have a tape log of what we shot originally, nor can I remember exactly what we did and didn't shoot. I'm hoping these tapes will jog my memory...failing that, there is a possibility that I would still have the VHS to VHS edited footage that I showed Mark still on a tape somewhere...I'm really not sure. But hopefully these tapes will finally fill in the blanks of the making of, I can at last edit the footage to include on the dvd and help bang another nail in the coffin of "Gettin' Some."

You Say It Best When You Saying Nothing At All

2009-07-20T04:33:00.000-07:00

Titling a post after a song covered by Ronan Keating isn't the best start to a blog...bare with me!

I met up with a film making friend last week, who as ever is bashing his head against a brick wall with frustration at how slow things move. He's made a big effort to try and make links with actors groups in his area, from colleges with performing arts courses to amateur dramatics groups, but doesn't seem to be getting much of a response back.

He made the joke about using Lego men or something else instead, as they won't let him down or have a busy schedule that he would have to film around, which led us on to the use of puppets.

I used a puppet in my feature film, Gettin' Some, which does sound out of place in a slice of life/ grounded in reality film. The puppet was originally made for a scene where Alex, the female lead, goes on a date with a guy called Jason, who saw himself as a real Liam Gallagher geezer. Throughout the date Alex would imagine Jason literally as a muppet, spouting his geezer speak.

The character of Jason was set to reappear later in the film in a few scenes, where it's revealed he's a friend of the second group of friends the film follows. But the actor who played Jason let us down - he failed to turn up for a big shoot and when I spoke to him he didn't seem too concerned about leaving us in the shit. It was the equivalent of getting a don'tgiveafuck shrug down a telephone line...oddly in keeping with the character he played.

We thought of some ideas, I even considered doing the role then reshooting his footage from the date, before we struck on the brilliant idea of recasting the actor with the muppet - we already had the date footage, nothing else had yet been shot that involved the character and we could easily redub the muppet dialogue, removing the actor who let us down from the entire production.

The muppet was a hit during the shoot - everyone thought it was hilarious and the actors brilliantly played it completely straight. I find this odd stroke of misfortune, or luck (depending on your perspective) one of the best aspects of the final film.

Which led me on to telling my friend about a film I saw at Movie Bar, before I took over the running of the night. The Mathematician is a film by Nathan Gregg and, as far as I remember, seemed to follow a scholar who is struggling with a math's problem and his life goes off the rails.

I thought it was amazing. And its online here:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=685175968224680247

The first half of the film was told entirely with cuddly toys and puppets and as a result, I thought it was much more emotive. It would have taken a really good acting performance to create the same kind of empathy and pathos towards the lead character, but having a cuddly toy, who you're more likely to find "cute", in a way creates a shortcut to empathy...the "arrrrrr" factor.

Funnily enough, comparing the first half (with the cuddly toy) to the second half (with the human actor) it feels the 2nd half isn't as successful to me. I think we suddenly bring our own baggage to the table. Do I like the look of the actor? Does he look irritating? Do I believe his pain and struggle? Does he look like he needs a slap in the face? Compare this to using the cuddly toy, close up of its face, bit of sad music - hey presto, I'm on the cuddly toy's side!

Remembering this film ties in nicely with my first viewing of Daft Punk's Electroma, which I finally got to see this weekend. Several friends had raved about it and I'd finally got around to picking up a copy of it this week - the dvd package is very swish, though I wished I hadn't looked at the pictures in the book before viewing the film.

I'm a big Daft Punk fan, though as their music isn't featured in the film, you don't need to be.

There isn't much to the film in terms of storyline, but the way I interpreted it was of two robots who don't want to be just robots and be like the mass majority - they find a way to make themselves stand out, which horrifically backfires and then finally lose their desire to continue existing.

I can understand criticisms of the film being boring, of long pieces where nothing much happens. The opening, where the robots drive through the desert seems to go on for a very long time - nothing much happens until they overtake a tractor, driven by a robot, which reveals we're in a world of robots. There's also the walk in the desert, and a particularly long tracking shot behind the two robots walking and walking and walking...and walking some more and walking some more...

In a way the film reminded me of some kind of 60s/70s art film - yep, it could be called indulgent, but it seems to revel in its indulgence, that this is the film they wanted to make and tough luck if you don't like it. Or perhaps the Daft Punk guys are goading the audience, seeing if they will sit through the more tedious parts of the film. I don't know why, but I kept thinking of Zabriskie Point - maybe it was the desert locale and there's also a repeated explosion in Electroma, though not the scale of Zabriskie Point's stunning finale.

But it could also be seen as a celebration of films that maybe the film making duo love - the opening in the desert, in their swish black Ferrarri, brings to mind the desert and car of Mad Max and its sequel. The look of the robots, decked in sharp leathers, recalls the robot police men from THX 1138. When the robots reach the white picket fence picture perfect postcard American town, it feels as if we're in something like the town in The Wild One, or Blue Velvet's mocking small town America. The robots have human faces crafted on to them at a clinic which is bathed in blinding white light which reminds me of 2001: A Space Odyssey, from the machinery to the white dining room where the aging Dave Bowman is dining at the end. Then maybe we're in to Walkabout territory, with the hike in the desert.

I could be wrong, but I might have spotted a reference to Street Trash in there, of all the things to wink towards...

Strangely, another film it recalls to me is Easy Rider - perhaps its the travelogue element to the film, and two friends going on a journey which we assume from the outset isn't going to end happily. As the robots face a kind of "rascist smalltown backlash" against their look, as do the bikers in Easy Rider, perhaps this isn't so ridiculous as it sounds.

With no dialogue in the film, only music and many passages of nothing really happening, you do find yourself projecting more on to the characters on the screen. There's two sequences in particular which I thought were really powerful - the first is after the robots face grafting has gone horrifically wrong - their faces have melted in the harsh sunlight of the desert and, pursued by a mob of the townsfolk, have taken refuge in a toilet. One of the robots, seemingly furious, tears off his face and clothes and cleans himself up, returning to his Daft Punk robot look. His partner, however, is much more reluctant to give up their human identity dream - he stares at his face in the mirror, the top of his head covered with a wig, his forehead covered with the still melting latex skin and his chrome head framed on either side by a pair of latex ears. Its an equally laughable but pitiful sight, but one which I found deeply moving. And he just continues to stare and stare and stare at himself, at the dream which has gone sour.

Later, after hiking in the desert for what seems an age (both to the robots and the audience) the same robot halts. His companion, eventually noticing that he's alone, goes back to him. There's no dialogue spoken, nor body language such as hand gestures to express what they discussing, if anything. But in that series of reversal shots between the two, you get the impression of a heated debate, of a friend who cannot go on anymore and perhaps doesn't want to go on, of asking a friend to do the unthinkable. I thought it was a remarkable sequence to say we're staring at nothing apart from two metal faces which do not move or express anything.

Perhaps its a film which could have been edited down to half its running time, but nevertheless I think Electroma is an amazing achievement - its has an incredible aesthetic, the film looks gorgeous and I think its one of the most moving pieces of cinema I've ever seen, despite no word of dialogue being spoken or shown on screen.

I'm going to be suggesting my friend views Electroma and The Mathematician - perhaps it may offer some inspiration away from his troubles with finding actors.

The Delays

2009-07-06T14:46:00.001-07:00

"Forever Delayed" was always one of my favourite lines from a Manic Street Preachers' song. Strangely, the way it was sang at the end of "Roses In The Hospital" seemed almost celebratory, when really the words alone seem almost melancholic, carrying an air of perpetual disappointment...that the elusive thing you're waiting for is just never going to happen.

Hmm...

Well, the filming of Stranded has been delayed again. I made a decision on the replacement of the actress for Gwyneth, which was a positive step and I'm excited about working with the actress, but then the availability of crew means the earliest we can now film is September. That will then be two years since I cast the original cast for the film when I was hoping to shoot the film in October 2007. Damn, that seems pretty crushing.

I can only cross my fingers and hope that no one gets offered any paid work in the interim, resulting in the first weekend of September being cancelled. Normally the weather is pretty reliable in September, but I can't really take it for granted.

So I was maybe thinking I could hopefully get things moving on Goodnight, Halloween in the interim...but Ryan is having trouble with the footage he's been supplied with, meaning the digital blood effects have been delayed...realistically, my hope of having even a rough cut of the film to show at Son Of Movie Bar at my Halloween special is unlikely to happen, which I am really gutted by.

Endless delays where it feels like I can't get anything moving, much that I'm desperate to. Writing of The Reprise has been sticky too, mostly down to being so tired by the time it gets to late at night. I blame the summer heat, hayfever and early sunrises - I always seem to sleep badly in the summer.

The Soft Places

2009-06-28T15:43:00.001-07:00

It really seems I'm neither here nor there right now with my projects. Maybe I just need a really good block of time to try and get some bits done and dusted as much as possible.

The good news front is that I went to see one of the actresses for the recast role in Stranded on Friday night - she was very good and really nice too. I'm hopefully seeing the other woman who's up for the role this week, which means I should be able to have made a decision by the end of the week and try to finalise a shooting day in August. I really cannot wait to have this film all shot.

Other projects seem up in the air - a few weeks ago I threw myself into doing some grading and effects work on my feature film, Gettin' Some. The main thing I was doing was fudging a depth of field look to some of the footage to try and make it look a touch more cinematic as opposed to nasty video. I've had some degree of success and it doesn't look too bad. With my sound designer friend up for doing the sound mix, it seemed there was a good reason to focus on getting this done especially as I'm going to focus on releasing the film in monthly episodes.

However, this depth of field effect was quickly becoming a massive amount of work for not particularly accurate results. Ryan, who is doing the digital squibs etc on Goodnight, Halloween suggested I should use the program Combustion to do the depth of field effects. So I ordered a book from Amazon, which looks potentially pretty daunting, with a view to doing the effects with this software. But now I need to find the time to go through the book and learn the package...maybe doing that instead of writing this blog would be a help,,,

But the other project which has reared its head is The Reprise. This is the next feature length project that I want to make and I'm hoping to try and raise some cash to help make it. My friend and fellow film maker Gus is keen to help make it and raise the money, but of course everything is waiting on me finishing the script...which I hadn't worked on since February, despite me originally telling him that a first draft would be done by the end of March.

So I've gone back to that in the last week and it's been a real struggle. Usually my scripts flow pretty effortlessly, but this one seems to be a real struggle. Maybe that's a good sign. Maybe it's also a very bad sign. I'm really not too happy with what I'm writing, but persevering as I know it's the first draft and just have to get past the psychological block of this first draft to really start honing it. I know some changes I want to make for the second draft, it's just getting to that stage.

I'm currently at around 50 pages, so potentially only another 40 to go. Not sure its a good idea that I'm counting down the pages. That can't be a good sign, can it?

So I'm stuck in these soft places, with nothing much concrete happening on anything, a bit of this and a bit of that. Not great, really...

Giant Steps

2009-06-17T15:11:00.000-07:00

Well, maybe not, but some positive news today - went to meet Ryan, who is doing the digital effects on Goodnight, Halloween and he thinks it should only take him a day or two to do the digital blood effects and other little things that I need for the news cast footage. For the final sequence we still need to shoot, he's advising getting the actor to where a green skull cap with motion capture crosses on it, as Ryan is thinking of doing a full CGI malformed pumpkin head for Conal, which sounds amazing and far beyond anything I thought we would have for the film.

And John, who salvaged the sound from The Crunch and has been a great sound recordist on the Stranded shoot, has agreed to do some work on Gettin' Some, which is just such great news - he's local and I trust him to get the job done.

Who knows, maybe the feature film will be complete this year after all!

Mistakes have to be made: The making of Past. Present. Future.

2009-06-15T22:58:00.000-07:00

Past. Present. Future. was the third film I made after leaving college. It isn't available to see online, for reasons outlined below...

Unsurprisingly, casting on 5 Times For was still not moving on so that project remained stillborn...and the night footage for Date was still nowhere on the horizon. Perhaps I should have taken the hint, but at this stage I was determined not to let all that work go to waste.

Instead, I continued to keep myself busy, and wrote Past. Present. Future. a very (too?) personal rumination of where I was in my “tortured” 19 year old life. This time, Juliet saw sense and turned down the chance to play the female lead of Connie. As I recall her reason at the time was that she felt it was too similar to the other films. I thought this was a ridiculous

excuse as I couldn’t see any similarities. Of course, its only now in hindsight that I see what Juliet was probably really thinking - she’s been in two of my films and still yet to see a bloody frame, so I’m obviously pissing her about...Christ, I think I would have even turned myself down!

I think Mark loved the script, although by now me could have easily been doing them just because...at the time he was partial to the dark side and lived in “the horror house” with 3 goths in Sneinton. Cat was inexpicably the girlfriend of the donkey dicked dipshit stink bag self

proclaimed leader of the house and Mark suggested that she would be ideal to play Connie, plus, as they were already quite good friends, that warmth would easily show on camera. Er....

It seems absurd now, but I’m pretty sure we shot the entire film in a day. An early start from me ensured I was sat in my car outside the horror house waiting for Mark to be inevitably late, then round to pick Cat up who was still late despite us already running behind.

When we picked Cat up I couldn’t help but keep glancing at her in the rear view mirror as she did her make up (late and still not bloody ready!) There was something odd about her when she got in the car that I couldn’t quite put my finger on, and now as she sat on the back seat I

was trying to figure it out - then the penny dropped ...

She really did have no, or very little eyebrow hair and really had to paint them on. This was a real shock to myself and Mark, as we’d only ever seen her in full Goth style make up.

First port of call was yet again Sutton-in-Ashfield, home town of myself and Mark, to film on the park where I used to play as a kid. Filming seemed to be running smoothly enough and with the addition of a specific piece of tailored graffiti on the climbing frame platform we

were away. I’d wanted to get an early start on the day, in particular for this scene so what happened wouldn’t happen, but as we were late, it inevitably did happen. Two kids on bikes (why weren’t they at bloody school?) showed up and disrupted the shoot, creating noise and mayhem. They wanted to know what we were doing and I realised the only way to deal with little shits like this was some good old fashioned bribery.

We told the kids we were shooting the new Star Wars film and that Cat was playing Princess Leia. The climbing frame/slide construction we were filming on and all the background would be turned into a spaceship with computer graphics. (OH GEORGE, THE IRONY!)

We told the kids that if they let us film and then came back in two hours we would put them in the film. They left us alone to quickly wrap in this location and bog off before they came back. I sometimes wonder if they got beat up by other kids at school when they told them they’d just seen people making the new Star Wars film...

Naturally, the next location would have its own problems. We went to the cemetery in Sutton adjacent to St Mary’s Church, the location we used in Date. In my typical naive way I didn’t get permission to film there, we just rolled up and started filming. I didn’t mean any disrespect and it’s not as if we were pissing and fornicating on gravestones, but now I can see how us being there could be seen as contentious. The cross we filmed in front of was an actual cross, though there was no name on or around the marker (maybe it was for someone who had no money or family for a burial, or perhaps it was a temporary marker.)

As we were shooting the scene in front of the cross this huge woman straight out of Tom and Jerry (”THOMAASSSSSSS!”) came over and started shouting at us for being disrespectful (not that the marker was anything to do with this woman.)

Cat suddenly whipped out a feisty firey side to herself which we’d never seen and gave as good as she got - the woman had said not only were we being disrespectful, but so was the way that Cat was dressed (implying she looked like a whore or something.) Cat took one look at

this woman in her huge bright yellow shell suit bottoms and bright purple top and suggested that it was SHE who was dressed disrespectfully. I can’t remember what happened next - I think the woman went to report us to someone or something - so we quickly finished the

scene, scuttled back to the trusty Luth Mobile and drove over to Bulwell, where we finished the next scene undisturbed in a church yard there. (This must have been the point in the day where our friend Jim joined us to help with the shoot, as there are stills of all three of us which he must have taken...though he can’t remember being there, and Mark and I can't remember him being there, but he is on one of the production stills, looking through the camera.)

The rest of the film was shot back at the house on Commercial Road in Bulwell where I was stil living - this would prove to be a very frustrating afternoon.

Cat had already been struggling to remember some of the undigestable lines of dialogue in the previous scenes, but during the lounge scene she hit a brick wall. The sequence had to be broken down into a series of piecemeal shots - I think at one point I may have even fed her the lines to repeat back. Some shots where the camera is looking at Mark the audio is Cat simply reading aloud directly from the script...and it shows. I’m pretty sure this approach continued into the evening, where we shot the bedroom sequence in my housemate/landlord/friend’s bedroom (stand up Paul Harrison) and then the final scene in his little study/office. We

must have wrapped around midnight, maybe around 1 in the morning, I really can’t remember.

Bar the scenes where Cat’s dialogue and performance had to be constructed line by line the editing of the film was relatively smooth - I’m guessing a day again, but it might have been two days, with some additional bits added during half a day to (Mono)(Tone)(Drone) - the

extra pub ambience, the titles etc. Once again the film was edited at the remarkably friendly and welcoming Intermedia (I never tire of being sarcastic of that place and its staff.)

Titles were once again created courtesy of my dodgy titling disc and filming the television, although I went with white at the end for a change.

Although I knew using copyrighted music would scupper my chances of showing the film at any of the short film nights around Nottingham, I wanted to use music from the Manic Street Preachers, as they meant so much to me at the time, and the film was so personal to me. The

repetiton of the line “More and more junk” was achieved through the wonderful lo fi use of two tape decks...

Out of all the films I made after leaving college, this is the biggest turkey and the one I like

least. I usually end up shouting SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP at the screen when I’m watching it. As with Date, boy did I need an editor or someone to slap me down and tell me to stop labouring a point past all need. At the time the sentiments were ones I was genuinely feeling (I had tried to get in touch with some childhood friends and was wondering if these scripts

were repeating themselves...damn, maybe Juliet WAS being honest!) but I’m not sure if catharsis through cinema was the best approach for exorcising these demons.

Plus, and possibly the most staggering stumbling block to this whole sorry farago, is that I can’t believe I was having some sort of mid life and artistic crisis at the age of 19, for god’s sake...

This film, like (Mono)(Tone)(Drone), was reviewed in the same issue of A Bag Of Sand and received a scathing review, in particular the dialogue. Steve Lawson noticed some dialogue lift from Goldeneye, which I hadn’t even realised at the time, and reads into the film far too much,

seeing the opening as a passage from the book Mark is writing - I wish this interpretation were true!

For me, there are a few redeeming features = that is my grandma (dad’s mum) in the pre-titles sequence actually describing photos of my family to Mark (hence Mark saying “Brown eyed Murle”, our Van Morrison inspired nickname for my dad, well, his name is Murle, so its barely a nickname...) I’m just glad I’ve got her captured on film, but not in a horrible family video camera way. I also think there’s some great shots in this film, some really nice compositions...the stills in the stills section seem to look really good.

So maybe that’s the answer - turn down the sound and treat the film as a series of stills. It should play a whole lot better.

Funnily enough, in an odd post script, I'd been thinking about the film recently and wondered if I could re-edit the film just enough to remove some of the more excruciating lines of dialogue and performance aspects...maybe a project for a rainy day (as if I don't have enough to do!)

In the meantime: The making of (Mono)(Tone)(Drone)

2009-06-15T15:09:00.000-07:00

(Mono)(Tone)(Drone) is the second film I made after leaving college. You can watch it here

Despite “Date” grinding to an inglorious halt until I managed to film the final sequence I stil held high hopes for continuing work on the other storylines in the “5 Times For” anthology. However, casting was still proving to be elusive which ensured I couldn’t continue...this problem was hampered no end by Tim’s decision not to play Martin In Bitch...so I was really bac k to square one (okay, one and a bit - I still had Mark raring to go in Fall Out.)

Determined to keep going with any project, I quickly wrote (Mono)(Tone)(Drone) which was blatantly inspired by Mark’s then often blase attitude towards things...so in a piece of brilliant casting, he pretty much got to play himself (I still can’t tell how much he is acting!)

Juliet came on board to play the lead the female role , which seems incredible in retrospect. She hadn’t seen a frame of “Date” and here I was asking her to star in another film!

I wanted to try and create a world within these films where characters and lives crossed over, despite being in different films. In (Mono)(Tone) (Drone), Mark’s character Tony is and Juliet’s character is confusingly supposed to be the same Alison as in the 5 Times For episodes Bitch and Fall Out. I think this world I wanted to create was a direct influence from Quentin Tarantino and comics I loved at the time.

We quickly shot the film in one morning, again in the Newmarket Inn pub before and just after they opened, hence the very realistic looking patrons drinking in the background. Once again the sound was awful as I was still only using the camera microphone. This really shoudn’t

have been any surprise to me - the opening shot of Juliet was filmed at the far end of the pub, so its no wonder I had to dub this line with audio from a later shot taken much closer. Background noise was also a problem - jump cuts in the background sound meant I had to add an extra layer of pub ambience to cover the joins, muddying the sound to the mess you hear today.

The internal dialogue shots were all done on Super 8 which at least added a different look to the film.

We recorded the over dub dialogue for these Super 8 moments directly into the camera as we sat in my (t)rusty Fiat Uno in the Newmarket car park.

The crapy titles were made using a piece of video titling software I’d pirated from Ilkeston College when I was on my course at West Notts College. As I couldn’t output directly from my knackered Amiga computer to video I had to film the titles running on my shitty little TV,

hence the monterous blur and shimmy you get, pretty much making them unreadable.

Out of all the films on this disc, (Mono)(Tone)(Drone) is still one I like the most. Despite its technical shortcomings, it has a certain charm and some ridiculous rule book out the window camera shots (Point of view from inside a cigarette packet!?!) Juliet’s “apocalyptic rant from

left to right” (as I called it) wasn’t quite as furious as I had hoped but the film was shot and edited as I intended. (Again, it was edited at Intermedia and I probably had it done and dusted in a day easily)

It’s one of the few films of mine that ever got a showing beyond my lounge - (Mono)(Tone)(Drone) was shown at one of the Trampolene film and arts nights at The Maze.

It also got a favourable review in “A Bag Of Sand”, a fanzine dedicated to no budget film making which I contributed to.

(Mono)(Tone)(Drone) has the auspicious prize of being one of the few of my films that I can watch without at some point wanting to shout at the television, which is high praise indeed!

Actors must be like buses...

2009-06-15T14:34:00.000-07:00

Within the space of 24 hours last week, I'd been in touch with two actresses for the recasting I need to do in Stranded, which was a great surprise.

Neither of them had come from any advertisements I'd posted - the first came via Debbie (my friend and make up artist on Stranded) and her friend, the second came from my actor Courtney.

Its going to be a couple of weeks or so before I've had chance to meet them both and get them to read for me, but fingers crossed this means I can get the last bit of the shooting done in July.

5 Times For A Beginning: The Making Of "Date"

2009-06-11T14:17:00.000-07:00

I put a compilation dvd together a year or so ago of all the films I made after leaving college but before I embarked on making my no budget feature "Gettin' Some."

This is the essay I wrote about "Date", the first film I made since leaving college which you can watch HERE

The summer of 1995 was a big change for me - in the space of a few months I’d failed to get into university to do a degree in film making, left college and gone on to work full time at Selectadisc and moved out for the first time in my life. I was thrust bitterly in to the real world (I still moan about not getting into uni, though half of it is down to me being a picky bugger) and as a depressive 18 year old had to endure the recognised “Selectadisc school of hard knocks” (it made me the man I am today etc) All of these life changing events helped shape my first project since leaving college - “Five Times For.”

“5 Times For” was planned to be an anthology film of 5 different stories “Bitch” would introduce the 3 main characters Martin, Steven and Alison as they sit around the dinner table and bitch about their working lives in general. Then each of these characters would star in their individual story - “Date” followed Martin’s agonised preparations for a date with a girl, “Party” showed Steven at a house party, “Fall Out” followed Alison as she recalls the abrasive argument she has had with her boyfriend and where she could have taken control and lead the debate. Finally “...” was a Goddard inspired play with film conventions which also took

inspiration from a dream like story entitled “To Kill A...” from the Love And Rockets comic books.

Around this time I was spending a ridiculous amount of time in the Broadway cinema’s cafe bar. A typical day off in the week would have been spent in the cafe bar writing and taking advantage of their unlimited coffee refill offer. My friend Mark would join me (usually

turning up late), drink plenty of coffee too then we’d both go off around the city centre zinging from the caffeine and laughing uncontrollably. (And dying to pee.)

There seemed to be a real buzz in the Broadway cafe bar back then, no doubt thanks to the creative people who were working for Intermedia, the production resource house behind the cinema. I don’t really remember how I became friends with them, but I was taken under the wing of several of these regulars - Chris Cooke, Tim Cunningham, Steven Schiel, Louise the projectionist and Matthew (erm...who’s surname I’ve forgotten, and terribly I always used to get him and Steven mixed up.)

When I look back on this it seems remarkable that they gave me the time of day - I’m sure they were all at least 5 years older than me - but apparently didn’t seem to mind this naive 19 year

old hanging out with them, talking film ideas and dreams.

I finished the 5 scripts for “5 Times For” but actors were proving elusive. I’m sure I put some posters up around town (definitely sure there was one up in the Old Angel pub and the sandwich bar where I went every dinner) but it was hardly the greatest high profile campaign.

Mark had agreed to play the boyfriend in “Fall Out” (a role he is still waiting to play apparently - he’d soon change his mind if he read the script now) and Tim came on board to play Martin,

but as I couldn’t find players for Steven and Alison I decided to get the ball rolling and film Date. I just had to find an actress. At the time Juliet Brain was a barmaid at the Broadway cafe bar. In an ironic twist, she was actually my inspiration for the girl that Martin was infatuated with, as I was at the time. So in an art imitating life aspect I asked Juliet if she would be interested in acting in a film (what a line!) I’m pretty sure it became her debut film role, but after that she ended up appearing in several other films made by those cafe bar regulars.

I recall a particular meeting with her to discuss the film which ironically was as painful as some of the scenes from the film - Juliet seemed more interested in doing a crossword...

Its difficult to remember the order we shot the film in - I’m sure we concentrated on the first half of the film, which featured just Tim. In a ridiculously stupid illogical way of making a film, we shot in a variety of locations many miles apart. The bedroom scenes and the shot of Tim underneath the hanging plant were all shot in the house in Bulwell I was living at. However, the shot in a lounge was shot in my parents house all the way back in Sutton-In-Ashfield (about 15 miles away), as was some of the final montage footage and the tape smashing. The florist scene

was also shot in Sutton, as were the church scenes.

Although you can barely see him, Mark appeared in the background of the main church shot with blood on his hands and dripping from behind his sunglasses. Chris, who was also helping

to crew the film quickly distracted an eye patch wearing church clerk so she wouldn’t spot the potentially offensive stigmata. I still can’t remember how we got permission to film in there.

The scene with Tim reading the paper was shot on the top of some stone stairs on the Forest recreation ground. In a further act of stupidity, the video shop exterior was on Commercial

Road in Bulwell, but I’m sure we shot the interiors in a different video shop on Mansfield Road around Carrington - again, about ten miles away from the exterior!

Mark had recently worked on a large mural and logo designs for That Cafe Bar (previously known as Truffles, now known as Bar De Nada) on Broad Street and had become friends with the owners. Through this connection we found our location for the first part of the date.

We must have filmed the scenes on a bank holiday Monday, as That Cafe Bar didn’t open Sundays, and insanely we filmed as they were open for business. Due to my lack of confidence and the fact they were trading I didn’t ask to have the music turned off or at least turned down, which would plague the dialogue shot here. (All the sound was recorded using the camera microphone on my Hi-8 camera)

Mark and Chris appeared as grinning members of the public who were supposed to be smirking at him as it looked like he had been stood up.

On a different day (you can see its wet) we went across the road to the Newmarket Inn (at the time a major after work haunt for the Selectadisc crowd.) Once again the dialogue was plagued by background noise, plus my insistence that the 5 main parts of dialogue would only be shot as 5 individual tracking shots, perfectly timed so that we would track past Tim and Juliet for the

same amount of time it took to deliver the lines. This created no end of hassle, not helped by the fact we were filming in the way of the entrance to the gents (as, like the previous scene, the pub was naturally open for business)

The final street scene was shot after this out on Broad Street. Tim and Juliet were understandably frazzled by this point and you can see where they both have to look over to the right of frame, where I’m holding the lines up for them to glance at.

And then following this...a big nothing. I still needed to get some night time footage for the final montage and it wouldn’t be until a year or so later that I would actually film it. My friend

Jim and I went out at 4 in the morning to film the empty city. A police car intrigued by our strange behaviour never seemed to be far behind.

I did edit the rest of the film together up to the final street scene but the film has remained frustratingly unfinished until now.

I did try to come up with different ways to tackle the bad sound in the scenes with Tim and Juliet - at one point I had their dialogue translated in to French, with a view of dubbing the cafe bar scene into French and subtitling it! The dialogue in the pub would have been reduced down to a quick montage of aspects of the tracking shots, with some text joyfully ecplaining what they talked about. None of this was ever implemented.

And now here I am, ten years later, finally finishing the film.

Luckily I still had my original script with all my shooting notes, along with tape logs and paper edits of how I envisaged the final montage. With these notes I’ve been able to finally edit

the concluding montage. Due to some corruption of my S-VHS master tape I’ve had to re-edit part of the farewell street scene.

I’m pleased that this is as close to what it would have been ten years ago, pretentious Joseph Conrad quote included.

My main problem with the film in retrospect is that it desperately needed an editor and script editor to cut the whaffle from the film. I was so precious about every word at the time that everything HAD to go in the film, and the opening half drags as a result of this. I feel a bit sheepish about how strongly it wears its heart on its sleeve too...Sequences such as the montage in the cafe bar and the video shop don’t seem to work and Juliet’s cooling off

towards Tim once they reach the pub seems to make no sense.

I still think the performances seem pretty strong - Tim seems to play the part very well and Juliet worked well too (so much so that I would ask her to work on countless other films after

this, even when I was over my infatuation with her!)

I’m also a big fan of the variety of shots and locations in the film - watch the film on fast forward and it seems to have a real life, energy and movement to it.

Don't Enjoy The Silence

2009-06-10T00:58:00.000-07:00

Damn.

Despite my best efforts to recast in time for filming this weekend, it just hasn't happened.

I blitzed the free casting websites, Shooting People and emailed most of the amateur dramatics societies around the south coast. And the amazing response I had back from all of this?

One person spamming me regarding equipment hire and one actress spamming me, knowing she isn't suitable for the role, but would I keep her CV on file for future productions?

Its probably not surprising - I guess most actresses would have looked at it and realised a week or so isn't enough time to learn the lines properly and get the character sorted, so I'm guessing the urgency has put people off. I do also think there's a bit of a vanity thing when it comes to actors and actresses though - perhaps they think their playing age is wildly off, that they can still pass for early 30s when they're easily looking late 40s. With this in mind, its probable that most don't want to think they're at an age where they can easily play a pensioner.

I did have this a little bit when originally casting "Stranded" - there are 3 female roles, a teenager, her late 30s/ early 40s mother and the pensioner. I had a lot of people contact me for the film, though several never stated which role they thought they were suitable for, or would like to be considered for and I'd have an awful lot of women in their late 20s/ early 30s which just didn't fit any role. Perhaps they were spamming me in a way and hoping for the best, but going through CVs and collating the information can be a time consuming process.

A slight bit of good news though - Debbie, my friend and regular make up artist, has found a pensioner who does am dram, named Pat. I spoke to her last night and she seems very keen. She's out of action for a few weeks, so we'll get together afterwards and see if she's suitable. I'll re-advetise the role in the meantime as I'd rather have too much than too little choice.

Judging by the weather and reports in the news yesterday that the Glastonbury festival is going to be "hit by a monsoon" its probably for the best that I won't be filming in June though!

A Brief Visit To The Trenches

2009-06-01T05:51:00.000-07:00

Last week was a strange one and typical of the struggles I seem to have making films.

We filmed on Saturday, though a few weeks previously I had no idea what was happening with the film. One of my actors seemed unable, or unwilling to commit to a filming date, which was leaving me stressed and confused. Communication with the actor seemed temperamental, which didn't help and I was worrying whether the actor had a commitment issue.

In fact, I was convinced the actor had a commitment issue and decided to try and call the actor's bluff. Several days later the actor got in touch, which was weird, as I really thought the actor wouldn't and in my head I'd already been trying to figure out a plan of how I could still use the footage that had been shot with the actor.

Ironically, following this I chased up another actor for the shoot which has been scheduled for mid June for over 6 weeks, but who was worryingly not responding to my emails, my texts nor to my phone calls. I managed to collar the actor, who told me that they would no longer be able to do the proposed filming date in June due to paid work they were being offered, which was fair enough, that it was hopefully long term work with the play touring, which was disappointing but couldn't be helped, and as such they were pulling out of the film. I was fine with this reasoning, but then the actor had to go and say "I think my juices have ran dry for your film anyway."

It didn't come as a surprise, in a way. The actor had been cast since September 2007 and we'd yet to shoot a single thing with the actor. The actor had been privy to the scheduling nightmare that I'd had with this film, which part of me feels is necessary, as I think its only polite to keep people in the loop with what's going on, but at the same time it was probably detrimental to the actor's confidence and enthusiasm for the film. I guess there's a fine line between too little and too much information and I've yet to grasp it.

So, thinking I'd lost one actor, I'd in fact lost another. I've got less than two weeks to recast the role, sort out the costume and hope the actor can learn the lines in time - realistically, I've got about a week. I've posted a bulletin on the usual suspects websites and emailed as many amateur dramatics societies as I could around the region. Fingers crossed it gets sorted.

The shoot on Saturday was a touch worrying and stressful - the usual transport issues with people getting to the location, which suggests even more that I shouldn't work with people beyond the region unless they have their own transport and then, as we were filming in a public place during a wonderful day, we had to constantly stop for people to go by, or for their noise to quieten down. I was expecting some disruption, but not as much as we had to put up with. What shouldn't have taken that long naturally did. I really should reconsider changing that ironic Faster Productions mantle.

Its always good to see my regular crew all catching up every time we get together to film. I can see I'm working with a really good bunch of people who I can trust.

I woke Sunday morning aching all over. Not from a particularly physically gruelling shoot, but probably more from an accumulation of tension that has finally dissipated now this shoot is over with. Anthony, the d.o.p, contacted me to say the footage looked great. What I could see from the viewfinder looked really lush.

So in less than two weeks this film will either be completely in the can, or I'll be chasing another filming date. The next shoot will be odd as we're having to "shemp" the actor we've just shot with this weekend - hopefully my good friend Mark may be free to fill the role - and the shots I've figured out in my head should mean we can get away with the shemp. I hope.

What Is It And What Is It To You?

2009-05-26T14:55:00.000-07:00

Why do you do it? That seems to be a question occasionally asked about my film making. As to why, I'll do my best to answer later, but first it may be worth asking, as did Talking Heads, "How did I get here?"

I'd have to say via Stephen King. He was the author who I became obsessed with around the age of 13 or 14. Although the name was already familiar to me, via articles on him and the film adaptations of his work in the computer magazines I read as a child, it was a random book which pointed me to him and set me off on this path. I was in Nottingham town centre with my dad and we were in one of those overstocks book stores, much like "The Works" (the nationwide chain of overstocks books and stationery in the UK.)

For some odd reason I picked up a book on horror films. I wasn't a particular fan of horror films. I wasn't a particular fan of any particular genre of films, I could pretty much enjoy any type of film. I was flicking through the pages and stopped on a double page spread - on one side was a close up of a pair of eyes from Brian De Palma's "The Fury" and on the other was the grotesque decaying corpse of Alice Krige from "Ghost Story" (a film I've still never seen.)

There was some old man walking behind me who looked over and saw what I was looking at and made some comment along the lines of "That will rot your brain/ That's disgusting/ etc" Perhaps it was an act of teenage rebellion, of confirmation that getting this book would set me apart from them, those who were so outraged by a "disgusting" photo from a film. I really have no idea why, but I bought the book, read it hungrily, took it on holiday with me, read it some more, even copied the film stills from Carrie into a sketchbook...it became pretty much my bible and I did my best to try and see as many films that were featured in the book as possible.

So from this it naturally lead to Stephen King and Carrie was the first book I picked up. It blew my mind. Maybe to a teenager who already had feelings of alienation and not quite belonging it struck a cord. I lent it to my friends who all loved it instantly too. From this I started to read as much King as I could, with Night Shift probably being the collection I returned to again and again, and The Stand er...standing out as possibly the most impressive book of his I'd read.

This would all lead to reading lots of James Herbert, which lead into a dabbling of Shaun Hutson. One of my favourite lessons at school was English and from reading these books I'd have daydreams of being a writer of some kind. But for some reason, probably the usual doubts that some teenagers have, I suddenly came to the conclusion that I had no style or flair to my writing. Of course, it didn't occur to me that most people at the age of 15 don't...but it was enough to put me of at that time attempting to be an author. What an ass.

So if I wanted to tell stories, what was the next medium I could do it with? Comics seemed to be the answer, so my friend and I decided to make a comic together. I would write and illustrate "Armour Geddon", the story of a narcissistic misanthropist cyborg law enforcer, which was supposed evoke the anarchist humour of "Marshall Law" comics. The fact I couldn't draw very well didn't stop me, until my friend's comment about my drawing ability got back to me second hand...and that seemed to kill that idea.

With that in tatters (and our proposed fanzine comic "Bad Apples" of course never materialising) I figured film making would be the next logical way to tell a story. Here it wouldn't matter that I couldn't draw - I would "paint" with the camera! Hurrah, I thought...which lead to the debut opus of "Agent 008.5 and Fez Head", as mentioned in my first post. From there it lead to a college course where my main reason for going was just to get my hands on their equipment.

So really, this whole wannabe career and aspiring madness came from a simple desire to tell stories.

As to why, I don't know where my desire to tell stories comes from. I was thinking about this a while ago, recalling musicians being interviewed and they'd say portentous things about "living and breathing making music." I don't think I have that same drive. I know some people who seemingly dedicate every spare minute to films and film making, but that's not me - I like to have other interests too, which some could say are a distraction. Maybe I won't "make it" because I'm not one of those using every spare moment to work on their film making career. Maybe.

But what I have realised is that when I'm not expressing myself in someway, either by writing a script or making a film, I get grouchy and miserable. The irony being that the fighting with production logistics, or tedious post production periods where I'm convinced I'm an appalling film maker makes me pretty miserable at times too.

So I can either be miserable and grouchy doing nothing, or potentially miserable and grouchy with something hopefully half decent to show for it at the end.

Its not a great reason, but it makes sense to me.

Who Are You?

2009-04-27T16:30:00.000-07:00

"Who are you?" asked The Who. "Who am I?" shouted Jackie Chan from the top of a cliff top in one of his not so good later period films.

I figured I best go through my filming "career" to date. No doubt I will come back to the films I've made over the period of the posts, but just to bring you up to speed...though with the speed I do things, you best make yourself comfortable...

The first film I made was at the age of 15, entitled "Agent 009.5 and Fez Head." This staggering opus was shot in the bedroom of my best friend Mark Walker on his dad's camcorder during the school holidays. We had to record direct on to his VHS player, not the camcorder, so we couldn't leave the confines of his room. And another factor was that we shouldn't have even been using his dad's camcorder, hence the sneaky filming in the holidays while he was at work.

This piece of high brow entertainment was followed by the unfinished "Silicon Seeds." My dad had purchased a camcorder, so now we shot this in my home. Mark starred once again, this time in a strange film inspired by David Lynch's "The Grandmother" - in Lynch's film a boy grows a grandparent, in our film the man grows a robot spider which goes on a rampage, trying to kill him. Unfortunately this piece of Oscar worthy ingenuity was never finished and the robot spider was only seen for a very brief period of seconds in wonderful jerky camcorder pause/unpause/pause stop motion.

But it was enough to convince me that this was worth pursuing with an education, so off I went to West Notts College of Further Education in Mansfield for a BTEC Media course. I had no interest in sound recording or radio, I just wanted to get my hands on their kit. Of which there wasn't much.

However, two years later and a plethora of short films later (some of which were for the course, some of which were knocked out in my spare time with their equipment) didn't lead to the hallowed door of my chosen university, so I went into the real world and entered full time employment, with the dream of my chosen university still alive.

I continued writing and making films in my spare time from work, which resulted in a bunch of films made on Hi-8, some of which continued to star Mark until he left to Cardiff University. Others starred the new group of friends I'd made, the majority of which were handily performing arts students at Clarendon College in Nottingham.

Two years later I bitterly abandoned my university path but continued with the film making. Admittedly, my track record of actually finishing films wasn't great. I made several films during this period - "Date", "(Mono)(Tone)(Drone)", "Past. Present. Future.", "Bitch", "The Sky Is Empty", "Ansafon" and "The Lonely Death Of A Girl Who Could Live A Lie No Longer" (you'd never guess I was a Manic Street Preachers fan with that title, eh?)

Of those I made only the 2nd, 3rd and 4th were finished at the time. "Date" was missing its final montage and credits until only several years ago, "Bitch" and "Ansafon" were also sans credit until the same time and "Lonely Death" was never completely shot, though again I only edited the footage together several years ago from my original notes at the time.

Still, despite my track record of incomplete work, I decided I was bored of making short films and decided I wanted a bigger challenge. And I certainly got one. I wrote a feature length script entitled "Gettin' Some" which involved countless actors and locations across the city. To sum up the storyline, I used to tell people the film was "A week in the life of two groups of friends who's lives crossover. With relationship based themes." That about sums it up - or, forgive me for getting ideas above my station, imagine a very low rent "Short Cuts" (in terms of cross over and ensemble) and you'd be somewhere close to where my intentions lay, though not necessarily the final outcome.

This film took me a year to write, then a year was spent shooting about a fifth of the film which was all axed and re-shot during the next year after changes of lead actors and personnel behind the camera (Mark came back from Cardiff, himself now heavily bitten with the film making bug, to live on my bedroom floor for however long it took to shoot the film.) We were still filming at the start of the 4th year, by which time Mark had gained a place on the Fiction Directing course at the prestigious National Film and Television School in Beaconsfield.

By this point I'd pretty much had enough. The shoot fizzled out, with some scenes never to be shot. As I'd been financing the whole thing myself, I had a large credit card bill which I was only making the minimum payments on. I had no way of editing it, as I didn't have a computer. So, with a view that one day I'd finish the bloody thing, my girlfriend and I moved away.

With no desire to make films of my own for the time being, I concentrated on writing. I wrote the script "Scorn" for the digi beta project which Mark had to make in his 2nd year at the NFTS. I also did a draft for his graduation film "Sea Monsters", though in the end I was adding elements when he was at the stage he needed to be streamlining the script down. For political reasons I couldn't be credited, even though some lines of my dialogue stayed in the film. The film was nominated for Best Short Film at the BAFTAs, which was an amazing result for Mark, straight out of film school.

Through Mark I also got involved with a production company he knew and I did a treatment for them which fizzled out. In the end they didn't seem particularly interested in what I brought to the table of their idea, only the aspects which they'd suggested in the first part.

I also continued to write some treatments for and with Mark. One was supposed to be a pitch for Channel 4's "Coming Up" series of short films for emerging talent, though I'd written a feature length treatment and felt very strongly that we should try and get some interest in it as a feature. Mark was won over by the treatment and agreed that it should be a feature. Unfortunately, due to time constraints the project ended up on my back burner, but its one we're still both very keen on getting to the screen.

With the move I was able to find higher paying employment, so at last I was able to pay off that credit card bill and save up to buy a Mac. I could finally tackle those 24 hours of dv and 21 hours of audio that we got through making "Gettin' Some." Due to the haphazard nature that we'd made the film (broken timecodes and what not) even getting the footage on the Mac was a demoralizing nightmare. To cut a long story short, "Gettin' Some" is edited but still unfinished. Its currently having a sound mix done by a guy called Nik who lives in Greece (the wonders of the internet!) and my friend and DOP of my latest works is attempting to grade the damn thing...or at least tart it up the best he can with footage that it nearly 10 years old and has had the life rendered out of it.

It was with my Mac that I was finally able to finish off the titles and some editing on those Hi-8 shorts.

I finally returned to making my own films in March 2007 with a short film called "The Crunch." With my typical luck regarding sound, I've had major complications with the sound mix on this film, resulting in 4 different sound designers being involved at some point (or in the case of one of them, its arguable whether he ever did anything on it in 3 months.) However, in the last few weeks its finally been completed and just today I've submitted it to Raindance and the Brief Encounters short film festival in Bristol, the first time I've ever entered film festivals.

The two other films I'm currently working on are "Stranded" and "Goodnight, Halloween." The first was written at the same time as The Crunch and has already proved to be problematic regarding the logistics of filming. Its 3 intertwined storylines and we shot the first 2 last year but didn't have chance to shoot the 3rd, so I'm currently trying to arrange that. "Goodnight, Halloween", by its very nature, has had to have a strange shooting schedule - we've shot two thirds of the film, but these elements need to be placed together for the lead actor to respond to on the final day's shoot. As it stands I'm currently waiting on the animation and design work that's needed to integrate the elements. Its looking amazing so far, so fingers crossed for the animator/ designer's personal end of May deadline.

In amongst these current projects, I'm writing a feature length script which I'm hoping to try and raise some money for. Hopefully my three latest shorts will be strong showreel pieces to help untie some purse strings somewhere.

Finally, in addition to all of this at the start of the year I took over the running of a film maker's networking night. The previous organiser was calling it a day as he wanted to concentrate on his own projects, so rather than see it die off I decided to take it on.

All of my films have been self funded from working full time. I did apply for some lottery funds for "Gettin' Some", but that obviously didn't happen. With this in mind, I like to think I have some experience of no budget film making, even if I'm not the most prolific.

It's ironic of course that I go under the name of Faster Productions, as everything seems to take me a bloody age to complete. But I'm always determined to finish off anything I've started. If I'd had the footage I would have undoubtedly finished off "Lonely Death", even if it was a few years ago and was just for my own satisfaction. Though doing a George Lucas and creating a CGI robot spider to finish off "Silicon Seeds" is pushing it.

So that's who I am, or at least the work I've done and doing, and what I'll be referring to throughout my subsequent posts.

All aboard...

2009-04-26T09:52:00.000-07:00

"Is there anyone out there?" sang Pink Floyd.

That's kinda my feelings about blogs in general - I'm not sure why most people do them.

The only other person I know who has a blog is Chris Regan, a local script writer, who you can follow at http://whatwritesatmidnight.blogspot.com/

I do follow some blogs myself, I mean, I don't subscribe to them, I just remember to check them out every now and then.

So why start a blog?

Well, it was a recent post on one of the bulletins from Shooting People, which I'm a member of. There was a link to Ted Hope's blog about selling your film. Now, I'm currently in no position to be selling a film, or at least not yet and I have doubts whether I would be actively trying to sell my latest short films when they're complete. This list was saying that there was no point even considering attempting to sell a film unless you've got the following...

A trailer made and up on the web

You do not have clips selected and up on the web

You have not been writing a blog regarding the film for a significant length of time

You do not have a plan on how to keep that blog interesting for a year

You do not have a website for the film up on the web

You do not have a simple way to collect email addresses from fans

You have not set up a way for fans to subscribe to updates about the film

You have not joined multiple social network sites, both as an individual and as the film

You have not created a press kit with press notes for the film

You have not identified the blogs and critics you think will help promote your film

You have not built a study guide for film clubs

You have not mapped out a festival strategy that builds to local releases

You have not made several versions of a poster, and have enough to sell and give away

You have not made promotional items for your film

You have not manufactured the dvd and made great packaging

I know this is geared more towards feature film makers and I see the point that you do need a presence on the web, but sometimes I wonder if all we end up doing is creating a whole bunch of white noise, that means nothing. I mean, in all honesty, my first port of call regarding a film these days is normally iMDB, rather than a film's own website. I also wonder if all that creative energy used in maintaining a presence online could be better applied to the actual film being made, or writing a script, or something...It reminds me of the story of Jim Morrison, who apparently would spend hours in the bar, drinking, waxing lyrically and poetically, but then find himself spent by the time they got to the studio at the exact time they needed that energy.

Anyway, I've sorted myself out a little bit this weekend - I've tarted up my Shooting People profile, getting credits and stills where I can on my work profile. With the advice above, I should be starting a Facebook page for my latest short The Crunch, which was finished a couple of weeks ago following a protracted post production process. And of course, I've started this blog.

Another reason for starting this blog is that I'm currently writing a large essay on the making of my no budget feature film "Gettin' Some" - this film was shot back in 2000 on DV in Nottingham and, fingers crossed, after another protracted post production process, could well be finally completed in the coming months. My main target for the film now is to break it into piecemeal chunks and upload it all to Youtube, but I'd like to have the making of essay somewhere online, to hopefully give some context to the film and an insight into the behind the scenes soap opera which unfolded while trying to get the film made.

As I have several older shorts kicking around on Youtube, I'll probably post my old making of essays regarding them up here too, to provide some context and history of them.

So, why Wars Of Attrition?

I'm sure all film making feels like a battle, whether you've got £100 million or £100, though having the millions I'm sure helps grease the wheels. But where I am, at the bottom of the film making pile looking upwards, it can often feel that every aspect of making a film is a battle and you have to keep chipping away at it bit by bit. Where I am, making my films in my spare time, most of the people involved have jobs and other commitments. Trying to get 7 crew and 3 actors together in a location can often meaning planning months ahead and even then you might have to hope the weather is good, or the actor hasn't been offered a paying role, or that someone isn't ill, or that someone hasn't made plans and completely forgot about committing to your shooting date two months ago.

But still I carry on, chipping away. At the time of writing, I've been struggling to organise the final shoot for a film which was written in August 2006, was cast in September 2007, had a one day shoot in June 2008 and a second day in August 2008. Now I need to film the final day, with an actress who's been cast for nearly two years and yet to do a single scene. With the logistics of things, it looks like I'm going to have to shoot this final piece in a way I don't really want to.

With these wars, it often feels like there are no victors. Only compromises. But I, and I'm sure many other film makers in a similar position, soldier on.