As of today, we have a date set for the filming of our short. Mark, Frazer and I originally planned to shoot over the Christmas break but there is just too damned much Christmassing going on, so we will be shooting in late January.

Our deadline for completion is the end of February, by which point we plan to have the film ready to show and also to put online, so that all four of you reading this can watch it too!

Looking forward to setting sail for sunny Watford, where Frazer's home will double as our glamorous film set. I'm meeting Mark and Frazer on Wednesday to finalise the script, then I can do a final draft of the storyboards and (with a little luck) we can get together in London (probably either my place or Mark's) to film a test-run. This will give us an indication of how long it will take, what problems we will hit, and how the whole thing edits together. I really can't stress enough how useful I've found these informal filmed dress rehearsals to be, so many wrinkles get ironed out that it makes the final shoot so much simpler - but still of course, not without complications and troubles - I've learned to accept that nothing is ever going to go fully to plan, but as long as you're prepared then you can deal with problems as they arise, and there will be blood problems!

In the run up to the shoot, feel free to enjoy this sexy shot of our principal cast members, Frazer and Boppy, chilling in the sunshine.

Sunshine seems like a distant memory...

More to come soon, until then, here's a clip of a waving bear.

Happy Monday Everybody!

Going to try to keep a Mon/Thurs update schedule for the blog. Got enough on at the moment to keep this up, it should be a good motivator for me, too! Thought I'd give the blog a cleaner, less cluttered look too. I've got a couple of new pages up as well, including a friends page on which I list people I work with, want to work with, or recommend. Check it out, I'm sure it will grow as time goes on.


Codename: "New Project" 

Got the majority of rough storyboarding done for this now, just working during the evenings sketching out ideas with a biro and clipboard. Some scenes are going to be re-worked but I should be meeting with Mark and Frazer soon over a beer to discuss the exact changes, and then I can prepare a storyboard that we can shoot our rough cut to!

We plan to be finished by February.

I've been cherry-picking bits on shot grammar and shot formation from some books in the library. I used a browser-based brainstorming tool (http://www.popplet.com/) to create a handy visual flow chart that I refer to when I storyboard scenes. This is my main board for that purpose:

(click for larger)

Obviously this is something I've put together using my own shorthand so it might not be as useful to someone else, but I'm including the image as it's an exercise I highly recommend (popplet is a great site for creating something presentable, alternatively many people prefer to brainstorm more creatively by hand. There is no right or wrong way to do this!). It really helped me crystalise the process I need to go through when thinking about my shots. It's so easy to forget to be mindful of everything you need to pay attention to, especially when you're working essentially as a one-man crew. Of course, my shots and framing are usually far from perfect, but I am working on this! It's a good thing if your own work disappoints you, it keeps you moving forward. Here's that excellent Ira Glass quote on the subject of self-disappointment from a previous post if anyone missed it.


Bacalao Performance Company

The talented people at Bacalao have their own website up and running and you can find it here:
http://www.bacalaocompany.com/
You may remember I shot the trailer for Sofia The Show for Bacalao, and not too long ago I was delighted to be invited to a special one-off performance of the show. Sofia The Show is an autobiographical performance by Sofia Marques that takes place in her own house as she celebrates her birthday, and looks back on the particular tragic connection she shares with the date, as well as events that shaped her childhood in Portugal and her adult life in London. It was certainly the most intimate show I'd ever seen, and very moving! The whole evening was wonderfully put together and rather than slip out after the show ended, as I expected I would, Dee and I stayed for drinks and to talk with the other audience members, as well as the talent themselves, Marianne and Sofia. I felt honoured to be able to sit in on such a wonderful show.

Several months ago I introduced Sofia and Marianne of Bacalao to a friend of mine, Andy, who runs his own website development company. Andy worked closely with Bacalao to build the website they needed and his dedication and talent are not to be overlooked. If you're ever in the market for a professional website, I highly recommend him. Here's his site:
http://www.syncrovise.com/

Poetical Cabaret

One more very worthy plug! As well as being one half of Bacalao Performance Company, Sofia also co-runs the Poetical Cabaret, a multi-faceted performance night that runs a few times a month in London. It's free (although you can make a small donation to children's charities on the door) and the night features everything from poetry to comedy to burlesque to bands. It's a wonderful night out and I really recommend you go if you are ever in the neighbourhood! Regular nights are held at the excellent White Lion in Streatham and the Moustache Bar in Stoke Newington.




Well, that's me spent for today, check back on Thursday for the next installment. I hope you like the new look. Also, feel free to send any sympathy my way, I'm currently suffering under a heavy cloud of illness that has kept me out of human circulation for far too long. I will also accept cash, liquor, miniDV tapes or Xbox games.

Cats, Lamps and Links

New Project


We have a deadline for our new project, the whole short should be ready to show by the end of February. We plan to do all the filming over a weekend during the Christmas break so that should be plenty of time to get all the post production done. I don't plan to talk about the details too much, as the video won't take long to put together and I'd like people to see it with fresh eyes and fresh minds, so I hope you don't mind if I talk around it enigmatically.

I can say that there is a starring role for a cat, so I spent today filming my cat, Sir Digby Chicken Caesar, as he walked around the house. All he wants to do is hide in dark corners and under tables though. He's not our star for the project, but he is the stand-in for "rehearsing". 

Rehearsing what I can make a cat do. 

Which is not a whole lot, it seems! 

"far out man."

Amazon UK Links


You might have noticed the Amazon box ---> over there. I've also been adding links to any books I review that will take you to the relevant Amazon page. If you buy something on Amazon after clicking through on my page, then Amazon pay me for the traffic. Hey, if it can help keep me stocked in MiniDV tapes, it's worth a shot! 


I have tagged any posts with book reviews with a "book review" label so you can see all my reviews/recommendations. Click here to see the posts.


If you're interested in any one of my projects more than others, each project also has a label, for easy reference.


Clamp Lamp

Remember my clamp lamp I bought in order to have a cheap n' cheerful spotlight in my toolbox? You might recall from this entry that the lamp cast a horrid light, owing to it's super reflective dome, as it is actually designed for reptile vivariums and not for lighting. Why did I choose it? Some American brands of these lamps are perfectly suited to film-making. But this UK one was just too shiny. I decided to paint the inside of the dome to make it matte, using a spray can of grey primer car paint we had in the shed (just the cheap generic car primer from Halfords).

Here's some before and after pics:

The metal dome, very reflective.

The light shining on a wall, horrible!

After a quick spray-paint

So much better!

It's not going to outshine any professional equipment, but it's a light I can use! It also comes with a clamp so you can fix it onto certain surfaces and edges, which saves someone from holding it.




Right, well I'm off, Dee's cooking pizza and I really should get over there and start chopping some peppers! Is anyone else watching Community? God damn, I'm loving that show. 

Ira Glass - Why Your Own Work Disappoints You

Here is a quote from American public radio star Ira Glass, a man who has been in the business for decades, talking in an interview about creativity - specifically about storytelling through the medium of radio but equally applicable to story based film making, or just about any creative field.

“What nobody tells people who are beginners — and I really wish someone had told this to me... is that all of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, and it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not.
But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase. They quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know it’s normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story.
It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”

Man, that is a good piece of reading! I have felt this way about my own work for a long time but he puts it so magnificently. If you're disappointed in your creative work during your early stages, this is a good thing. This shows that you are holding yourself to a high standard. You will only get better with more experience.

In short, don't give up. Keep pushing, keep learning.

Surviving The Toilet Circuit - A Brief Retrospective

These are some pictures that my partner Dee took while we were filming our first full scene for now-defunct project Surviving The Toilet Circuit. 

It was a great experience. We were shooting in a stunning Whitehall block right on the riverside that we managed to get access to thanks to a friend. As you can see, when you're working without a crew, any moment that the cast aren't performing they will be holding lamps or microphones or operating the clapperboard. Dee found herself doing a lot of this too, when she wasn't taking pictures she was invaluable as my AD! I just want to add how wonderfully open, honest and helpful everyone was. I really enjoyed working with these guys.

Big thanks to the ever pleasant and ever hard-working Diana, Brian, Fiona, Vince T, Vince N, Pablo, Frazer Neil and Mark. An extra big thank you to Kitty for securing the flat for us to film in and for tarting up to play our working girl! You all gave so much time and energy to the project and I am so grateful for that.

The pictures are testament to how beautiful the flat and the building itself were. A really great location and opportunity. It doubled as label manager Clint Coxon's opulent pad for the purpose of the shoot.

If you're interested in what went wrong with the project, or why it ended up being unsustainable, I have written about it in a previous entry here.

Click for larger images.

Brian's scene - Clint: the decadent alcoholic label manager

Setting up the corridor entrance

Brian stepping in for soundman duties 

Fiona (playing the A&R agent Felicity) on soundman duties

Neil - playing guitarist Mitch - relaxing in between scenes

Frazer and a hard earned beer for his duties as co-writer and cast member

The writers behind Surviving The Toilet Circuit, Frazer and (the unphotographed) Mark have co-written another project, a short film which we will be shooting this Christmas. One location, one main actor, ten minute running length. That sounds a little more digestible!

Thanks for reading, and keep an eye out for the new project (as yet untitled) and also for the recurrence of the STTC cast, as I will be calling them again for future projects (if they are up for it)!



Quick book review - The Unkindest Cut

I bought this alongside several other seminal texts (see this blog post from Feb 2010) and it never really managed to grab me, so it kept getting left on the shelf. But it has finally been read!

It's by a  bombastic and egotistic (but very funny) film critic called Joe Queenan who hears about the infamous $7,000 budget for El Mariachi and decided to go one better and make his own self-financed movie for $6,998 in order to overturn the corporate paradigm, make a name for himself, and win a victory for all the average joes who thought that filmmaking was only for the Hollywood elite. All his cash is reserved for film stock, development and equipment hire. He gets neighbours to star in his film for free and uses local locations.

Of course, things snowball out of control very quickly. Queenan has never made a film before, and his cheerful experiment soon becomes a month of terror and dread, with costs exploding exponentially and spilling over all through post production. He loses friends and alienates neigbours, and documents every decision, catastrophe and breakthrough in detail in the book, which makes for compulsive reading.

The movie gets made, but at a heck of a cost. It's a great read if you're interested in what goes on behind the scenes of a film, and if you're interested in making films yourself, you will walk away having learned a lot of lessons.

Sadly the film is impossible to find, it would make the perfect companion to the book about it's genesis. If you've already read Rebel Without A Crew (Robert Rodrigues book about the filming of El Mariachi) then this is a great follow up. The two projects could have not have gone more differently!

It also makes me fucking glad that I work with digital video and not film. The cost is insanely prohibitive!

God bless ya, DV.

If you're interested, you can pick up the book through amazon marketplace:


The Unkindest Cut: How a Hatchet-Man Critic Made His Own $7,000 Movie and Put It All on His Credit Card - amazon

Some real news!

Actual developments this time, not just posts about me playing Grand Theft Auto. Whatever next??


New Project!

Well I sat down for a drink and a (bloody lovely) burger with Mark and Frazer on Monday night, in a really flashy pub (Horniman's) by the riverside in London Bridge.

We talked through a lot of ideas for a short film, some of which I think had major potential to grow into really interesting projects. However, remembering how our last over-ambitious project ended up, we elected to go for the simplest possible. The reasoning being that if we can conquer a small project, we'll be better informed to take on a bigger project in the future and if it doesn't work out, it's no big loss. After all, no-one says we only have one project left in us. Might as well start small. Baby steps! I like Mark and Frazer a lot and I really trust their judgement and ideas. Frazer has written a couple of novels and in his efforts to get published, he recently got a literary agent, exciting times!

We settled on an idea that was set largely in a single location, with one main actor, and - perhaps riskily - an animal performance. We should be able to shoot it over a single weekend. More info to come soon! Mark and Frazer are working on the plot as you read this. It's not the most sweepingly ambitious of our ideas, but it will be the simplest to shoot. I'm really looking forward to storyboarding this idea, it feels like a much more appropriately sized project.

Does anyone else think of What About Bob whenever someone says baby steps?


Smashing Fun

I called into work this morning and arranged to take the day off as holiday, just feeling absolutely annihilated after cycling in to work for the last few weeks. 20 miles a day is a real shock to the system, not to mention the London traffic. Decided to be productive on my day off and picked up the laptop only to immediately drop it and absolutely shatter the screen.

Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuccccccckkkkkkkkkk. Hopefully it's just the screen, need to plug it into a monitor (probably next week at work, no monitors in the house) and see if the rest survived. I don't know what the next step is. I probably need to stump up for a replacement screen.


Stand Up, Sit Down

Some news so fresh it is still piping hot and not entirely confirmed, but hopefully I'll be taping a stand-up show for new comic Robin Adams in the next couple of weeks. Looking forward to it! I think I'll try at least a two-camera set up, one main one on the man himself and a second one off to the side for coverage, depends on what I can get away with in the venue. Need to think about sound too, will be a good opportunity to get some experience here. Will find out what the venue will let me do! Maybe they won't allow any filming :-|


London

You know... sitting in that flashy pub I mentioned earlier surrounded by expensive suits really made me think of the weird relationship I have with this city. I always feel under-dressed in places like that. Probably due to my scraggy t-shirt and jeans look. I live in a pretty decent corner of the overall grubby/crimey/stabby suburb of Lewisham in Greater London (we had a good presence in the 2011 London riots!) but I work in South Kensington, one of the most affluent areas of the Central London, home of Harrods, the Royal Albert Hall and insanely high house prices. The further I get to the centre of the city, the more I feel like an outsider. I think it's a paradox I'm not alone in feeling, seeing as so many of us working in service positions can't afford to live anywhere near we work. It's a chasm I constantly feel that I'm standing near the edge of. I'm impressed by the city, but simultaneously I know it owes so much to the wealth divide. I love London, but it is a weird fucking place. On the plus side, it's one of the greatest and most tolerant melting pots on the planet. I got to say, I fucking love me some tolerance. We need to pump people full of it, because there is a shortage in this world.


Tag it and Bag it

As always I'll be using tags in these blog posts, so you can filter my posts by the project you're interested in. The new project is currently tagged... well... "new project"! I'll rename the tag once we have a title for the damned thing!


Saints Row The Third (is the word)

Don't even bother trying to contact me tomorrow. I'll be locked up indoors with Saints Row The Third, denying the existence of the outside world.

So Peter Jackson, if you need some fresh eyes for your new Hobbit movie, sorry son but I'm BUSY.

Bye :-)

My morning

I know I've got a big job ahead of me so I call my friend, Little Jacob. We've been hanging out a bit lately, playing some pool (he nearly always wins) and eating take-away chicken. He answers the phone.
"Jacob," I say. "I need some of those guns you promised me."
He arranges to meet me downtown. I don't have a car. An large red convertible pulls up at the junction next to me and the obnoxious driver yells an obscenity. I pull him out of his car, throw him to the ground and I climb in. I change the radio station and get some electro pumping on the car's impressive sound system, and I speed off to the meet.

A policeman saw the whole thing and has called in the license plate. After a kilometre or two I've got cops on my tail, sirens screaming. I pull in to the alleyway where Little Jacob is waiting. He hears the sirens and tells me he is leaving, jumping back into his car. No fucking way Jacob, I bought you fried chicken. I ram my convertible into the side of his car, crunching metal and breaking glass. Jacob cries out in shock. I lean out with a submachine gun, squeezing down the trigger as flame kicks out of the barrell, unloading a clip in his direction. Dirty bullet holes rake Jacob's car, his windows shatter and his head bursts like an overripe fruit, spattering blood all over his plush interior. I get out of my car and run down some steps into a subway station, chased by armed police. A cop pulls his gun out and threatens me, in the heat of the moment I open fire and kill him with a single shot. People yell in horror. I hide round a corridor corner as my phone rings. It's Jacob, he's getting out of the hospital soon and needs a lift.
"Sure thing Jacob, I'll be there in an hour" I say as the police open fire and concrete chunks get blown out of the wall. People are screaming and running. I jump onto the subway tracks as the bullets fly and get hit by a train. Everything goes black.

A few hours later I'm walking out of hospital. My phone rings, it's Jacob again. He curses me out for not picking him up, leaving him to make his own way home.

And then I got dressed and went to work

(Not) Surviving The Toilet Circuit

Well, I guess it was just too big a project. A 45 minute short film with over a dozen locations and 8 main cast members, filmed without any experience.

Unfortunately, the short film project - Surviving The Toilet Circuit - a film about a SE London band not quite climbing the ladder to musical success has stalled and is no longer being pursued.

The biggest problem? It was simply too unwieldy, and finding the time when we're all busy people with jobs and bands and families. It took so long that situations changed and the obstacles began to become too big to climb. It is with a strange mixture of genuine regret and naked relief that we closed the project that had become bigger than I could keep track of.

Mark and Frazer are keeping their script though, and hoping to pass it on to some professionals who can do it justice, maybe even a stage performance. I really liked it, and it really resonated with me. I look forward to seeing what happens with the story in the future.

I learned a metric ton of stuff on our filming and rehearsing for this project, and we're all still great friends, stronger than before. But the lesson is learned. If I'm going to do anything as big as that, I need to do it with far simpler logistics. Fewer cast, fewer locations. These are the limitations I need to work in when this is all being done in people's spare time.

Any cast members reading this, thank you so much for giving up so much of your free time for rehearsals, for filming, for logistics, for everything. You were all so generous, I really can't thank you enough.

Well, I'm meeting with Mark and Frazer tomorrow to use this momentum and education we've had, we're going to decide on a short film to shoot. Something simple, no more than 3 locations, no more than 3 cast members, filmable in two weekends or so. Looking forward to it! The sheer mass of the previous project became a suffocating spectre during my low periods, although this is probably largely because I didn't really know how it was going to work out. Learning on the job is the best way to do it, and I've loved it, but there's always the frightening notion that it could all go wrong, and people would be looking to me to fix it, and I wouldn't be able to. Pretending to lead a project while feeling like a fraud is a bad place to be, which is why I try to be as honest and open as possible with anyone I'm working with. I feel like I've learned so much, but I still feel that this is barely the surface.

Sound is still a big obstacle to climb. I should find some people who know all about that stuff and see what I can learn.

In other news, my rent has gone up by £100 a month (negotiated down from £150) and I am so goddamned broke. Missed an opportunity to film Houdini, one of my new favourite bands (check them out here) because of lack of cash, distance (they are based in Medway, not that far away to be honest) and commitments. I would still dearly love to do a video with them though, we've been talking about it for a long time. I'm happy to have full-time work in a financial climate such as this, but it's leaving me so little freedom to work on what I want to do. I'm really glad to be meeting Mark and Frazer tomorrow, get that spark started again, get myself pulled out of the comfortable mire that I sank into once work on Surviving The Toilet Circuit ceased, and since I finished the trailer video for Sofia The Show. 

I've also been fleshing out the basics on my own screenplay finally. I've got a basic outline that I'm really pleased with. I'm writing it with one eye firmly fixed on how limited my options are when it comes to locations and casting and what can realistically be done. Who knows if it will evolve into something filmable, but right now I'm excited, and working on it makes me happy!

Lastly, Saints Row: The Third comes out on Friday. The last pre-order I'll be making for a while until my finances improve. I can justify it because a huge open-world game has real value - I can play it for months - and I'm nerdily excited about it. We all need some down time, and gaming is how I relax. It's my one true vice. You know, apart from all the drugs.

Sofia The Show trailer - finished!

Sometimes it's hard to find a good balance between a full time job, home life, and not one but two time consuming hobbies. The night before last I spent the entire evening putting together a video for Bacalao Performance Company, the footage we shot a while back (mentioned in my last blog) and some footage I had shot since, when I met Marianne, the director of the piece, to film a spoken-to-camera pitch asking for help or funding for the project. The aim is that the finished video trailer will go on the Bacalao website, whereas the trailer followed by the video pitch is now live on a website called Sponsume.com, which is a place where people can show snippets of their work and ask for help funding their projects. Please, check the page out, read about the project, and if you can spare some change, please make a contribution to the show and help Sofia and Marianne, they've worked so hard to get the show off the ground. You'll get a beer out of it!!!

http://www.sponsume.com/project/sofia-show

I was really pleased to get the video done. Putting the parts together and making something that works is really satisfying. I love editing, it's probably my favourite part of the whole project. It's like building something out of clay. You start with a mess and end up with something beautiful. Now I'm not saying my work is beautiful, but I'm learning about how to get there!

I had actually put together a trailer a few weeks earlier, using a scene we filmed of Sofia singing some fado (a beautiful genre of classical style Portuguese folk music) with some shots from the footage. Ultimately though the trailer focused too much on the sad elements of Sofia's story and not enough on the redemptive, joyous part, and wasn't quite representative of the whole performance. Sofia and Marianne were both very honest and forthright and gracious, and their openness was refreshing and really allowed me to see what the video was lacking and what parts of it worked.

I cut a second trailer using a piece of fado music by Amelia Rodrigues recommended to me by Sofia and Marianne and it's a very beautiful piece of music. I've heard it 100 times and I still really like it. This time Sofia and Marianne collaborated with me to help get the right feel across, and sent me detailed notes. I've been working on it for a few weeks, but last night I put in a solid few hours and got the video to a finished state. I then spent the requisite hour exporting the video by trial and error to produce a copy that was the correct ratio, a good size, and below 500 megs (Vimeo has an upload cap), but I got there in the end! The new trailer was uploaded last night and has been met with positive comments from Bacalao, so I'm very happy!

I've created an account on Vimeo to upload the videos and as a newcomer to the service (having only really used youtube before) I'm impressed by how open, friendly and directed the site is. It's specifically created for people like me who want to upload their own work and it looks really nice. I don't know why it took me so long to get here!

I have to say I'm a little intimidated by the visual quality of the videos. There is a sharpness and crystal clear quality that I have just not been able to replicate so far. There is a also probably a bit too much slow motion. It seems these days that you're not showing off your tech or your talent if you're not filming in HD and in extreme slow motion. Makes everything look like an advert for Sky Sports or the latest flatscreen TV. If I had a HD camera capable of slow motion like that, I think I would go crazy with the awesome novelty and document my entire life in slow motion, so it would take ten lifetimes to watch. But I'm digressing!

Anyway, get your ass over to the Sponsume.com page so you can see my video. Read about the show too, it's an exciting and ambitious project.

http://www.sponsume.com/project/sofia-show