Screening & Awards

Last night was the cinema screening in the Little Theatre. We watched a total of 7 films before voting for 2 at the end. The results were as follows:

• Critic's Choice - The Legend of Robin Link
  


• Runner-Up - Dans L'Espirit: The Vision


• First Place - The Interview

We were all really happy (and surprised) with the result, especially considering there were technical difficulties during our film with much of Ed's key dialogue being muted for some reason. I think what helped us was shooting it on the 7D, as oppose to the Sony Z1 that the university provides, as well as our location and the fact that we had lighting and tracking. We did also invite a lot of our friends, which probably helped with the voting!

Well done to everyones films, they were all really enjoyable and thanks to everyone who voted for us!

The Edit

Since finishing our film, we have been mostly preoccupied with deadlines for our other subjects, however we've also been squeezing in a bit of editing as well! Unfortunately me and Mark are the only ones in the group who don't know how to use Final Cut, which means we are only able to give verbal suggestions about what needs to be done and not actually do it. Initially three edits were made over the Easter holiday, one by Myles & Mark, one by Elspeth and one by Josh. We then compiled what we considered the best parts of each, into one edit.

Unfortunately we faced more problems editing than we did filming. Firstly we couldn't transfer Josh's edit from his MacBook, as he edited on Final Cut 7, when the university computers have Fincal Cut 6 and Final Cut have decided to not make them compatible in an attempt to make everybody buy their latest software! We soon found a way round this though (and by 'we' I mean Rich Wood!). Our next issue was with the sound, which was extremely inconsistent due to the small space we were shooting in making it hard to keep the boom out of shot and the tape player which was playing in the background. In the end we had to do a soundmix and lay it on a different track and sync it in Final Cut. The other main issue that needed to be dealt with was colour correction, as this film is being made to be entered in competitions, the standards are a lot higher than on our last project. Initially there were some shots, which were problematic but they were all fine in the end.

Despite being a lot more work and stress than it should have been it wasn't disastrous as nothing was effected. It was just a question of correcting the problems.

Wrapped!

Our shooting weekend is over and I am very pleased with the results! I think we went into this film a lot more prepared than the last one and it showed. On Friday afternoon we did our stills on campus, Saturday morning did our stills in Victoria Park and did rehearsals with the cast and Sunday shot the film at the police station. Both Friday and Saturday went extremely smoothly and whilst there were some problems on the Sunday, they all worked out in the end.

Sunday's shooting was by far the best day of filming I have worked on (excluding running work!) as we were using a good camera (Ciaran's Canon 7D), we had a good location, good actors and good equipment (tracking and lighting) and costumes (courtesy of Duncan whose father and brother are policemen). The fact that we were shooting inside also meant that we didn't have any adverse weather conditions to deal with. As with any day of filming, however, we did have some slight problems. The main (and only real) problem was due to us filming in such high quality. We were recording onto Compact Flash cards and had a system whereby we used two cards, so that we could transfer the footage to one of our MacBooks and then clear it when the next one was full. However, the problem occurred when the MacBooks were too old to handle the footage that we had shot, meaning that we soon reached a point where we no longer had any space on our Compact Flash cards and could not contiue shooting. This led to me and Ciaran wondering in and out of camera and electronics shops in Bristol trying to find some new cards so that we could continue, with the results consistently being that they were too small or cost £200. Yet another hour was then wasted trying to find a Jessops, which everybody we asked seemed to know the location of (including the GPS on our iPhones), but we always found ourselves at the same petrol station! Eventually we returned accepting defeat and ended up having to call one of Josh's friends to pick up Ciaran's newer MacBook Pro from our house in Bath and drop it off.

With two and a half hours successfully wasted, we were worried that we would not be able to finish shooting, as we were meant to be vacating the premises by 6pm. Luckily for us, however, the people who ran the arts centre were as relaxed as you would expect an artist to be and said we could stay there as long as we needed, as long as we closed the door behind us! In the end, this meant that we only had to sacrifice a couple of shots from our shotlist, none of which were crucial anyway. Here are a couple of sneak preview pictures from our weekend.

Pre-Production

The last couple of weeks have been occupied by pre-production work on The Interview, this has mostly consisted of two things, casting & locations. After lots of false starts and dead ends we finally have both!

Casting

Initially our main character (Luke Phillips) was going to be played by a friend of me and Myles, Bradley Ojugo, who studied acting at BRIT school. However, he ended up pulling out meaning we were left back at square one with no cast! Shortly after this spot of bad luck we were blessed with acquiring all three of our lead actors within the space of a week. Myles had got in touch with the head of Performing Arts, Chris Jury, who put us in contact with Guy Smallwood. Myles also got in contact with a friend of his, Duncan Roe, with whom he had worked on a film last year. Our third lead came through Elspeth, who had got into contact with the Theatre Royal in Bath who put us in contact with Ed Browning. We had our three leads.

Luckily all three of our actors were in their mid-to-late twenties, so they didn't look too typical of those you normally see in student productions. Whilst it would have been nicer to perhaps get some actors pushing 30 or even 40, we were more than happy with our cast.

Locations

Our locations scouting was holding our finalised script in the lurch, whilst we had already finished the script and set it to the police station. If we were not able to get a suitable location then we were going have to change it to an office scenario. We had some initial links through the Bath film office to use Bath Police Station and a restaurant in town, which used to be a police station. Unfortunately both of these were dead ends and we were unable to get permission to film in either. With things not looking good for us being able to use our script, Elspeth found another ex-police station in Bristol (Bridewell Art Centre) and booked us an appointment to be shown round. We went there without the highest expectations based on our previous efforts, but were pleasantly surprised when we got there!

Not only was the location perfect for what we wanted, having all of our locations (corridor, cell, interview room), but they had had experience with film crews using it, with Being Human having been filmed there a few weeks ago and they let us use it free of charge as we were students. Here are some pictures of the location:

However, this was not our only location we needed. We also had to find an office and a supermarket to take stills for our flashback sequences. As with the police station, we were initially turned down for both locations. For the supermarket we tried Sainsburys and two branches of Co-Op, none of which wanted to be associated with the issue of schizophrenia or criminal activities. The offices were also hard to gain permission for, this time as we wanted to shoot on a weekend, and it was very hard to negotiate times when we would be able to use them. Although this is understandable, as they would not have been getting anything out of it! In the end we reluctantly settled on locations on campus, which we had been trying to avoid. For the supermarket we used the SU shop and for the office we used an office in the library. Thankfully, however, both of these locations turned out really well, as we were able to shoot them from such angles that it was not obvious as to where they were taken.

The Re-Write

Over the last week we have met up a couple of times and talked about what changes we want to make to Luke's script. We initially wanted to keep the same story and use lots of stylistic devices to represent the two sides of the character. However, we decided that more could be done if we changed the story and kept the theme of the main character being schizophrenic and having not taken his medication.

Our first port of call was researching the characterestics of someone with schizophrenia and seeing how we could encorporate them into what would otherwise be a normal situation. The symptoms which stood out to us as working best were, dillusions of grandeur and paranoia. As these were subtle enough to reveal his condition over the course of the script and not as cliché as the idea of a dual personality as in Fight Club.

We had two conflicting ideas to start with, one was just of an opening shot with the main character sitting in a police cell and another which involved the main character in a typical office workspace or possibly a job interview. In the end we came up with an amalgamation of all of these ideas. The main character had been arrested and was in a police interview, which he thought was a job interview. As the title Treatment was no longer relevant to the script, we changed it to The Interview.

As we felt we might be changing the script a bit too much from the original concept, we kept most of the scenarios that featured in Luke's script in flashback sequences, when the crimes of the main character are being discussed in the interview. We also named the main character Luke Phillips in homage to its original writer.

Here is a storyboard I completed on my iPhone, using the Hitchcock application I spoke about in a previous post.

And The Winner Is...

After much debate about which of the three films, mentioned in my last post, we would pick we came to a decision. Albeit not a very decisive decision, but rather one based on the outcome of a coin toss (and not even a real coin toss, but rather one stimulated by an iPhone app!). Well without further ado, the result was Treatment by Luke Phillips.

Treatment is about a schizophrenic man who forgets to take his medicine one morning. Although the first draft needed lots of work, we liked the theme of schizophrenia and thought it would be an interesting issue to explore within our film. We are going to start a re-write over the next couple of days. In the meantime, however, I am going to rewatch a few films from my collection that deal with schizophrenia (all in very different ways!) and see if I can gain some inspiration. My to watch list tonight is:

• Fight Club (1999) - dir. David Fincher


• Me, Myself & Irene (2000) - dir. Bobby & Peter Farrelly


• Julien Donkey Boy (1999) - dir. Harmony Korine

Obviously some of these are going to be more useful than others, by which I mean Julien Donkey Boy will probably be the only useful one! But it will be fun nonetheless.

Picking...

Recently or time has mainly been occupied with picking things. First of all we had to pick groups for our new film project, then we had to pick roles within the project and the script we would be producing. Here is our team and their roles:

Elspeth Wild - Co-Producer

Josh Montague - Sound

Lord McAuliffe - Co-Producer

Mark Davies - Cinematographer

And myself as director.

Our next task then is to pick which script to make. After reading through the classes scripts, there were 3 which stood out to everyone in our group. These were Liz Scott's The Industry, Lyndon McGuckian's A Justified Presumption and Luke Phillips' Treatment. Once we decide which film we are going to remake, then we can get started on a rewrite and the pre-production.