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.

Done In 60 Seconds

As most of you probably know, every year Empire magazine runs a competition in which you have to remake a feature length of your choice and fit it into just 60 seconds. Of course the aim of the competition is the challenge of managing to transfer the entire plot of a feature length film, with a running time of 2 hours or so, into just 60 seconds and on a tiny budget. This of course results in films that are entertaining for the ways in which they get round the obvious time and budget problems, for example here is last year's winner. Jerry Maguire (1996) in 60 seconds.

This competition led me to start thinking about which films would be the easiest to reduce to just 60 seconds. After a brief think about it, I came up with a shortlist of my top 5 easy to do films:

5. Permanent Vacation (1980) - dir. Jim Jarmusch

Jarmusch's feature debut follows Allie, a drifter, as he roams the streets of New York and occasionally stops off to speak to various people he meets. A 60 second remake would be much the same, he would just have to have shorter conversations and not travel quite as far. Jarmusch's non existent budget in the first place gives way to no real concerns on that front either, as anything he managed so can you.

4. Rope (1948) - dir. Alfred Hithcock

One of the most immediate things to notice about Rope is that it is all filmed in one location with the illusion of all being one take. That said, it is perfect material for this competition, with the story being simple yet structured enough to bring down to time.

3. Koyaanisqatsi (1982) - dir. Godfrey Reggio

The first in a trilogy, Koyaanisqatsi is a collection of brilliant and beautifully epic footage compiled to a Phillip Glass score. The film opens with shots of America's natural and untouched beauty and progresses to show how it has been built on and used. This would be relatively easy to mimic in Bath, with so much open space surrounding it and the building works in progress. With Glass's score ready for us to use, the film which took Reggio 6 years to make could be done for this competition in 6 minutes (but more realistically a few hours!)

2. Blue (1993) - dir. Derek Jarman

If you are already familiar with this film, you must be wondering what could possibly be easier than this to make it to number one! If you are not familiar with it, the whole 79 minute film consists of a plain blue screen which doesn't change, with a score from Brian Eno and voice over from Derek Jarman as he recalls his life and meditates, facing death from AIDS related complications. The colour and the concept being significant as blue was the last colour he could see before going blind through his illness. The main complication with remaking this film, is the high probability that it would be received as rather insensitive, when his heartfelt story is reduced to a mere 60 seconds.

1. Empire (1964) - dir. Andy Warhol

If you could be given one piece of information about a film to help you decide whether or not it would be suitable to remake for this competition, "What is it's runtime?", would be a reasonable question. In the case of Empire, the answer would be 485 minutes. From that information it would probably seem like the least likely candidate, it's only saving grace being, perhaps, that it's title might be appreciated by the competition's organisers. If, however, you were not only granted one piece of information and curiosity as to how a 485 minute film could even be considered for such a competition led you to wanting to find out more then you might not be so surprised. The entire film consists of one shot from one angle of the Empire State Building for over 8 hours. Whilst the film was constructed as an experiment, to see how long people could watch the same image before growing impatient and giving up, this would probably be lost in the 60 second version, as it would be over before they realised they were being tested.

Feel free to leave comments of other films that would be suitably easy to do.

Films & Kicks!

As you can see from my earlier post of my submission for the Foot Locker competition, film is not my only passion. Thus I felt obliged to write a blog post combining the two, I've decided to write a post about when films and sneakers cross each other's paths, starting with Spike Lee, as he is a man who shares both of these interests and much more productively and creatively than myself.



Spike's love for the athletic shoe has been prevalent in many of his films, often being written in to his scripts, from his Mars Blackmon character from She's Gotta Have It (1986) going to bed in his Air Jordan Is or Buggin' Out in Do The Right Thing (1989) starting a fight over someone standing on his Air Jordan IIIs. As Spike Lee was giving free advertising to Air Jordan brand in his films anyway, he was given the role officially with the introduction of the 'Mars and Mike' ad- campaign, using Spike Lee's Mars Blackmon character.






Spike Lee's involvement with the Air Jordan brand was furthered in 2006, with the release of the Air Jordan Spiz'ikes, which combined different parts of the previous Air Jordan 3, 4, 5, 6, 9 and 20. As well as featuring a picture of Mars Blackmon on the left heel and the logo of Spike Lee's production company 40 Acres & A Mule Filmworks on the right heel.





Spike Lee, however, is not the only link between the two worlds, with films having an impact on the sneaker world and vice versa. A good example would be last week's much anticipated release of the Star Wars x Adidas Originals collection, a lot of which sold out on it's opening day. These are by no means the only film/trainer collaborative effort, the last couple of years having seen collaborations such as Ghostbusters x A Bathing Ape and Hellboy II x Adidas Originals. The limited quantities that collaborations, such as these, are released in appeals to the sneakerhead and film fanboy alike, for whom it is vital to have in order to further build their collections.




Companies such as Nike, have long seen the potential for advertising in movies. This is particularly obvious in 80's and early 90's movies, when you often see a close-up of a character pulling on or running in a Nike trainer, as this is the time when Nike were fighting against the likes of Adidas and Reebok to be the leading sneaker brand. This fight was fought both subtley and unsubtely. A more subtle example would be White Men Can't Jump (1992), which featured all the best and newest Nike trainers throughout the film; whilst they were heavily featured (as you can see in this article) they weren't focussed on, unlike in Back To The Future Part II (1989). With Back To The Future Part II they went as far as creating their own sneaker (not the Nike Air Pressure as some people believe) for the sequence when Marty McFly travels to the year 2015, which prompted a long-running online petition for the Nike McFly to be released and someone even created a fake Nike McFly trailer to accompany it!



Trainers have also been the subject of a documentary film called Just For Kicks (2005), exploring the history of people's obsession with them. Which if anyone is interested in gaining any further knowledge on sneakers is available to watch on YouTube:



Hope the off-topic from planning & making a film blog post was educational and incidentally my blog's name Ecstasy is named after the 1986 Adidas sneaker and not the drug!

Writer's Block

Over this festive season I have been writing my script, which is aptly named Writer's Block. The plot follows an artist who is having 'painter's block' and spends his days staring at a blank canvas seeking inspiration, but only finding distraction in his surrounding appartment. After a few days the artist starts taking to the streets at night hoping to find inspiration, until one day he comes across a group of graffiti writers (hence the title) and goes along with them as they paint the city. He ends up finding his inspiration and painting a huge spraypaint mural on a wall overlooking the city, before returning home elated that he can finally paint again. On sitting in front of his canvas again he finds himself back to square one, with nothing to paint.

There were a few films in my head as I was writing this, the main one was Martin Scorsese's Life Lessons (1989), along with aspects of The Driller Killer (1979) & Quality Of Life (2004).






As my script doesn't have any dialogue it has been a struggle to write without directing it, due to this I feel that it has ended up rather short and I am unsure as to whether or not it is a satisfactory length for a visually driven piece or still running just under. To remedy this I have toyed with the idea of adding a voice over narration, but as of yet have not commited to doing so. I intend to do some test writing and see how it works first, with hopefully a well-timed narration not taking too much away from the visual and audial aspects of the piece.