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.

The Edit

The Last couple of weeks have been spent locked away in the editing suite (as well as editing in front of the TV from home) with Myles. As Myles was more experienced with using Final Cut, I played the part of Assistant Editor, offering suggestions and learning some of the more basic controls; enough so that I could just about string together a rough-round-the-edges edit. The end result was quite satisfactory, unfortunately there were a couple of things that we felt let it down.



The first of these was the music; after hours of searching royalty-free music sites, with a song in mind from Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986) we settled on an 80's sounding track we found in the dying moments of the edit, when in hinesight we probably should have scrapped that idea and chosen one of the smoother 50's or 60's tracks that we came across. The other major issue was more out of our control, due to the weather on the weekend of our filming, this caused some inconsistency in the lighting of our film, which needed to be colour corrected. This was particularly the case in the alleyway sequence when Andy gets caught by Jay stealing a CCTV camera, as it was towards the end of the Saturday and the sun was just starting to set.

We had also intended to use the photos that Andy takes with the disposable camera in the film as an accompaniment to the credits, but ended up deciding against it. So I uploaded the photos to Flickr, so that they can still be enjoyed.

On the whole I am pleased to have the edit done and it has given me a better idea of how to prioritise our time better on the next film, such as looking for music earlier and perhaps knowing better when pick-ups will be needed on our shooting weekend. Anyway here is the final product.

Sneakers For Life!

This week Myles and I entered a short film/trailer competition on YouTube. It was an online competition across Europe by Foot Locker, with a grand prize of a lifetime supply of kicks (lifetime supply being 65 pairs over 5 years!). Already owning an ever growing ammount of trainers, the prize sounded very appealing and was an excuse to make another short film, my first to be entered into a competition. Here is the competition outline.



This was the first film that me and Myles had made in an advert/viral style, which I had been waiting for an excuse to do for a while. In the end it worked out well, despite some minor concerns, the main one being the slightly washed colour of the film, which was a result of a few factors, such as poor lighting conditions in the kitchen, which was made worse with a large window next to the fridge. This lighting was further made an issue, due to the difference in appearance on the Z1 monitor, the MacBook it was edited on and how it appears on YouTube, which made colour correction even more difficult. There were also things improved during the shoot, such as the ending, which was originally supposed to be an ambitious 360 pan of the kitchen (which probably wouldn't have worked as well in hine sight). Anyway here is the final product. Written by Gustav Newby, Directed by Gustav Newby & Myles McAuliffe Camera & Sound by Myles McAuliffe, Performed by Gustav Newby, Edited by Myles McAuliffe and original score by Tim Crosbie.






Peace!

That's A Wrap!

This weekend we finished the shooting of our short film, Man Without A Movie Camera. It went a lot better than expected, despite the worst imaginable weather conditions! The first day of shooting started off quite dry, despite reports that there was going to be heavy storms throughout the day. Due to the surprisingly nice weather we decided to start with our outdoor shots to ge them out of the way before it turned, which it did on setting up our shot and would continue to do every time we wanted to film outside. Our second day of shooting, however was perfect filming conditions with a clear blue sky and great lighting, unfortunately this wasn't great for continuity with regard to the previous day's weather, but gave us a chance to do some pick-ups at the end of the day for some of the stormier shots of the previous day's shoot.

In the end our planning paid off, with time left at the end of each day's schedule meaning that we didn't run out of time on either day and had time to do multiple takes of every shot, to give us some leeway if anything is to be wrong with the footage when it comes to editing it. Some looseness in the structure led to us achieving some of our most creative feats of the film, such as a few of our best shots and a strengthening of the script being forced through an extras absence on the second day. One of our shots, which we came up with on location ended up being by far our best shot of the shoot, which was a tracking shot filmed from the boot of one of the extra's cars, as you can see in the photo below with Myles holding the camera while Luke drives.

Next step is the editing, which will be started after another short film for an online competition is made this week, which should be completed for viewing in my next post, so keep your eyes peeled!

Pre-Production

The pre-production process is going well so far, with nearly everything sorted for next weekends shoot. As producer, my main concern this week has been regarding locations. Me and Myles went on a scouting mission during the week, taking photos of possibilities. The main location we were seeking out was a Car Park, and we managed to find two possible candidates. Unfortunately our decision wasn't made any easier on talking to security/owners about their availability over our shooting weekend, as they were both readily available for us!
When we make our final decision on which of the car parks to use, I am going to put them into my new toy, the Hitchcock iPhone application to start storyboarding. It's a nice application, which lets you storyboard films including all the extra details, such as where a tracking shot/zoom will start and finish and lets you add templates of cast and what directions they move. Anyway, here is a video showing what it does better: