Site Tour

Are you getting the most out of this site? Here are some things you might not have known were on neiloseman.com…

Firstly, this blog goes right back to March 2001. It covers the making of my two micro-budget features, The Beacon and Soul Searcher, from development through to completion and distribution, and the development of my next feature project The Dark Side of the Earth, plus all stages of making that project’s pilot (demo sequence), a large-scale 35mm production starring Benedict Cumberbatch. Over those eleven years I’ve tried to share all the emotional ups and downs, everything I did right and (more frequently) everything I did wrong. There’s plenty for any low budget filmmaker to learn from my experiences, good and bad, and I hope they’ll inspire you as well.

For example, you can read about dodging Malvern Hills Conservators to shoot a car chase on a common, how I found a 56 piece orchestra to perform Soul Searcher’s score, what happened when I used a smoke machine while filming in the world’s largest chained library, what it was like to work with Red Dwarf and Doctor Who veteran Mike Tucker on the construction of the Wooden Swordsman, and how slow and difficult it was to shoot on 35mm anamorphic with a relatively small crew.

Use the Blog Categories in the righthand sidebar of this page to access the entries from the various stages of each film project.

The Films section of this site contains a page for every film I’ve directed, excluding corporate projects. What you might not have noticed is that – in addition to stills, synopses, clips, trailers and behind-the-scenes info – many of these pages have a Downloads section that contains production documents. Want to know what The Beacon’s £3,000 budget was spent on? Or what the schedule for Soul Searcher’s six week shoot looked like? Or how to set out a music cue sheet? Or how closely The Picnic stuck to its shot list? You can find all these things and more.

At the time of writing there are 73 videos on my YouTube channel, most of them informative behind-the-scenes or “how to” featurettes. These are organised into playlists according to the film project they relate to, but now for the first time I’ve compiled a list (below) according to subject matter.

With the exception of the ones in italics, these videos are all free to watch. And remember that every time the total raised for Stop/Eject‘s post-production passes a hundred pound mark we’re releasing public rewards, many of which are behind-the-scenes podcasts. So head on over to stopejectmovie.com and make your donation if you want to see this list grow.