A few months ago I was approached, via a comment on this blog, by John Harrington. A Herefordshire-based writer, John had completed a script for the pilot episode of SAS Couriers, a sitcom based on his experiences as a driver for a rural courier firm. The BBC had displayed some interest in the script, but wanted him to go away and shoot some of it before they would take it any further.
Dairy cattle at Rowlestone Ice Cream
So John’s hired me to direct a ten minute section of the pilot episode, which will be used as proof of concept and which we hope will lead to a TV commission. I was immediately attracted by the opportunity to do something about Herefordshire, a place I rarely get to shoot any fiction in, despite living here, and by the quirky but complex characters John had created.
We’ll be shooting early in the new year, and work has already begun on casting, crewing and location scouting. The other week Louise Wright – who doesn’t really have a job title yet, but I’m going to call her the production manager – took me into the beautiful west Herefordshire countryside to look at some locations. We quickly found a stunning setting for our sheep farm and an ideal dairy farm for an escaping cow scene.
It’s high time for an update on the progress of Stop/Eject, my magical and moving fantasy-drama about a tape recorder that can stop and rewind time.
First up, thanks to the auctioning-off of a hat worn by lead actress Georgina Sherrington (The Worst Witch), our fundraising total has crossed the £1,200 mark. That means we’re over 80% of the way to our £1,500 target. It also means that the last in our series of behind-the-scenes podcasts from the set of Stop/Eject has been released.
Down in Hay-on-Wye, editor Miguel Ferros is hard at work cutting Stop/Eject itself. I went down there on Tuesday and had a sneak peek at the first few minutes, which is already streets ahead of the version I edited. A fresh pair of eyes is indeed a very valuable thing at this stage in a film’s creation.
Meanwhile, I’ve also been editing – editing Record & Play: The Making of Stop/Eject, a 30 minute documentary which will form the centrepiece of the DVD and Bluray’s bonus features. Several brand-new interviews have been filmed for this, including one with Georgina. At the same time we interviewed her on another subject, and we hope to be revealing this soon as an exciting new reward for sponsors.
Press kit outside cover by Alain Bossuyt
Alain Bossuyt, who won our poster design competition earlier in the year, has adapted and expanded his eye-catching design into a folder for the press kits. Although it will probably be quite a while before these kits are needed, it’s always useful to have them around just in case. You can find out more about Alain and his work (with the help of Google Translate) at leplanb.fr
Another designer, Andy Roberts, who did all the graphics for the Worcestershire Film Festival, is busy laying out the illustrated script book for those sponsors who selected the Unit Publicist reward. I’m looking forward to seeing what he comes up; I’m sure it will be a fantastic souvenir. Andy’s website is at speakersfive.co.uk
Press kit inside cover by Alain Bossuyt
This afternoon I was interviewed by Toni McDonald on BBC Radio Hereford & Worcester. If you missed it, you can listen to it online. My part is about 2 hrs 45 mins into the programme.
And on Tuesday, Stop/Eject’s trailer will be screened at the Underwire networking event in Wolverhampton, along with the trailer for producer Sophie Black’s own short film, Ashes. Tickets can be bought online for £5.
Remember – apart from the hat, which was of course a one-off – all of the sponsor rewards mentioned above are still available. So if you want to secure yourself a copy of the DVD or Bluray, bag a ticket to the premiere or get one of the illustrated script books, head on over to stopejectmovie.com/donate and make your contribution.
I’ve just completed a new DP showreel for myself. I’m keen to expand my DP work on fiction projects of all kinds in 2013, so please get in touch if you’re looking for a cinematographer. I have seven micro-budget features and countless shorts under my belt as DP. Watch the reel in 1080P for the best experience.
In order of first appearance, these are the films featured on the reel. Click on them to link through to the official websites, Facebook pages, etc. In square brackets after some of the items below are links to posts on this blog about how I lit and shot the film in question.
Mary, Mary (psychological thriller, currently in post, dir. Barend Kruger)
Georgina Sherrington as Kate in Stop/Eject, wearing a hat that is now up for auction.
We’re auctioning off the hat worn by Georgina Sherrington in a scene in Stop/Eject, with all proceeds going towards finishing this short fantasy-drama. To bid, comment on the photo on our Facebook page (click here), stating the amount in UK pounds.* The auction ends at 7pm GMT on Thursday December 6th.
The hat appears in a winter scene in Stop/Eject, as Kate (played by Georgina Sherrington of The Worst Witch fame) enters the mysterious charity shop on a cold December day to once again use the time-travelling tape recorder. Behind-the-scenes footage of Georgie wearing the hat can be seen in this podcast from day two of the shoot:
A continuity photo from the shoot by costume designer Katie Lake
“I had discussed colours with Neil,” explains Katie Lake, Stop/Eject’s costume designer, “and we liked the idea of yellow and blue for Kate – more yellow when she was happy, and more blue when she was sad. For the winter scene, as it was set in the darkest days of Kate’s emotional journey, I knew I needed to dress her in dark or drab colors. I had chosen a navy dress, but wanted to avoid making her look like she was dressed for a funeral, so when I found an off-white coat, I knew a light or medium grey hat would be perfect. The lighter colours wash out pale skin, like Georgie has, making her look even more drab and depressed.”
The hat was handmade especially for the production by Kerryblueknits, a New England-based crafter. “I have knit many a custom hat, but this was my first for a film,” says Kerry. “It was really exciting! Katie wanted a small hat, in light or medium grey, and something that an artsy person would have. At first she was thinking something slouchy, but that can be hard for petite women to pull off. We decided in the end on this beautiful lacy pattern – something that a young professional might have gone for, but in a subtle color.”
Kerry knitted the hat with an 85% wool/15% alpaca yarn. It is a size small and should be hand-washed and lain flat to dry.
Click here to place your bid, and be sure to check out Kerryblueknits on Etsy, where Kerry has a range of lovely hats, scarves and cowls perfect for any men or women in your life who need warming up this winter. She’s also more than happy to knit you a custom hat; prices start at $35.
* Shipping/postage will be charged at £2 (UK) or £4 (rest of world) on top. The winning bidder will be instructed how to pay via the Stop/Eject website. If he/she doesn’t pay within 48 hours of the auction ending, the hat will be offered to the next highest bidder. Bids received after the closing time will not count. Direct message the Stop/Eject Facebook page to bid anonymously.
Last year I was contacted by scriptwriter, author and SFX Magazine contributor MJ Simpson, who was writing a book called Urban Terrors: New British Horror Cinema 1997-2008. Although I describe my 2005 feature Soul Searcher as a fantasy-action movie, it does have some elements in common with the horror genre, most notably the character of the Grim Reaper, and so Mike was keen to give it a mention in his book.
Urban Terrors is released this Saturday, December 1st, and can be bought online or on the highstreet from The Cinema Store and Forbidden Planet. Order before Saturday to get it at the discounted price of £15.25 (normally £17.95).
By the late 1990s, the Golden Age of British Horror Cinema was long gone. But like all the best monsters, the genre has risen from the grave and in the 21st century is going from strength to strength.
Developments in video technology and changes in distribution have seen a ten-fold increase in the number of British horror films made and released each year. From major studio pictures like 28 Days Later and Shaun of the Dead to cult indies like Freak Out and The Last Horror Movie, the new millennium is a boom time for home-grown horror. And many of these new films are contemporary, socially-relevant tales reflecting life in modern Britain; instead of creepy castles, their monsters and psychos stalk housing estates and tower blocks…
Urban Terrors is the first book to fully examine the British horror film revival, documenting and analysing the more than 100 movies that were commercially released between 1997 and 2008. It reveals how the changes in technology have enabled more people to make films, how changes in distribution – from VHS to DVD to VOD – are enabling more people to watch them, and how the mainstream media has failed to spot and comment upon this largely-undocumented phenomenon. And it examines how these new kinds of horror films have dealt with issues like disenfranchised youth, class division and social exclusion…
‘One of the UK’s foremost horror critics – what Mike Simpson doesn’t know about horror is not worth knowing.’ –film director Johannes Roberts
The cover of the official Russian DVD release of Soul Searcher
In this week’s FilmWorks masterclass one of the speakers mentioned a filmmaker whose work was the subject of repeated YouTube mash-ups. She was faced with a choice: invoke her rights and request YouTube take them down, or embrace these creative responses and re-interpretations of her work. She chose the latter, engaging with the mashers(?) and nurturing her fan community.
Following the DVD release of my 2005 feature film Soul Searcher, I became aware of numerous pirate copies floating about on the internet. My feelings were mixed. On the one hand, given the years of my life and the thousands of pounds I’d put into making the film, I was furious that people were ripping it off. On the other hand, I couldn’t help but be flattered that people had thought it worth pirating. One Russian pirate (arrrrrsky!) had even gone to the trouble of dubbing it into his language, albeit doing all the voices himself without any attempt to differentiate them or act in any way.
Having spent the last year crowd-funding Stop/Eject, I am all too aware of the importance of posting free content online – like this blog, or Stop/Eject’s behind-the-scenes videos – in order to promote myself and my current projects. But promote myself to what end? Like many filmmakers, my ultimate goal is to make feature films for a living, but how can I or anyone else make a living in a world where almost all media content ever produced can be obtained, free of charge, at the click of a mouse? In the last few years I’ve already witnessed the specific type of filmmaking it’s always been my dream to work in – the kind where movies are shot on real sets with real actors on real celluloid and exhibited on real celluloid – start to disappear. But is the industry as a whole doomed to oblivion by piracy?
Maybe not. Perhaps crowd-funding demonstrates a glimmer of hope. Even though some people would rather pirate Hollywood blockbusters than pay for them, some other people will pay for independent films that haven’t even been made yet. How can we account for this dichomoty? Community engagement. Sponsors of a crowd-funded film feel part of the project in a way that they never could with the latest Tom Cruise juggernaut. Perhaps if I could have talked to that Russian pirate (arrrsky! That will never get old.) while Soul Searcher was still in production I could have involved him in the project, making him the official translator or the online publicist for Asia or something. Co-operation rather than competition. Perhaps that is the way forward.
I’ll leave you with some highlights from the Russian bootleg of Soul Searcher.
When I first started making amateur films with my grandad’s Video8 camcorder, the only “actors” I had available were me, my friend David Abbott and occasionally my sister. Even a little later on, when I managed to rope in a few extra friends, there were still far more characters than actors. The solution? Each person – with the addition or subtraction of a hat, jacket or pair of glasses – portrayed multiple characters.
While this massively confused the audience (which fortunately consisted of only my parents), it did teach me a thing or two about how to shoot scenes in which one actor plays two characters. Below is a run-down of the various techniques you can use next time you shoot a script featuring time travel, parallel universes or uncanny doppelgängers. Back in the nineties, when I was making amateur films, there was no way of combining two separate video images on screen at once (without a hugely expensive video mixer), so only the first two of these techniques were available to me. Nowadays they can all be done with a green sheet, a decent home computer and the right software.
1. Ordinary cuts
The simplest method is to block your shot so that one doppelgänger’s face is not seen, be it out of focus, turned away from camera, in shadow or whatever. Simply dress a stand-in in the right clothes and make sure their hair matches. Two over-the-shoulder shots, each with a stand-in providing the foreground shoulder, can be edited into a very natural conversation.
Katie Lake (foreground) doubles for Georgina Sherrington (background) as the character of Kate steps into her own past in Stop/Eject.
2. Hidden cuts
It’s possible to pan from one doppelgänger to another, without any post-production effects, so long as the pan is very fast – a “whip” pan. There is so much motion in a whip pan that the eye will not detect a cut in the middle of it. Alternatively, track the camera so it passes close behind a foreground object or character; use the moment of darkness as this object wipes frame to hide a cut.
A quick camera move behind a foreground wall masks a cut from Johnny Cartwright to Johnny Cartwright in The Picnic.
3. Split screen
As long as your camera is locked off, it’s the work of seconds in post to create a simple split screen effect using your editing software’s crop tool. If a straight vertical line doesn’t suit your shot, more unusual matte lines can be created with a garbage matte filter. Watch out for changes in lighting when you shoot the two elements, particularly when filming outdoors, and beware of shadows crossing the matte line. If you can afford to hire a motion control rig for accurately repeatable moves, your camera doesn’t even need to be locked down.
Elizabeth Shue plays both old and young Jennifer in a split screen shot from Back to the Future: Part II (1989, dir. Robert Zemeckis).
4. Green screen
If you try to use technique 3 for a shot where one doppelgänger passes in front of the other, you’ll quickly find it a post-production nightmare of painstaking matte animation. Instead, shoot the foreground doppelgänger against a green screen. As always with green screen work, light carefully to reduce spill and match the background plate.
Peter Kay is green-screened over an element of himself and Patrick McGuinness in the 2005 Comic Relief music video (Is This the Way to) Amarillo.
5. Face replacement
This is the only suitable technique when your doppelgängers are in close physical contact and both faces are visible. The action is performed by the actor and a stand-in, who may wear a green hood with tracking marks on it. Later, the actor performs the second character against a green screen, wearing a green body suit, with the angle and lighting carefully matched to the earlier shot. This isolated face, or the entire head, can then be tracked onto the stand-in. (Alternatively, on a big budget, the actor’s head may be cyber-scanned and a CG version of it tracked onto the stand-in.) Beware that only experienced VFX artists will be able to pull this off convincingly.
One of the many face replacement shots in the climactic fight of the dimension-hopping Jet Li vehicle The One (2001, dir. James Wong)
The best approach is to mix as many techniques as possible, relying mostly on the simpler ones but hitting the audience with a more effectsy one every now and then to sell the doubles. Happy sci-fi shooting!
Although Stop/Eject is still a long way off being finished, we’ve started to give some thought to the press kit. I remember being in the last week or so of Soul Searcher’s sound mix, Neil Douek and I desperately trying to get the film finished in time for the premiere, and at the same time I was having to deal with designing the press kits and getting them printed. That’s why I’m keen to start early this time around. Speaking of Soul Searcher’s press kit, I’m posting it below so if you’re wondering what a press kit should have in it, wonder no more. Click the images for larger, legible versions. I have Chris Jones and his Guerilla Filmmakers’ Movie Blueprint to thank for knowing what to put in it.
Review quotes, contact details and short and long synopsesCast biosCast and crew biosProduction notes (the making of the film)Production notes cont’d and some extracts from the director’s blogFull creditsThumbnails, filenames and photographer credits for the accompanying CD of stills
Operating camera, directing and even monitoring sound on The Beacon. Photo: Mark Evans
Cooking MCs like a pound of bacon, and so on and so forth.
This week’s FilmWorks session was called “How to Succeed at Not Doing Everything” – i.e. how to collaborate. This session really chimed with me. Like many low budget filmmakers, I suspect, I can be something of a control freak and have only recently been letting go of certain key roles within my productions.
On my 2002 action movie The Beacon I was writer, director, producer, director of photography, camera operator, focus puller, editor, visual effects artist, sound designer, sound mixer and colourist. Since then I’ve been gradually letting go of roles and almost without exception the results have been good. Giving someone a job to do and getting results that exceed my expectations is one of the most enjoyable aspects of filmmaking for me now. Neil Douek’s sound mix of Soul Searcher was light years beyond my efforts on The Beacon, and on The Dark Side of the Earth when I turned over both sound design and mixing to Henning Knoepfel, I was rewarded with a soundtrack beyond anything I could have imagined.
The roles I’ve clung onto the longest are (co-)writing, (co-)producing, DPing and editing. The writing and producing are down to the necessities of unpaid filmmaking; I’ve always hated both of these roles. I kid myself that the same is true of DPing, but it’s probably more due to an over-inflated opinion of my own abilities. Yes, I’m fairly certain that I’m a better DP than I am a director, but to think that no-one else could have DPed Stop/Eject to a good standard with limited time and equipment was somewhat egotistical.
Stop/Eject, and I still haven’t learnt my lesson. Photo: Paul Bednall
This year, for the first time ever, I’ve handed over the editing of a project to someone else – Miguel Ferros is now working on a cut of Stop/Eject. Although I was initially resistant to the idea, I now feel like a huge weight has been lifted off my shoulders and I eagerly anticipate Miguel’s cut.
Gratifyingly, I’ve recently been hired by a couple of different writer-producers to direct their shorts. I’m really looking forward to the opportunity to direct and only direct. (More on these projects on the blog in due course.)
To close with, here’s a simple example of the perils of not collaborating. This week I recorded a line of ADR on my Zoom H1. Coming from a technical background, when faced with a technical task and an artistic task to do simultaneously, the former gets priority unless I make a conscious effort otherwise. So I was focused on the technical quality of the recording, and only noticed on playing back the material at home that I had failed to give the actress an important piece of direction. Had someone else been operating the recorder for me, I would have caught this mistake.
Fortunately the main ADR session is yet to come. At which someone else will be pressing the buttons.
