On Friday morning Satnam Rana, arts correspondent for BBC Midlands Today, came and shot an interview with me about Stop/Eject. Two interviews in fact – one for radio, which went out just before 6pm that evening on BBC Hereford & Worcester – and one for TV, which was meant to go out that evening too, but subsequently got bumped back to tonight’s (Monday’s) show. Look out for it at 6:30pm in the West Midlands or on Sky channel 979.
Poster concept 2
The report should go on their website as well, so hopefully in my next post I’ll be able to bring you a link to that and I’ll also explain how I managed to get myself on TV.
There have been some visual developments with Stop/Eject in the last few days. Sophie has taken some of my crude storyboards and fleshed them out, while I’ve been taking photographs of cassettes and mangled tape and trying out some new poster concepts. The wrapped tape one has garnered the most response so far, some loving it, some hating it, but I’m interested to hear what you think.
PLEASE NOTE: THE ITEMS OFFERED IN THIS POST ARE NO LONGER AVAILABLE.
Stop/Eject‘s costume designer Katie Lake of Katiedidonline has kindly donated some beautiful items from her Mayumi range of hand-made fabric gifts which we are delighted to be offering to new sponsors. We have two sets of pretty fabric coasters, two sets of cute baby bibs (a pair of boy’s bibs and a trio of girl’s bibs) and four stylish hostess aprons to give away. These lovingly upcycled, eco-friendly items would make great gifts for Valentine’s Day, Mothers’ Day or Easter.
£10 of sponsorship to Stop/Eject will get you a set of coasters, £20 will get you a set of bibs and £30 will get you an apron – while stocks last of course. We’ll do our best to accommodate any combination of those values, so for example if you contribute £40 you could either have both sets of bibs or one set of coasters and an apron – providing someone else hasn’t beaten you to those items! To be sure of getting one of these items you’ll need to contribute before we hit the £1,300 mark.
Postage to a UK, European or US address is included.
Katiedid items will only be given if we reach our £2,000 target by the Jan 18th deadline. At this time, if the target has been met, we will ask you for your preferences on specific Katiedid items, giving first choice to those who sponsored earliest.
You will still be entitled to the other rewards as listed on the summary page.
If you’ve already sponsored, you’ll need to increase your sponsorship by at least one of the amounts above to qualify for these gifts.
This weekend, eschewing some sleep and new year celebrations, I completed a 20 minute video called How to Make a Fantasy Action Movie for £28,000. Presented by me, disguised as a homeless person who’s just been dragged through a hedge backwards, it’s a completely frank and open breakdown of Soul Searcher’s budget: where the money came from, how it was spent and how much the film made. It’s an invaluable tool for anyone considering making a feature, and since it also looks at the details of the distribution deals I was offered and why I picked the one I did, if you’ve just completed a feature and you’re wondering what you can expect when you sell it then this is definitely something you need to watch too.
Here’s the trailer for Soul Searcher to get you in the mood:
And here are the first few minutes of How to Make a Fantasy Action Movie for £28,000….
To see the full programme all you have to do is sponsor Stop/Eject £10 or more before January 18th. There are other great rewards for sponsoring as well, but you’ll get access to this programme straight away, regardless of whether we make our target or not. http://tinyurl.com/stopeject
This is a genuine email I just received at the email address linked linked to my other website, The Dark Side of the Earth (a site about a family fantasy-adventure film).
Hi I’d like to offer you a review copy of bestselling author and sex educator Dr. Sadie Allison’s newly released fifth book, “Tickle My Tush,” for you to review on The Dark Side of the Earth. Dr. Sadie has written a smart new paperback that helps women and men learn the true pleasures of the under-explored seat of love. I’ve compiled everything about the book into a microsite for you to check out here: http://ticklemytushbook.com
The Swordsman prepares to thrust from behind
Please let me know if you’d like a review copy or would like to interview Dr. Sadie. If you post or tweet, please pop me the link as I would love to share it with her. If you have any questions, I am here to help. Thanks you, Barbara — Barbara Dunn Tickle Kitty
Well Barbara, I’m very flattered that you thought of The Dark Side of the Earth when planning your marketing campaign for this obvious literary delight. I kept it quiet on the site, but The Dark Side of the Earth will be a film liberally sprinkled with anal love-making. In fact the main reason I’ve never made the pilot available online is because some more conservative surfers may be shocked by the graphic images of backdoor coitus it contains. Honestly, you don’t want to know where the Wooden Swordsman’s sword has been.
Whilst I’d love to review your book, its content so clearly overlaps with my film that I feel it would be a conflict of interest. I therefore decline your kind offer, but wish you every pleasure in your ongoing exploration of the seat of love.
Last year Katie made a new year’s resolution for me: to write down an idea for a film every day. I didn’t stick to it very well and gave up completely around Easter, but at least one good thing came out of it: the idea for Stop/Eject. (Just seventeen days to go – make your pledge now or never.)
I’m going to do it again this year, but here is a selection of the ideas I came up with in 2011…
When Traffic Cones Turn Bad
22/1/11 – WHEN TRAFFIC CONES TURN BAD: What if the cones declared war on us? Perhaps starting subtly, by guiding drivers to the wrong places. Perhaps the mortal enemy of the cones is the Sat Nav.
16/2/11 – TROJAN HORSE: Aliens make contact and give humanity an impressive gift – which turns out to be full of alien invaders.
19/2/11 – A tramp who lives in a junkyard builds a rocket and flies to the moon.
24/2/11 – LAPTOP: Future-set film about robots that have laptops built into their laps. Awkward!
25/2/11 – Reality is controlled by some small children who do annoying things like removing objects from reality for a few minutes so people think they’ve lost them and hunt high and low only to later find them in the first place they looked.
5/3/11 – Clouds are really floating sheep-like creatures. Now imagine how freaky the shepherds must be.
7/3/11 – 4OD: Film about an infuriatingly shit on-demand TV website
16/3/11 – THE POINTLESS TOWN: Documentary about a reporter trying to find out just what the point of Leominster is.
17/3/11 – THE POINTLESS CITY: Sequel to the above, in which the same reporter visits Hereford.
20/3/11 – Psychological thriller about a man who descends into madness after repeatedly having good ideas for films and forgetting them before he gets around to writing them down.
1/4/11 – APRIL FOOL: Jim Carey vehicle in which an intelligent, successful businessman is cursed by a vengeful ex such that his IQ is temporarily slashed on April 1st each year, which always seems to coincide with a really important meeting at which it’s vital he makes a good impression.
[Voice of Majel Barrett-Roddenberry] Previously on neiloseman.com: I hate 3D.
And now the conclusion: So does everyone else. I was delighted this week to read a very interesting article about 3D on Shadowlocked.com It’s a very well-reasoned argument against the proliferation of 3D cinema, so no regular readers will be surprised that it struck a chord with me.
What particularly grabbed me was the news that audience figures are declining for 3D screenings. To give just one example, 2010’s Shrek Forever After made 60% of its opening weekend box office from 3D screens, whereas this year’s Kung Fu Panda 2 made only 45%. Anecdotal evidence seems to suggest that the headaches, uncomfortable glasses and dimmer projection are putting people off. Many people around the globe are working hard to design and implement improved 3D projection that eliminates these problems, but now it seems there is a real chance the 3D bubble may burst before they succeed.
It’s also worth reading Christopher Nolan’s thoughts on the subject. “The truth is, I think it’s a misnomer to call it 3D versus 2D,” he says. “The whole point of cinematic imagery is it’s three-dimensional. … You know, 95% of our depth cues come from occlusion, resolution, color and so forth, so the idea of calling a 2D movie a ’2D movie’ is a little misleading.”
After Cannes this year I was certain that the bell had tolled for 2D films (I’ll keep using the term for clarity, despite Nolan’s excellent point above) but now it seems the tide might be turning – something I hadn’t dared to hope for. Perhaps 2D might just win this war after all.
DEATH TO 3D! DEATH TO 3D! DEATH TO 3D!
Oh, and joy to the world and merry Christmas and stuff.
Here’s the latest podcast. Only six days left now to sponsor Stop/Eject if you want to claim access to the exclusive new documentary about the financials ins and outs of Soul Searcher.
Need some cinematic inspiration and advice to get your 2012 filmmaking plans off to a flying start? As a special Christmas gift to Stop/Eject supporters, anyone who sponsors the film (any amount) by midnight on Christmas Eve will get access to an exclusive new featurette I’m currently creating: “How to Make a Fantasy Action Movie for £28,000”. This will be a detailed look at the budget from my feature film Soul Searcher, analysing where all the money came from and exactly how it was spent, examining the contracts given to the investors, comparing the distribution deals I was offered and revealing precisely how much money the film made. This is an unprecedented real-world case study of the financial realities of indie filmmaking. Get it in YOUR inbox on New Year’s Day by sponsoring Stop/Eject before Christmas. You’ll also get all the great rewards we’ve been offering all along. And don’t worry – if you’ve already sponsored Stop/Eject, you’ll get access to this video too.
Remember to keep spreading the word about Stop/Eject, just like Hereford Journal (left) and Sci-Fi London have done this week – thanks guys!
Jonny Lewis as Ezekiel in Soul Searcher. Photo: John Galloway
Here’s a brand new Stop/Eject podcast in which Katie takes us through some of the costumes and bags she has already put together for the main characters.
Looking for a unique Christmas gift for a film-loving friend or relative? Why not sponsor Stop/Eject on their behalf? They’ll get their name in the credits and receive exclusive souvenirs like signed DVDs and artwork.
A few posts back I wrote about See Saw, the thriller directed by Tom Muschamp which I DPed in the summer of 2007. Today I’m going to share some of the tribulations experienced in the making of this sequence:
The sequence was filmed in the Hamptons, a popular holiday destination at the east end of Long Island, near New York City. The boat was filmed in a harbour, with the camera and an HMI lamp on the dock. I wish we could have put either the camera or the HMI in another boat, because it’s never a good idea to have your camera and your only light source close together; you end up with flat lighting that looks like flash from a stills camera. Unfortunately we didn’t have much choice. Putting the HMI on a boat was too dangerous, and putting the camera on a boat would have rendered the footage too shaky for successful compositing with the other element of the sequence: Katherine.
Aimee Denaro as Katherine
Katherine, played by producer Aimee Denaro, was filmed in an outdoor swimming pool – again, of course, at night. We had been able to get hold of a single black drape, which we rigged half in and half out of the water, to hide the stand for the backlight and to cover the blue-painted pool interior. We originally planned to frame all our shots tightly enough that this drape would fill the entire background, but we ended up shooting off it quite a lot. Fortunately the surroundings were dark enough that we got away with it.
Aside from the backlight there was one other lamp – a key light coming in from the side. Both were 800W tungsten pars if memory serves. As I often do on night sequences, I white-balanced on a red-gelled lamp, fooling the camera into turning everything blue for that classic James Cameron/Michael Mann look.
Director Tom Muschamp
After shooting all the set-ups from the poolside, it was time to dive in – quite literally – and shoot the underwater material. That’s when the fun began.
We had spent the last couple of weeks trying to find an underwater housing we could hire, but nowhere had one that would fit our camera (a JVC GY-HD110). In the end we had to settle for a splash bag designed for ENG (i.e. proper broadcast) cameras. A splash bag is simply a rubber bag with a waterproof zip and a porthole of optical glass at one end. They’re not designed to be used at any depth, but will keep the water out down to a metre or two. So far, so good – this restriction fitted in with Tom’s shot requirements just fine.
But because our camera was too small, we could not screw the filter thread into the porthole inside the bag. This meant there was no way of keeping the camera in a fixed position within the bag. This was, not to beat about the bush, annoying. Oh, and did I mention that the battery adapter on the camera had a loose connection which caused the camera to shut itself off sometimes?
The black drape and backlight set-up
Anyone who knows me knows that I am very quiet. I doubt most of the cast and crew were accustomed to hearing me say much of anything. They were certainly all pretty shocked when, within a few minutes of starting to work with the splash bag, I was cursing and swearing like a trooper. The difficulties of trying to swim, keep the bag underwater (it had plenty of empty space in it so it wanted to float), keep the camera lens lined up with the porthole, prevent the focus ring from rubbing against the inside of the bag and throwing the image out of focus, all at the same time, almost drove me insane. Add to that the battery coming loose from time to time and you can see how I might have been a tad frustrated.
But after a while I learnt to contort my body and the bag into a stable configuration and we got some great shots. By the time we wrapped, thanks to the pool’s automatic overnight chlorination system, we all had red, stinging eyes and Aimee’s top had been completely bleached.
The next time I shot underwater – which I may blog about in the future – rather than trying to hire a housing to fit our camera, we hired a housing that came with its own camera. In hindsight I wish we’d done this on See Saw. If you’re going to try it yourself, I’d recommend getting hold of some diving weights because you’re always fighting the natural buoyancy of the housing. Remember that tiled walls and painted lane divisions are dead giveaways that you shot in a swimming pool; don’t rely on the distorting effect of water to hide these – it doesn’t work that way. Bring drapes or tarpaulins to fill your background.
Okay, that’s all for now folks, but if you enjoy reading this blog then please consider contributing a little cash towards my new short film Stop/Eject.
Katherine clings onto the "boowee" as our American friends like to say
