The first ever Worcestershire Film Festival takes place next weekend, and I’m delighted to be part of this cinematic celebration in my home county.
On Saturday (Nov 3rd) at 6pm my comedy documentary Video8 will be screened. Here’s the trailer:
And on Sunday (Nov 4th) at 3:30pm I’ll give a talk about the funding and making of both Stop/Eject and my 2005 feature Soul Searcher. Here’s the Soul Searcher trailer. You can watch the whole thing for free at neiloseman.com/soulsearcher
All the details can be found on the festival’s website. I hope to see some of you in Worcester next weekend.
Tonight we’ve launched a brand new collection of Stop/Eject rewards. These unique and exclusive Stop/Eject-themed accessories have been handmade by our production designer and co-producer Sophie Black. They’re available in very limited numbers and for one week only. Visit stopejectmovie.com/collection to donate and claim your gift. All the money goes towards post-production and distribution of our magical and moving little fantasy-drama.
Get a set of Stop/Eject badges, a ring, a necklace or a headband by donating to the film before midnight on Friday October 26th.
The following post has been created and released because you lovely people out there have between you contributed over £900 to the post-production funding of my fantasy-drama Stop/Eject. Visit stopejectmovie.com to become part of the project if you haven’t already.
Since Stop/Eject is still being edited, work has not yet begun on the visual effects for the film itself, but the trailer we released in May features three representative FX shots and it’s these that I’m now going to take you through. First, watch the trailer if you haven’t already.
And here’s the breakdown video. A full explanation of the steps involved can be found below.
Dan’s Death
This is a key shot and was carefully planned. I wanted it to be in slow motion, but the Canon 600D we used can only over-crank to 50 frames per second if the resolution is lowered from 1080P (full HD) to 720P. I built this limitation into the VFX design.
Firstly a wide shot of the shop facade was recorded at 1080P25. This was deliberately done in the morning, when the shop was in the sun and the opposite side of the street was in the shade, in order to minimise the genuine reflections. Then Kate (Georgina Sherrington) was shot emerging from the shop at 720P50, with the camera mounted on its side and framed solely on the doorway. This slow motion element could then be placed within the larger 1080P25 frame recorded earlier, maintaining the image resolution.
Dan (Oliver Park) and the car were shot in a car park with a locked-off camera, the former at 720P50 to ensure his movements matched the slow motion of Kate’s, and the latter at 1080P25 with the car driving at half the speed it should have been. These two elements were combined with a simple feathered crop. The collision will never be seen, so he simply vanishes at the critical moment. I figured the lower resolution of Dan would not be noticeable once this element was composited as a reflection.
In Photoshop, I created an alpha matte of the shop’s windows and door. I applied this to the Dan/car composite, then layered it on top of the Georgina/shop composite with an opacity of about 50% to give the impression of a reflection.
The door’s alpha matte was key-framed to distort as Kate opens it. The final step was to animate this part of the reflection to pan sideways with motion blur and fade out as the door opens.
Rehearsing the “ghostly Kate” scene. Photo: Paul Bednall
Ghostly Kate
Kate and Dan were shot separately for this, with the camera locked off. For both elements I created a difference matte in Final Cut, whereby the computer compares the element with a base image, in this case the same locked-off shot without either character present. I could then important these mattes into Shake and clean them up using rotoshapes and Quickpaint nodes.
Further use of these tools was made to animate the intersection of the two characters, revealing Kate little by little as she passes through Dan, all the time striving to give the impression that both bodies are three-dimensional. (Here I drew on many über-geeky teenage hours spent watching VFX shots in Quantum Leap and Red Dwarf frame by frame on my VCR, admiring the artistry and trying to figure out the technical trickery.)
After subtracting one matte from the other, I imported the result back into Final Cut and applied it to the original Dan element, placing the Kate element beneath to generate the final composite. A separate, static matte for the foreground records was used to layer them back on top, and an artificial camera move was applied to the whole thing to take the curse off the locked-off look. This move was possible without loss of image quality since we had shot 16:9 but were masking to 2.35:1, so we had surplus material at the top and bottom of frame.
Tape Archive
Not a tape in sight. Photo: Paul Bednall
Hopefully you didn’t even spot that this was a VFX shot. Sophie spent many sleepless nights labelling hundreds of cassette cases for the basement scene, but even these represented only a small fraction of the number required to fill the master shot. Therefore it was always planned to lock off the camera and fill in the missing tapes digitally.
I started by exporting a single frame to Photoshop, where I used primarily good old copy-and-paste, plus a bit of airbrushing and a lot of distorting and resizing, to clone the real tapes many times over. I then imported this layered file into Final Cut.
Next came the most time-consuming part. Hold-out mattes had to be generated for Kate and Alice (Therese Collins) to keep them in front of the cloned tapes. These were created in Shake as rotoshapes and key-framed every few frames to follow the characters’ movements. Once applied back in Final Cut, the foreground characters and falling tapes appear to occlude the digital tapes in the background as you would expect.
That’s all, folks. Please keep the donations coming. We’re just £43 away from the £1,000 mark and the next public reward – the podcast covering day four of the shoot.
This Wednesday saw the second session of FilmWorks, the “networked professional development” scheme which I’m on. In the masterclass section, Chris Hainsworth (managing director of AV Pictures) and Christopher Simon (producer of The Sweeney) talked about all the things you can do when developing a film project to attract pre-sales and financing. I must confess I found this a bit depressing, because they were all things I’d done with one of my feature projects, The Dark Side of the Earth, and I still haven’t been able to get it off the ground. I had the production designer create pages of fantastic concept art and a beautiful leaflet containing images, a director’s statement and a synopsis. I attached Benedict Cumberbatch, and shot a very expensive 35mm anamorphic pilot with him. I developed the script for years and hired a well-respected script editor to fine-tune it with me. The producer and I went to Cannes two years in a row and pitched to some big companies. And still the project remains unfinanced. (Although the pilot isn’t online, there are images and loads of behind-the-scenes videos at www.darksideoftheearth.com.)
It was heartening at least to find that I hadn’t been doing it all wrong. As a new director, no matter how many hoops you jump through, you will always be a tough sell. And luck will always play a large part – having just the right project with just the right elements that the person you’re pitching to is looking for at that moment.
The second half of the evening was much more positive for me. Even though I felt my mood reel was rushed, several people had nice things to say about it and wanted to hear more about my current project, Stop/Eject. And it’s a joy to hear more about everyone else’s projects as the course progresses. Already the seeds of future collaborations are being sown, and I have no doubt that this will be the greatest legacy of the course. It’s just a shame that the sessions seem to end just as they really feel like they’re getting going. At least they end for me, as like Cinderella I have to run off at nine on the dot in order to catch my train back to deepest, darkest Hairy Ford. I think I may have to start sucking it up and getting the later train, even though it means I won’t get home until after 2am.
A few days ago I re-read the FilmWorks homework instructions and noticed the hitherto-unnoticed word “edit” lurking after the phrase “mood reel“. Cue mad dash around the DVD shops of Hereford, frantic googling for software that will rip region 1 discs and even filming YouTube videos off my computer screen. I fear the technical aspect of the exercise may have overshadowed the creative one, but anyway here it is:
It’s probably the most random thing I’ve ever edited, but I can already see its value. Mashing up the romantic drama genre with sci-fi is not easy, and the Venn Diagram of audience demographics for those two genres has little overlap. I see the audience for Stop/Eject being males 25-45 and a wider female audience of 14-45.
Despite the difficulties, some films have straddled the genre gap successfully, The Adjustment Bureau being the best example to my mind. Sci-fi is at its best when using fantastic devices and situations to explore the human condition, and if I can pull off a moving personal drama against a fantasy backdrop it should be quite powerful. I think this is nicely encapsulated by Stop/Eject’s tagline: “What would you rewind?” – a classic “what if?” type question.
Since I’m about to hand over the Stop/Eject editing reigns to Miguel Ferros, now seemed as good a time as any to share a little insight into some of the kinds of things an editor has to think about while shaping a sequence.
This is the £700 public reward for Stop/Eject. (If you haven’t got a clue what that means, visit stopejectmovie.com to find out.) The total is actually up to £906 now, so there are two more public rewards coming your way: a podcast covering the third day of the shoot, and a breakdown of how the visual effects shots in the trailer were accomplished.
Here’s a little about Miguel, the man who will be taking my edit and polishing it up into a final cut. Miguel is the technical director of the Hay Film School, and indeed organised the Stop/Eject talk I gave in Hay last weekend. He’s also the director of Digital Film and Post, a consultancy company that advises on post-production workflows, helping to navigate the ever-changing landscape of tapeless acquisition formats, ingesting, off- and on-lining, distribution and archiving. His experience includes editing, VFX, producing and directing, mainly in the genres of documentaries, promos and commercials.
Stop/Eject marks a welcome foray into drama for Miguel, and I’m sure he’ll bring all his eighteen years of post-production experience to bear in fine-tuning the film. I’ll leave you with an award-winning Diesel Jeans commercial he edited.
Day two of Stop/Eject‘s shoot and we move into the main location: the shop.
(We actually spent half of day two filming Dan’s death scene at the River Gardens in Belper, but sadly the B-roll from this was corrupt, possibly due to being recorded on a dodgy card.)
Thanks to a generous contribution from filmmaker Barend Kruger, Stop/Eject‘s post-production crowd-funding total has jumped up to £856, smashing through no less than three public reward targets. We’re going to stagger the release of these rewards over the next couple of weeks, but the above video was the first one.
In return for his contribution, I’ll be DPing Barend’s short film next month, a psychological thriller called Mary, Mary. I think this is a fantastic example of filmmakers collaborating to help each other’s projects succeed, and I’m really grateful to Barend for approaching me with the idea. I’m sure you’ll be hearing more about his film on this blog, and the trailer for it will ultimately feature on Stop/Eject’s DVD.
Last week I was delighted to be accepted onto FilmWorks, a fast-track development scheme for regional filmmakers, based at the Watershed Media Centre in Bristol. As part of the programme we’re encouraged to blog about our progress on the FilmWorks site, and I’ll be duplicating some if not all of those blogs right here on neiloseman.com, starting now.
FilmWorks kicked off this week with a masterclass on developing an idea. “Where do you get your ideas from?” is never an easy question to answer, but the speakers had plenty of interesting things to say on the subject. I particularly enjoyed hearing from Peter Lord, co-director of Chicken Run and Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists! Apart from a few FX shots in my feature Soul Searcher I haven’t worked with stop motion animators, but I’ve always admired and been fascinated by their art. Peter was very open and generous with his knowledge when I briefly chatted to him, which seems to be the spirit of FilmWorks.
The masterclass introduced me to mood reels, montages of clips from other films which demonstrate the tone and style of a project you’re pitching. In the past I’ve used concept art, scrapbooks, videomatics and even once a full-blown 35mm demo scene (see darksideoftheearth.com), but I never thought of just half-inching other people’s films!
The workshop session afterwards was mostly about us participants getting to know each other. The organisers have pulled together a nice mix of people and I’m sure we can all learn a thing or two from each other.
As the session drew to a close, it was time to focus on our own projects. In my case it’s Stop/Eject, a fantasy-drama about a bereaved woman who finds a mysterious old cassette recorder that can stop and rewind time – but can she undo her husband’s death? Currently it’s a short film in postproduction, but co-writer Tommy Draper and I have just embarked on the development of a feature-length version.
And what would be on my mood reel? Films that cover similar ground in terms of emotion, tone and story elements include The Adjustment Bureau, The Time Traveller’s Wife, A Thousand Kisses Deep, P.S. I Love You and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I’ll continue to ponder this.
Meanwhile, I’ve been reading up on my fellow FilmWorks participants, checking out their websites and watching their work. (Hmmm, sounds a bit like creepy cyberstalking.) I particularly enjoyed Matt Freeth’s short, Luke and the Void, which you can check out here.
Georgina Sherrington as Kate in Stop/Eject. Photo: Paul Bednall
I can now confirm the details of my Stop/Eject talk at the Hay Festival of British Film this Saturday, September 22nd. In the session, which will take place at Booth’s Bookshop Cinema at 3:30pm, I’ll show clips from Stop/Eject and discuss my experiences of using crowd-funding to finance the project.
This is an exclusive opportunity to get a sneak peek at some footage from the film and some segments of the behind-the-scenes documentary, Record & Play. For anyone considering crowd-funding their next film, this is an unparalleled chance to hear all the mistakes and successes of a filmmaker who’s been through the process. There’s more information on the Hay Film School website.
The festival takes place in the lovely Welsh border town of Hay-on-Wye, famous for its bookshops and its literary festival. Call the cinema’s festival box office on 01497 822629 to book your tickets.
Also screening are a trio of local short films, plus some great feature films old and new, including Dr Strangelove, Oliver Twist (1948), Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, Hot Fuzz, Tyrannosaur, An American Werewolf in London and Pirates! In Adventure with Scientists. There’s more info on the festival’s website (although my event for some reason isn’t on there).
