Scenic Artist Elaine Carr talks about painting and texturing the set for the airship’s training room.
Directed by Neil
Blog posts from when Neil used to produce and direct his own micro-budget movies (2001-2014).
The Dark Side of the Earth: February 20th, 2009
Things are ticking along nicely. All the major components of the miniature are under construction and the roto and paint-out work has begun on the 2K on-line footage. Hopefully this weekend I’ll break the back of the sound design; to date I’ve only got as far as trimming the dialogue and track-laying some basic foley.
I’m delighted to announce the pilot will be musically ennobled by Scott Benzie, the man responsible for The-Best-Thing-About-Soul-Searcher TM (i.e. its score). I look forward to experiencing his orchestral maneuvres on the Dark Side.
On April Fools Day, lucky patrons of the Borderlines Film Festival in Hereford will get a sneak peek at part of the pilot and a brief glimpse behind-the-scenes, not to mention an edifying oration from Yours Truly. Those wishing to see it complete and in all its 35mm Dolby 5.1 glory will still have to wait for Sci-Fi London, however.
The Dark Side of the Earth: February 13th, 2009
Yesterday I went up to Elstree to see Lau and Lou who are making a miniature Swordsman. The couple showed me some of their previous work, including an automaton representing the seven deadly sins which took the form of a Pan’s Labyrinth-esque journey into phantasmagorical underground caves.
Ian had kindly delivered the full size Swordsman, the top half of which now lounges scandalously on a sofa bed in Lau and Lou’s spare room. Since the miniature will be shot upside-down, we had to figure out certain issues of gravity and loose parts that would hang the wrong way and the give the game away.
Tomorrow I have a meeting with John Galloway and two students from the SAE Institute who will be handling some of the puppeteer paint-out work.
The Dark Side of the Earth: February 1st, 2009
Post-production finally feels like it’s getting up to speed. Two students from the SAE – a college in Islington that I used to lecture at – have begun painting out puppeteers, just in low rez off-line shots for now, but the 2K scan should be done by next week, then they can really get cracking.
Meanwhile preparations are underway to build a miniature Swordsman and ceiling mechanism for shooting in late March along with the rest of the pick-ups.
The Dark Side of the Earth: January 20th, 2009
The application to the UK Film Council’s Feature Film Development Fund went off yesterday, with a nice DVD of the pilot rough cut, some of Ian’s artwork, the script and the obligatory half page on “why this film should be made”, which as any reader of this blog might guess included glorification of eighties fantasy classics and a rant about CGI. This is my fourth application for development funding for Dark Side: two to Screen West Midlands and now two to the UKFC. Fourth time lucky?
Tomorrow I have to lug the rolls of camera negative across Soho again to be scanned at 2K resolution. This way the VFX can be done at the highest quality so it can be recorded back to 35mm for screenings.
I was in HMV earlier when a voice behind me said, “Hey, McFly!” I turned around, because in my head I am McFly. And I don’t mean the band. Back to the Future Part III was playing. Nuff said.
The Dark Side of the Earth: January 13th, 2009
I’ve decided to shoot some pick-ups of the Swordsman, in addition to shots of the miniature ceiling mechanism, which will allow me to complete scenes two and three as originally intended. There is a deadline to work to – film festival Sci-Fi London are going to premiere the pilot, or part of it, at the start of May. In addition to the extra shooting, there’s a truckload of roto and compositing work and all the sound design and mixing to do before then. John Galloway, a cohort from the Soul Searcher days back in the Hairy Ford, is in charge of the former. On sonic duties is another SS veteran, Neil Douek, who will once again balance the Kurt Russells and tweak the volume knobs of destiny to deliver the 5.1 mix.
As you may have noticed I’m playing catch-up with the podcasts – still a couple more to go before we get to principal photography – and I’ve started work on a sparkly new Flash website. And I’m about to apply once again to the UK Film Council for development funding.
The Dark Side of the Earth Podcast #5: What to Wear
Production of the insanely ambitious British fantasy adventure movie The Dark Side of the Earth begins with a single pilot scene, set aboard an airship travelling to the dark side of the Earth. Costume designer Katie Lake explains how she came up with the look for the leading lady’s dress.
The Dark Side of the Earth: January 3rd, 2009
The recurring nightmare lasted until Christmas Day, when my body gave up and tried to contract the flu just to spite me. After a night or two of slightly different dreams – this time rushing to strike the set before we got kicked out of HDS – I finally recovered.
A few days before Christmas I had completed a rough cut of scene three (unsurprisingly, the last of the trio scenes which the pilot was intended to comprise). If I was editing the feature right now I’d be very pleased with the scene and more than happy to cut it into the timeline. As a pilot it’s somewhat problematic because it doesn’t have the wide establishing shots of the set and the Swordsman. However, by the skin of our teeth we did manage to cover all of scene two. I cut this yesterday and it’s not as far from working as it could be. It’s a question of what, if anything, can be done to bring this scene up to scratch, or whether I’ll have to resort to behind-the-scenes B roll and interviews to set up scene three.
Speaking of which, over the last few days I have been capturing the prodigious “making of” material which Gerard and his friends shot. In all we have amassed 21 hours of material since we started documenting the pilot in 2007, half of which covers the shoot.
The Dark Side of the Earth: December 17th, 2008
I almost forgot to mention us A-Teaming the trolley. You know things are desperate when, in order to move scrap wood from your workshop to your studio, you have to build a trolley from some of that scrap wood first. Not from scratch, mind. We had a trolley already – it just wasn’t big enough and needed extending. Anyway, this was on Saturday and we dragged our new creation all the way around the outside of the building in the rain to find that the skip which we thought was there had been taken away, so then we had to wheel it all back.
And on Monday we were still clearing the last of our stuff out of the workshop when the next production moved in – not a production at all, in fact, but an art installation for the Victoria & Albert Museum. Presumably thinking I was a runner or other minion, one of their staff offered me
The Dark Side of the Earth: December 15th, 2008
Alright, let’s crank up the flux capacitor and fire-trail back to last Monday. I can barely remember it now, but there was an enjoyable period spent in an empty room with just myself and the actors working on the material. I also recall the unfinished set being full of lights, lots of sword choreography with Abbi, AJ and Kate, and once more failing to rehearse the puppet as well as we should have done because we kept having to solve logistical problems with him.
The first day of the shoot, Tuesday dawned full of promise. And it was still only promising when the sun went down. Due to understaffed and over-worked art and lighting departments (seemingly most of the day revolved around obtaining and fitting up practical lights), it was 4:30pm before the camera rolled. By this time the old “I wish I was somewhere else… anywhere else” feeling from Soul Searcher had taken firm root within me. Even the obscenely high quality of the material that was eventually shot couldn’t stop my stomach from searching for exits.
On Wednesday I overslept. Once again on the clock, we struggled to get all of Benedict’s shots in the can before lunch. The germ suit and the Swordsman proved equally nightmarish to wrangle. Trailing a compressor hose, power for the helmet lights and a line to a hand-pump that operated his breathing bulb, not to mention the functional fan on his back, poor Benedict was sweating buckets by the time he got out of his costume.
The puppet’s movements were likewise hampered. Hanging from the studio ceiling was a black device of wood, bungees and pulleys designed to support the Swordsman’s ropes which, in the fiction of the movie, control the robot. The device was promptly christened Dante’s Disc as AJ took charge of dealing with it and the movement of the puppet. The disc interfered with Ollie’s overhead lighting rig and vice versa. We would have foreseen this and planned around it, but Monday’s rehearsals indicated that the Disc wasn’t going to work. Two alternatives had been considered and built by the art department over the intervening 48 hours, but neither improved upon the Disc so we just had to struggle on with it.
As Isabelle, the only character not encumbered by rods and ropes and cables, Kate’s close-ups were marginally easier to get through. Ollie and his one sparks Dave worked like demons, but by the end of Wednesday we still hadn’t finished scene three.
Ollie and some of the art department stuck around after hours in an attempt to knock off some inserts. “Guerilla filmmaking on 35mm anamorphic,” Ollie remarked as he set up the massive camera and its comically large lenses by himself, before setting all the lights too. But a dodgy power cable prevented us from shooting anything that evening.
Thursday got off to a much better start, with a staggering three shots in the can before lunch, but we couldn’t maintain the momentum and we officially wrapped at 8pm with scene three reasonably covered and three shots from scene two on film. Some of the crew stayed on longer to shoot more dialogue with Kate, then it was time for Indian food and beer. Once again we tried to shoot inserts with a skeleton crew, but the roll of film ran out and we didn’t have a changing tent to reload in.
On Friday morning, severely knackered, Ollie and Katie and I, along with the ever-faithful art department and puppeteer Sheila, convened to shoot the inserts before Panavision and Panalux came and took their equipment away. The less that is said about the big ladder and the smouldering drape, the better.
Late in the afternoon came my favourite part of the whole process so far: destroying the set. Don’t get me wrong – it was a tragedy to have to wreck something so beautiful, but there is nothing quite as satisfying as beating the crap out of wooden stuff with an axe.
And then came the never-ending clean-up. By Sunday we were down to three: myself, Ian and Col, laboriously sweeping and stacking and hoovering and skipping (that’s putting stuff in skips, not jumping in a girly fashion). We still have another half day to go before everything is out of the studio. Saturday in particular was downright miserable, dragging trolleys full of wood to the skip in the dark and the rain.
The exposed cans of film are sitting worryingly in my loft waiting to be developed. I can’t wait to see what they contain and to get on with editing it, to finally see if I actually have a complete scene that works.
Huge thanks to everyone on the cast and crew for working so hard under very difficult conditions. A special mention must go to the art department, who had already been working flat-out for four weeks before the shoot, but who continued to give their all and forego sleep in order to get more of my vision on film, not to mention performing the duties of sparks, riggers and runners at various points when there was no-one else around.
Excuse me now; I must sleep.