Wednesday 29 September 2010

Shameless Promotion

Quick Post just to say, that if you have the requirement to rent gear for a film shoot I highly, highly recommend Hire A Camera. The have great kit. For a weekend shoot they courier it to you on Friday before noon and pick up on Monday. And if you order over the phone on the Thursday, and quote "Fly Away Thursday" they knock 20% off their already reasonable price. I rented a excellent tripod and a boom mic, pole and lead and it only cost about 70 quid all in. Check them out.

Mark out

Tuesday 28 September 2010

A different perspective

I'D LIKE TO GIVE A WARM WELCOME TO THE FIRST INVADER TO MY HALLOWED DOMAIN, THE GUEST BLOGGER THAT IS MY BROTHER, PETER. WHAT FOLLOWS IS AN UNEDITED, UNCENSORED AND AN UNBURDENED WITH PUNCTUATION ACCOUNT OF, NOT JUST THE SHIT I'VE BEEN THROUGH, BUT THE SHIT I PUT OTHERS THROUGH THIS WEEKEND ON THE 'LITTLE THINGS' SHOOT.

" Well it was a hectic shoot, but we got it in the can. I should really start by stating my role in the production, and I would if it were at all clear. As the great director said in a previous post the only way to credit this one is with a Venn diagram. I'm lobbying hard for First Assistant Director and Executive Producer, it'll just look better on IMDB." (MARK: YOU'LL TAKE WHATEVER FECKIN' CREDIT YOU'RE GIVEN)

"Now, on to the weekend. I flew in at ridiculous o'clock on Friday morning, having slept somewhere in the region of three hours. This lack of sleep was to become a recurring theme for the weekend for both Mark and myself. Considering the shoot was Saturday and Sunday I expected a leisurely morning in Wales, followed by some light preparation work in the evening. This was my first mistake."

"Being as I am a pessimist there may appear to be some negativity in this post but since this was at least in part a learning experience I see no harm in that."

"Friday was spent hunting down props and catering supplies while my body begged me to have a little nap. When the afternoon came we took delivery of the rented equipment. Although Mark owns the camera (the rather excellent Canon XL1, watch 28 days later if you don’t believe me) there were a number of other pieces of equipment rented by Mark without which the shoot would have been impossible specifically an excellent tripod, condenser mic and boom and cables and adapters to connect the mic to the camera."

"The first, albeit minor setback was the lack of a microphone mount for the boom, although a trip to a local electronics shop and £6 solved this one.
As the evening wore on Mark and I sat down to do the shooting schedule for Saturday and Sunday. Mark had already painstakingly storyboarded the shoot, so we expected this to be a doddle and finished in twenty minutes. Big fucking mistake. After about half an hour of discussing how the hell we were going to do it (note, 10 minutes longer than we expected the whole thing to take) we decided to break up the schedule between technical shots and performance (note we have no idea if these terms are industry recognised, or even make sense to the readers of this blog, but that’s what we called them so I'll run with it now."

"The shots without dialogue seemed the logical place to start so that we could get accustomed to using the camera on location without having to think about sound or keeping the fucking boom out of shot (this proved to be a problem later.). As far as the schedule went the tech shots were easy, Mark knew what he wanted there, we grouped them by setup and got them on paper. The performance shots were... not so easy. From our (admittedly meagre) previous experience we knew that takes that seemed perfect on the day could be completely fucking unusable for reasons of lighting and sound among others. For this reason we initially discussed trying to get four good takes of every shot to provide more editing options. Mark wanted to shoot the dialogue scenes as one long take from different angles. This led to complications both for the schedule and during the shoot (more on this later. ) we worked out that to get four good takes the way he planned we would have to spend an hour and a half shooting these scenes, not including bad takes or setup time. Considering we were shooting outdoors using only natural light in practice we realised this would mean spending th better part of four hours shooting only these scenes, which would not be possible. Thus we compromised and broke up the scenes a little and satisfied ourselves with 3 good takes."

"Three hours after sitting down to our twenty minute task we were done for the night having only managed to write the schedule for day one. Lesson for the future, small simple jobs can balloon very fucking easily."

PETER IS TOO PROLIFIC JUST TO WRITE ONE POST. FUCKING WRITERS. MORE FRON HIM SOON.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Monday 27 September 2010

In The Can

clapper board bought as a joke gift. No one's laughing any more

Principal photography on Little Things was done on Saturday and Sunday and I am absolutely fucking knackered. Partly because of the amount of work I had to do and partly from lying in bed each night before shooting with the words "Oh Shit Oh Shit Oh Shit Oh Shit Oh Shit Oh Shit" going round and round in my head. Despite the exhaustion I am really pleased with the results. I am delighted with the amount of hard work that the cast and crew put in for absolutely no reward other than the sandwiches and teas that were supplied by my good lady wife. So before I go on I'd like to do a shout out to all my cast and crew:

  • Rachel Moynihan
  • Peter Moynihan
  • Chris Jones
  • Lisa Solari
  • Richie Nolan
  • Arun Parmar
  • Andrew Baker
  • Amy Richardson
  • Amy's mate John
  • Richie's friend Melisa
left to right: Peter, me, Arun, Rach and Chris

Their selfless enthusiasm and devotion to the project will make writing the credits for this movie a total ball-ache. Rach worked collecting agreement signatures, loading the clapperboard, catering, props and based on her script knowledge made performance suggestions. My brother held the boom, worked the camera, was and extra, wrote the shooting schedule with me and made sure I picked up all the shots I needed. Lisa, as well as being in the main cast, loaded the clapperboard and made the tea. Chris, as well as taking the main role, also held up a light reflector for the close ups of others. This is tip of the iceberg stuff. I'm toying with the idea of putting the credits up as a fucking Venn diagram. 

"Excuse me, can you please spare some change?" me, Lisa and Richie

Despite the hard work, and happy results, it wasn't all smooth sailing. For a start the weather was not in my favour. I have officially become one of those miserable bastards who complains that it's too sunny. Sounds mental, but harsh sunshine really made things difficult. It throws harsh, defined shadows that messed with the light balance on the camera and their movement through the day is likely to completely fuck up my continuity. The view finder of the camera was also really poor at picking up how the final picture would look. Colours that looked subdued in the viewfinder were harshly washed out with sunshine on the final picture and it really missed out on what was in the shadows. One shot done on Saturday had to be completely redone on Sunday, Why? Because completely unnoticed by me when I was filming, the boom was completely visible in the shot. This might not be so bad except for the fact that Arun, who was holding the boom at the time, was completely visible as well! Not just his arm! All of him! Just standing there! You'd think I'd have noticed that! I had to make a decision early on. I decided to let the performances carry the movie. My experience so limited with the camera, that photography was always going to be the weak link. As long as the story and characters are compelling, then for my first work I'm prepared to accept less than perfect photography and continuity.

Loads more happened on the shoot and over the next while you will be hearing more and more, not just from me, but hopefully from some guest bloggers from my cast and crew. I can't wait for you all to see the final film. 

Mark out

"My Mamma always said like a box of chocolates..." Andrew and Chris

Monday 20 September 2010

It's the final countdown, Da Na Na Na, Dana Nana Naa, Dana Na Na Na, Dana Na Na Na Na Naaaa

If you get what the title means, you're old and humming shit eighties rock!

It is the final week before the shoot and my god if I thought I was shitting myself last week, I had no idea. So this and probably any subsequent post this week has the potential to be a combination of my usual South Park ending ("you know, I've learned something today...") and screaming paranoia ("everyone knows, that I have no fucking clue what I'm doing"). In order to counteract that, I think I'm gonna use this blog as my to-do list of stuff that I have to get done pre-shoot.



Things that can be ticked off the list first. I've finished rehearsals with a session with Chris and Richie on Sunday night. Chrsi has taken to the subtlety of screen acting like a duck to water and it just seems to be the most natural thing in the world for Richie. We laid a lot of groundwork about the characters, who they are, how they know each other, where they are in their lives and what makes them tick. I hesitate to use the clichéd word motivation  when it comes to character but we looked at the key points in the scene, what is happening outside of the scene and what is going on inside the heads of Leonard and Weaver, two guys that I made up but are becoming more and more embodied and owned by Chris and Richie as time goes on. It's actually kinda weird to let them go, they're not mine alone any more. As the guys now know the characters we have also been able to have a little fun improvising the characters and additional scenes. Frankly the stuff they came up with is fucking golden and there may be more of that in Little Things than my original dialogue. That's cool, as long as the story is told the best it can be, I'm happy.

So jobs to do this week:

  • Legal agreements for everyone involved. Get them finalised and printed
  • Equipment, I need a tripod, a boom, a condenser mic, a windjammer, some XLR cable as a minimum
  • Shooting schedule. I broadly know what I'm doing, tricky shots first, dialogue scenes with improv after
  • Make up. I may or may not have a make up artist on the days, still don't know.
  • Lighting is nearly sorted, through Richie I've been in touch with a lighting expert who wants to get involved. I feel like Blanche in Streetcar Named Desire, relying on the kindness of strangers
  • Establishing shots with Chris, they may hit the cutting room floor but I still have to schedule and shoot them
  • Ambient sound tracks for park and pub, about five minutes of each
  • Popping into the pub to make sure everything is still okay for Sunday morning.
  • Some final camera and editing tests, specifically around how feasible it is to convert to wide screen in post production or whether it's better to use the pixel stretch on the camera
Tomorrow and Wednesday are days to be dominated by work. You know, the real work that pays the mortgage. After that Thursday and Friday are days off, and devoted to Little Things. Presumable that will be when my head explodes. 

Talk later, and in the meantime I leave you with more pictures from rehearsal.

M






The Director's Tale.

I've been saying for a while that I would talk about the shoot for Grove Park Theatre. As I finally got the chance to see the play that the video was shot for on Friday night, now seems like an appropriate time to talk about the experience.

I've written before about how I cast Little Things by getting in touch with Grove Park theatre. One of the guys who read for the part of Leonard was Rick. I decided to go another way with casting Leonard, but Rick's audition was excellent. Rick though expressed an interest in getting involved in the production irrespective of whether he was cast or not, an offer I gratefully accepted. A couple of weeks after first meeting him Rick contacted me on a different matter. The director of  their latest production, David, wanted a video sequence for one of the segments of their Canterbury Tales. The segment of the Wife of Bath was interpreted as a Jeremy Kyle/ Trisha/ Ricki Lake/ Jerry Springer style talk show and he wanted a small vox-pop, talking heads, sequence shot and showed on a screen. Rick, who does a lot of the technical stuff for the theatre, asked if it was something I was interested in. Wanting to get some experience both of external shooting and editing, my answer was "hell yeah!"  So I met with David the director and had a chat about what he wanted, then we got stuck in.

We shot on a Sunday in Wrexham so as to get streets as empty as possible of what my brother would refer to as "slack-jawed yokels". First thing I learned for future reference, if the weather is not good enough, don't fucking shoot outdoors. The weather was crap so in order to shoot we went under a covered alleyway. Covered alleyway equals echo, echo equals god awful fucking sound, god awful sound means that you spend all your energy on making sure that the sound is right, and as a result the picture suffers.

Second lesson, pick a style and run with it. Don't, for fuck sake, don't shoot the same content in two different ways and try and see what's better later. The camera I'm using, the XL-1 has two shooting modes, video and progressive scan. I will explain the difference for non video heads on the condition that any video heads among you don't shout at me. Video mode has a harsh real life quality to it, progressive scan, tones down some of the quality in a way that makes it look a bit more like film. Davis didn't know which way he wanted to shoot, so he asked me to shoot each vox pop in each mode and then we can choose later which method looks best. Big fucking mistake. Why? Because what I ended up with was some unusable shots in each format, so the final result needed to be a mishmash of both. The final video was projected and was unnoticeable to any of the audience. Except me.

Lesson three. Colour matters. One of the cast was wearing white, she stood in front of a white wall. She looked like a floating fucking head.

Final lesson. This shit takes time. The shoot on the day took about two and a half hours. I got about 45 minutes of footage (which is a pretty good ratio I think). That was edited down to just over a minute. working off those ratios, Little Things will be about 18 hours of shooting, about 6 hours of footage to get an 8 minute movie. That's a lot of stripping down.

Despite massive quantities of self criticism the end result was something I was reasonable happy with. I learned shitloads. I learned how to use editing software, I made my first chunk of schoolboy errors and I got my first credit for film making in the Canterbury Tales program. And context is so important. The footage slotting straight into the show.

Canterbury Tales is playing in Wrexham Grove Park Theatre until Friday and not only can you see my footage but Lisa Solari, from my cast, doing a fantastic turn in the Miller's Tale. Go check it out.

M

Tuesday 14 September 2010

Storyboards

Just wanted to write a brief note on storyboards...

...do them!

Told you it was brief.

Seriously, when I started pre-production, depite the fact that the movie only has a couple of short scenes with limited setup, I decided to storyboard it. Not because I thought it would be particularly useful but because I was the "done thing". I didn't really want to do it to be honest but when I started I realised, really really quickly that without storyboards I couldn't come up with a proper shooting schedule (the order in which you film things) AND would have had to do the same set ups over and over again, AND it is incredibly likely I would have missed out on some important shots AND if I didn't plan out some shots in advance I just would have done the same shitty shots over and over AND I wouldn't be able to plan props properly AND I wouldnt have thought about things like camera placement and what was really necessary from locations.

I was put off storyboarding because, well frankly I'd seen storyboards even on amateur stuff that looks like the were done by Frank fucking Miller see exhibit A -


"How the fuck am I supposed to do that?" I thought. Answer: I didn't. I drew little stick figures. See Exhibit B -


This stuff is not going to win any Eisner awards (for the geeks in the room) but that doesn't matter because as long as I know what they mean then who gives a shit.

Another thing storyboarding does, it makes you very aware about how much work you've got to. 8-10 minute film, I drew 136 storyboard panels

In summary, I started storyboarding not because I thought it would be useful but because I felt I should, but by Christ it was useful. Fucking vital if I'm honest.

Friday 10 September 2010

Two Weeks...


Well weather permitting it is now two weeks tomorrow until the shoot for Little Things, and yes, I am apprehensive. Maybe apprehensive is the wrong word. Fucking Bricking It. Ah yes, the mot juste. Pissing myself as I may be, things are coming together quite nicely. I know I still need to talk about the shooting I did for Grove Park Theatre, and I will, but for this post I'm going to talk about the things that are slotting into place

Equipment first. What kicked off this whole project was me getting my camera. The script for Little Things had been written for a while and I had been toying with the idea of making myself for a while. What really made things happen though was my wife Rach, muse that she is and enabler to a myriad of my insane shit. Rach is a teacher and this summer dedicated a ridiculous amount of time and energy marking A-level papers. The pay that she got for this pretty much entirely went on a second hand Canon XL1. Do me a favour, If you are take
ing the time to read this blog, then take the time to write a small comment at the end saying how awesome my wife is. The Canon XL1 is an old camera, but a good one, and it looks kick ass!
It shoots digital video and was the camera that Danny Boyle used to shoot "28 Days Later". It's not something you could shoot Avatar with but for the purpose of my little movie, it'll be perfect. As well as the camera I've been looking at the other kit I need. I'm going to keep it as simple as possible, so one camera, a boom mike, a tripod and maybe, but only maybe, some lights. I've found a website called Hireacamera.com that hire out all that additional stuff, if you call on the Thursday, they deliver the gear on the Friday, collect on the monday and give a 20% discount! I'm gonna use them for this, if I have a good experience I'll stick a link up.

Second thing that is coming together is locations. Little Things basically only has two scenes. There are a couple of establishing shots but the main story; two scenes. One is in a park, the other a pub. Finding a boozer that looked the part and would be willing to let me shoot in there is something that I was concerned about. Maybe concerned is the wrong word. Convinced That There Was No Way It Would Fucking Happen. Ah yes, the mot juste. As a result I was putting it off, but this week I knew that I had to bite the bullet and start calling places. So I made a list of places to call in order of preference. I called the first one. I asked to speak to the manager. I explained what I was trying to do. "What is the film about?" she asked me. "It's a romantic drama, and there's nothing in it that would show the pub in a negative fashion". "Yeah okay, that'll be fine".

...Really. God that was easy. So I have a pub location which I can reveal as "Y Pentan" in Mold. A lovely little pub with great food and beer and a perfect atmosphere.
Photo courtesy of Garstonian on Flickr

As you can see I am now a whore to corporate advertising. Seriously though I am very, very grateful to them. I still haven't got confirmation on the Park Location, but I have found the location I want, asked for permission and have been asked for more info which would lead me to believe that it should be okay. I'm not going to reveal the location just yet,because I don't want to jinx it,  but here is a little teaser...


The last thing that is falling into place is the cast. I had my first rehearsal with Chris and Lisa on Tuesday and I'm a chuffed with the progress. I think it's fair to say that it was a challenge for all of us. Me because I'd never directed actors before, and for Chris and Lisa, their experience is mostly with theatre which is very different from film. Chris has directed a lot of amateur dramatics and has spent a lot of time saying "they can't see your eyes moving like that in the back row" so me telling him "do it smaller dude, the camera is gonna get everything" is making him fight all of his instincts and experiences. For Lisa it was the first time she had done a character that didn't require an accent and she found it weird to use her natural speaking voice. Both though are really kick-ass actors and amazing at taking direction. By the end of the rehearsal they had the character and performance down. 

Again advice that I can give. If you have luxury of time to rehearse I highly recommend taking it the two hours I spent with Chris and Lisa on Tuesday were absolutely invaluable in getting the performances I wanted so on the day of the shoot I can just worry about the technical stuff. 

More advise, if you have written the script yourself, then be prepared to let it get changed. I know you may have agonised over your precious words, but if they sound weird and unnatural when an actor says them out loud, they're the wrong fucking words. Let actors and directors play with some of the words, as long as the story and the essence is there, it doesn't matter...

...Unless it's a really kick ass line, then fucking shout at them to say it right.

I'm going to leave you with some photos from the rehearsal. If you see a silhouette in the mirror in the background like some sort of fucking Sasquatch that's yours truly. Before I leave I have one further request. There is the option to Follow this blog on the right. I know a load of you read this but not many follow me making me look like a fucking lunatic, babbling to himself on a street corner. Please click on the follow button.

Later all

M