Itchy Feet and Loglines

I am going through a brief and disconcerting period where I can do nothing on Little Things and have to wait on others to do some work on the picture. Arun Parmar, my sound engineer mate is currently playing with the audio. Cleaning up the dialogue, getting rid of as much background noise as possible, matching the levels from shot to shot, that sort of thing. I've also spoken to Kevin Brew of I Phoenix fame who now has a copy of the rough cut and is working on the score for the film.


Until I have these elements back I'm pretty much at a loose end film-wise. This has been seen by some as an ideal window of opportunity for me to do such chores as tiling the porch. Not nearly as much fun as film making but does give some sense of achievement. 


As I can't do anything with Little Things itself I have taken to do some peripheral bits and pieces that I've been meaning to do for a long time. The first of which is to write a logline for the film.


For those of you who don't know what a logline is, it's a brief statement that outlines what a film is about. It is not the same thing as a tagline. A tagline is what they put under the title on the poster; "In space no one can hear you complain about Fincher's sequel" and the like. A logline is something different. It outlines your plot, main characters, and genre in about 3 sentences, 3 short sentences. It is used when you are trying to pitch your film to people who may do things like, pay for it to be made, accept it into festivals, market it, sell it, buy it, in short get it seen by other people. You know Robert Altman's film "The Player"? You know the "25 words or less" synopsis that Tim Robbins keeps asking for? That's a logline.


I know that the writers among you will be wondering why the hell I haven't done the logline before now. Two reasons. Number 1, because I'm making Little Things myself I haven't had the need to pitch it to anyone else. Number 2, because it's really fucking hard! You've read my stuff. You may not have seen any scripts of mine but you've gotten at least this far down the page of my blog. Do you honestly think that brevity is a strength of mine? It took me weeks to condense Little Things down from 16 pages to 9, now I need to trim it down to a couple of dozen words. Tiling might be easier.


There are hordes of people ready to tell you what good loglines should consist. Many of them, I might add, completely contradict each other. There are some common threads though. And as per usual I've followed the same approach that Grampa Simpson followed to history "I pieced it together , mostly from sugar packets". So based on this scientific approach, I worked under the assumption that a logline should contain references to: protagonist, the protagonist's goal, other significant characters, and the genre. It should do this hopefully peaking the interest of whoever reads it and without giving away the ending. After a couple of dozen rewrites while my wife watched X-Factor and my ears bled, I came up with this


"A world-weary young guy tries to prove that his enigmatic friend does not have a magical ability to change people’s destinies, by meeting up with a girl whose fate has supposedly been altered."

So tell me what you think. If you've written loglines before, tell me how I could do this better? If you know the story and have been involved, does it do what I want it to do? If you don't fall into either category, does it make you want to watch the film?


Your comments would be appreciated...

The Film Look On Video....or... how to give film purists a fucking fit

Something that becomes clear when you start trawling the internet looking for tips on how to give something shot on video a more filmic feel, is that asking film professionals for tips for a film-look on video, is a bit like asking the Jewish community for tips on how to be more like Mel Gibson. The words "rag", "bull" and "red" come screaming to mind in no particular order.   

Wherever there are forums where people ask, "how can I get the film look?" there are people who answer with "Use a fucking film camera!" Consequently it's difficult to get tips on what can be done to "film-up" your footage. 

original video

tweaked by me

Okay first up, let me say. I'm not an infant. I KNOW that you cant take a ten year old Canon Mini-DV camera, shoot your footage and have it turn out like fucking Laurence of Arabia. I know it is video and it will always look like video. I don't have 50 grand's worth of Panavision gear that I can pull out of my arse pocket, and that no matter how much post-production jiggery-pokery is done, it will not look like it was shot 24 frames per second on a strip of plastic covered in light sensitive chemicals. 

original video

tweaked by me

So here's what I'm getting at. I am not trying to make it look like it was shot on film. I'm trying to make it look better. Yes, better in my opinion probably appears a little more like film and less like video. But so be it. 

Original video

tweaked by me

So I have started to try and tweak the footage. As per everything else, I read a little about what it is I'm trying to do and then start fumbling in the dark. Dotted throughout the posts are examples (by no means finished) of the results I have started to achieve. 

What I have done so far is to drop the brightness, up the contrast, drop the colour saturation and tweak the colour levels. There are other tricks and tools that I am going to experiment with as well. 

As I said these aren't finished results but (he takes a deep breath, conscious that he may well have pissed off some film fans) if anyone has any opinions or tips I'd love to hear them....

Rough as a Bears Arse

Those of you that follow me on Facebook and Twitter, which is probably most of you, will know that this weekend I finished the first rough cut of Little Things. There are some bits of tidying up to do and the sound needs an overhaul, but as a rough cut, I'm really proud of the result.

As it stands, the cut is very close to the script. That'll be the result of me being the writer, director and editor. I've had this film made in my head for a long time, writing and storyboarding it were a method of showing other people what the film in my head was. Shooting it, was just collecting the elements of the film together and editing it was just trimming out the bits that weren't needed. So now I have a close representation of the film I've been imagining for about a year and a half. Advantage of this is that "Little Things" will eventually be exactly the film that I wanted to make.

Disadvantage of this is that if "Little Things " is shite, then it's entirely my fault. Scary thought.

Next steps. Firstly, music. As it stands at the moment, the music in the rough cut are Radiohead and Elbow songs. These convey the moods nicely, but I would never get clearance to use them in a public performance in a million years. I've handed a copy to my brother in Dublin who is showing the rough cut to the guys from I Phoenix who are composing the music. While my brother is pestering one audio artist I will be pestering another. I'll be cajoling some time from Arun my sound engineer mate to give the audio a clean up.

I'm also trying to get some people who are involved in the film industry to have a look at the film. Not as self promotion, I just need someone to have a look at the film objectively who can give me some advice about where I can trim fat.

While all this is going on I'm now going to bribe my cast and crew. If you are a member of the cast or crew and would like to see a rough cut, then I would be happy to show it to you....on condition that I procure from you one guest blog post.

I shall continue to stare at my empty inbox....

Channelling Kev'

it took ages to set up all the bottles to film Chris's real -world game of Pac-Man

I'm Back!!

Apologies to you all for my absence of late, that has been largely down to any time in front of a computer being dedicated to editing Little Things. That and it's a difficult time of year, those of you that either know Rach and I personally or read my other blog will understand why. 

I've suffered some setbacks. I was using our old family PC to edit the flick. When the footage was fine, there was no issue, but where I needed to tweak lighting or colour or sound, it fell on its arse. So a new tool was required for the job. Enter Mister Steve Jobs and the mighty iMac. The new machine was ordered a couple of weeks ago and whilst awaiting it's arrival I called a temporary hiatus on editing. So in the meantime I started listening to Kevin Smith's podcasts in the hope that I would become more well informed about the process of producing indie movies on a limited budget. I'm not. I am more will informed about sucking dick.

The editing hiatus has proved to be a sensible decision as now that the iMac is here, no amount of jiggling about with things has allowed me to get the existing edit files to work with the new machine, possibly due to the questionable origin of the editing software. In the absence of an alternative solution, I shouted at the screen a lot. Then I had a decision to make.

Option 1 - go back to the old computer. Well that would defeat the object of getting the new computer and more crucially might cause my wife to murder me.

Optioin 2 - I trawl the internet for solutions to the problem. Well I'm not techie enough to even know what I'm fucking looking for so that could take forever

Option 3 - Start over. Unappealing as that may have sounded, it would probably be less time consuming, that and I could un-fuck some of my early editing mistakes

So I started over. And you'll be happy to hear that because I know a little more about what I'm doing I have now nearly caught up with where I was before my upgrade. 

I have set myself a pretty tight deadline. Early submissions for the Edinburgh Film Festival ends on the 4th of December. I want to get an edit done, in enough time that I can show it to someone who knows more than me and tell me if Little Things is good enough for it to be worth my while entering. So with only a couple of weeks to edit the flick this is probably the last you'll hear from me for a little while. So in order to keep things going I am putting out a request for guest posts. Cast and crew, I know most of you read this so, please, your two cents would be appreciated. Even if you were one of the guys who was only there for part of one of the days, I'm sure the rest of the interweb that read this would love to hear from you.

I will sit and stare at my inbox awaiting responses.

PS - Peter. Not you.