Gert's Bucket Bassenthwaite killer fish

Despite the bad weather at the start with the wind and rain causing problems the shoot went well. Big thanks to Trevor, Horris, Ray, Louise and Josh for making it happen, and a big thanks to Bob Christie who turned up to help even though he'd never met any of us before! The film along with the first is now in post production.

The next episode of Gert's Bucket will hopefully be shot on the 17th and 18th of September and sees us investigating a haunted caravan in Bolton.

Nearly finished

Nearly finished editing and sound mixing my film. I feel really good about this. I got an e-mail on the 18th April asking if there was any films being made because the actor just wanted to do something. It started a chain of events that got us to make a film that is about to be finished this weekend. I had a rough draft of a script on my computer that I'd more or less forgotten about and dragged it out and dusted it off but apart from that the whole thing has gone from not even existing as an idea to being a finished short (9 minutes) in just over a month. We actually filmed it at the start of this month. Its a bit rough round the edges but basically its a film and it has a lot that I'm pleased with and and because it was such a nice experience to make, it may be leading to a writing collaboration between me and the two actors. We are thinking of trying to do a science fiction film next but one that's a bit low key and takes place on Earth in the recognisable (and therefore easy and cheap to film) present. 

3 days of lovely filming weather and an assembly I'm pretty pleased with

I've just spent two evenings shooting at magic hour (where you get about an hour of good light between being too light and too dark) and a hectic morning in a church (where we again had to shoot everything in an hour) getting a short film shot. It was made very quickly and cheaply with a minimum crew but we were blessed with the weather and beautiful sunsets which if nothing else made it beautiful just to be there. 

I shot on my little Mini DV camera (Panasonic NV DS-27) which i bought cheap off e-bay. It cost about £40.00 and has served me well. Because its old it has manual over-rides for everything and in low light its great to be able to get the exposure you want rather than the typical washed out general flatness that the auto exposure thinks is right. Also you don't get that annoying auto focus thing where it keeps looking for the contrast and going soft and then coming back into focus. All in all I'm very pleased with this camera and although its a bit of a dinosaur compared to the modern HD cameras, it still gives images that have a certain charm.

The finished film looks like an animated chocolate box which is kind of what I wanted but would never have dreamed the extent to which it happened. I don't think I'm someone who is too romantic really but the script is and I thought it needed to be steeped in atmosphere which Heysham certainly gave me. 

I decided that in order to get it shot in the time available I would dub the entire film so I didn't have to worry about the background noise when I was filming and if i hadn't made this decision it wouldn't have got shot at all (also the sound capabilities of the camera are pretty limited). I have got an assembly edit where I've had to cut around the sightseers up there as they walk behind the actors heads during the close ups (by some force of will it all got done) and they all made loads of noise. I'm really pleased with the assembly as I wasn't sure it would all cut together but it does. One of the extremely pleasant things I always find is that an awful lot of people do try to stay out of your shot if they see you filming or at least they don't linger if you are polite and ask them nicely to move out of the way, but they are never quiet (and why should they be? They don't owe film makers anything).

The good thing about editing without sound is that its like cutting a silent movie. You are always cutting for the visuals rather than the audio. Also post synching means that you can pick the sound completely independently of the image and get what you want for both. It means that I can hopefully create the atmosphere by adding the sounds of waves when in realty the tide was miles out when we filmed and even though it was shot at dusk when all the birds and bees have gone to bed I can record all my atmos tracks in the middle of the day and give it a summer feel. The dialogue is going to be a bit of a bitch but I'm half Italian so dubbing sound is in my blood (at least its in half of it).

I had a lovely relaxing day yesterday getting an assembly together and am very pleased with the way it's come out. I was worried because I only got one shot of a really crucial moment and then the light went. We hadn't really rehearsed it so the actress just jumped up unexpectedly and said her line and by the grace of God i caught it on camera. it looks rough but that adds a certain something to the whole thing.

The actors have now watched the film and seem pleased with it all and we are planning to record all the dialogue next week and then get recording all the other sounds as well. As i type this its pissing down with rain and the forecast for the next few days isn't too good so I only hope we can get our atmos tracks to sound like summer at all or else it'll be odd having chocolate box shots of Heysham and the sounds of a hurricane in the background. No birds and bees there.

'Gert's bucket'

The shoot for 'Gert's bucket' went well, managing to get done in less than 4 hours.
I'm reasonably happy with the content but we'll have to wait and see the end product.
Big thanks to Ray, Trevor M. Trevor J, David Dale and me mam. A very big thanks to
the Bow window cafe in Bare for allowing us to film there.  

Two good shoots then mine....

Several members of the Lancaster film Co op were present at Cec's film shoot last Sunday, taking up roles as sound engineers / boom operators / actors / actresses  and extras. (Information about the story etc has not been made public domain yet) The day went well but we were unable to complete the shoot due to time constraints.  Such is life.

Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday saw Ray operating the camera for a short film he had written. Acting was David Dale and Louise Geatch both from the Lancaster film Co op and also me and Ian doing the wrangling.

The location was Heysham Head and the weather was perfect, providing us with a magnificent view across the bay and 2 great sunsets.
A big thanks to St Peter's church at Heysham Head for allowing us to film there.
Furious editing is now taking place to try and get the film ready for the Made in Lancaster Festival at the Dukes in the second week of June. (good luck with that then).

My shoot which should have been tomorrow at Bassenthwaite lake has been cancelled due to a bad weather forecast and players pulling out. Hey Ho. Even more frustrating considering I was at the lake today doing a reccy and the weather was fine. Typical.
But the scheduled shoot at the cafe tomorrow will go ahead as planned so not everything is lost.
We are going to shoot a short comedy sketch (a few mins) with some resemblance of an idea and hopefully some improv.  All a bit experimental and it could go tits up. But if you don't try....

Exquisite corpse

Now then.... here are the guide lines for the short film compilation 'Exquisite corpse.

1.      All scripts must be set roughly in the present day. This means that we don’t have to change scenery and costumes are easier.

2.      They must take place in an unspecified small suburban town in England.

3.      There is no prescribed genre at all.

4.      The story has to take place roughly over six weeks but don’t be specific about the time period. In order to be able to have the stories running simultaneously it would be a good idea that there are regular points where the story jumps forwards an unspecified number of days or weeks (but not years) in order to be able to go to another story and then back again.

5.      We all have to have at least one scene that features the Eric Morecambe statue in Morecambe (which probably makes point 2 a little redundant).

6.      We can film in any screen ratio that we want and the finished film can jump between whatever we choose to film in. We will probably set it up to 16:9 but if anyone films anything different we will put black bars on the screen (down the sides for 4:3 or at the top and bottom for 2.35:1 or you can make up your own screen ratio if you can figure out how to film it)

7.      You can shoot in colour or black and white or any combination of the two that you want and they’ll get mixed together in the finished film.

8.      We didn’t set any limit on how many actors you can have in each script but as each actor can only play one part in the overall finished film (not just in each script) and we will probably all be picking from the same pool of Film co-op actors, they will run out fairly fast so after that you will have to find actors from elsewhere.

9.      Whatever you write and choose to film you will have to cast, find the locations, dress the actors and basically be responsible for getting it all on the screen (Probably with lots of help from the film co-op members) so don’t make it any harder on yourself than you have to.

10.  The deadline for the first drafts/treatments is the 16^th February. After that we’ll start trying to make them all work as a single script which will undoubtedly mean that they get warped and changed somewhat.

11.  The working title is Exquisite Corpse (which is based more on the way we’re writing it than on what we expect the finished film to be about. In case you don’t know it is a dinner party game where someone writes a line of a story and folds the paper over and hands it to the next person who writes the next line without reading the first one and so on until everyone has had a go and then you unfold the piece of paper and read the story). We felt it not only summed up the way we’re writing this but also it was a bit like Magnolia/Short Cuts/Love Actually in that it sounds meaningful but doesn’t tell us anything about the story we’re about to see. Anyway it may change when the film is finished.

12.  Finally, all these guidelines are to help us make something roughly coherent. Don’t get too hung up on them. Just be sensible and realise that we can’t easily suddenly jump back to Jerusalem in Biblical times or something like that and if you write this it’ll probably not make it into the finished film. We didn’t discuss what will happen if people want to tell a story that has flashbacks or have a complicated non-linear structure (or something else), so again I would say that you can use them but just be realistic about it and be prepared for them to be changed when they are fitted into a finished script.

  Well....good luck with that.

Distractions

No...didn't do 'life' got distracted with Prisoner cell block H.

Lardy & Straw has been released into the unforgiving world of the public....
Overall, everybody liked it in varying degrees. From really funny to yeah it was ok.
Fascinating to hear one person say they were suicidal after hearing the background music and a
another person say they liked it.  One person told me the sugar scene went on too long and wasn't funny,
the next day I got an email saying that that was one of the funniest things they'd seen!
Just goes to show you can't please everyone all of the time. It's all down to your comedy tastes.