I’ve been involved in the making of a new horror movie for a little while now, and I’m incredibly pleased to note that the final trailer for that film, Blood and Roses, is now up on the official website. I’ve embedded the YouTube link below, but please do check out the site for decent quality versions.
It’s also worth looking at the associated site My First Movie for director Simon Aitken’s blog, where he extensively documents the troubles, trials and tribulations of getting a low-budget film from script to screen. It’s an honest and open account, and it’s inspiring and exhausting in equal measure. I count myself as a film-maker, but Simon’s one of the rare breed that’s gone out and made that mythical and more importantly marketable entity – the first feature. He’s off to Cannes in May to get it out to the world. It’s going to do really well.
Why? Well, it’s a dark, sexy exploration of betrayal and reinvention, fueled with an evil sense of humour and a vicious final scene that makes you twist uncomfortably in your chair at how much you’re agreeing with the nastiness being meted out on screen. With stand-out performances from thinking girl’s fancy Benjamin Green and Brit scream queen Marysia Kay, the best way I can describe it is Twilight for grown-ups. Seriously worth your time when it starts hitting the festivals this year.
Declaration of interest: I colourgraded Blood and Roses, and am currently working on the short Making of documentary. As Simon has mentioned here.
The photo accompanying the piece is of me, pretending to grade.
I’m on a train, heading back home from That London. It’s late, and I won’t be in bed before midnight. On any normal Wednesday night this might be an issue. But my working life is changing shape for the next few months, and I am no longer a slave to the standard routine.
Once again, I have been shifted onto a night shift at work. The difference is that I have decided to embrace that life, complete with benefits and pitfalls, and am going to try to make the best of it.
I’m working a seven-day fortnight, which is a week on, week off deal. Obviously, the week on is a prize pig. Six 12 hour days on the trot. 72 hours crammed into one long working week. The compensation is that week off. Careful holiday planning can help take the sting off, and I find that I’m getting more things done in the down time, as opposed to monging in front of the telly. It’s early days yet, and I’m sure that’ll change. The worry is how long it’ll take to recover from the on week, and how much desperately needed sleep is going to eat into that time off. That is something I’ll have to see about, although I can’t pretend it’s a situation I’m looking forward to much. I guess if I start posting in monosyllabic grunts, then you’ll know how well I’m dealing with it.
For the mean time, I’m just enjoying the benefits of a late night out without consequence. The reason for my late train journey? Finally, I went to see Watchmen. A faithful, loving adaptation of one of my favourite books. Surprisingly sensitive in places, jaw-droppingly crass in others. I didn’t mind the change of ending, although it’s a worry when you find yourself thinking that the only reasonable opinion in the room is coming from Rorschach. And I never really even noticed Dr. Manhatten’s big blue dong. I guess the storytelling must have worked out after all.
I’m bone weary, barely able to focus. The frontal lobes of my brain are in a knot. A thunderstorm of a headache is making slow progress across my brow before settling in behind my eyes, where it will force jabs of pain out through my tear ducts.
I feel fantastic. The final push of effort has been completed, audio has been tweaked, polished, sweetened and uploaded and we are done for Straight 8 09. Dom has done some fantastic work over the last week in getting the found sound and atmos we’ve gathered into a cohesive whole. The cacophony he’s created all sounds the way I imagined it when I wrote the script for Time Out four score years and ten ago.
We’re quietly proud of what we’ve achieved so far. Now all we have to do is wait and see if we’ve made it into the screenings. And as anyone who’s made a Straight 8 will tell you, that wait is the toughest thing of all about the whole process. We’ll see.
Fist bumps and hugs to everyone that got their film into SFL on time this year. You’ve done something great, and you’re part of the hardcore. You’re film makers in the very purest sense of the word.
Many, many years ago, oh lordy, we must be talking at least 2004, my old boss offered me a lend of an album. “This looks like your sort of thing, Rob,” he said cryptically.
It was the first, self-titled Dresden Dolls album, and curse him for seeing the convolutions of my twisted little soul, he was right. It was skewed, wonky, unafraid of it’s influences, powerful, bold and brave. And I instantly fell in love with the stripy-stockinged loon that was Amanda Palmer. A clockwork Sally Bowles, a ticking song bomb. Greasepaint, corsets, minor chords and love songs to robot boys. What’s not to love?
Time moves on. The Dolls go into hiatus, and Amanda works on a solo album, Who Killed Amanda Palmer? Produced by the mighty Ben Folds, it focuses on her piano-driven pop sensibilities, and is a work of utter joy. She makes a couple of cheeky, funny promos skewering the pop world, low-budget gems that show off her penchant for dressing up and being a bit silly. I fall in love all over again.
And then the wheels come off. Her record company, Roadrunner, best known as a metal label, clearly have problems with her. And they start to interfere with the way she portrays herself, calling into question her approach, her songcraft.
Then they start calling her fat.
And here’s the vid in question, so you can see what the fuss is all about.
Bellygate is clearly the thin end of the wedge as far as Amanda’s concerned. She is now involved in a turf war with Roadrunner. At stake, nothing less than her career. She’s making the perfectly valid point that Roadrunner don’t get her, never did, and are not treating her with any kind of respect or even mild interest. She wants out, and she doesn’t care who knows it.
Here’s her latest offensive, a song written especially for her label, that really tells you everything you need to know about the conflict this far. It’s utterly typical of Amanda that she should take a situation that’s clearly causing her pain and misery, and turn it into entertainment. The sign of a great performer.
Here’s to the exit sign, Ms. Palmer.
Props to Rick for pointing me at this in the first place.
Wednesday. Early. Pre-sunrise. Alarms go off. Dom and I roll groaning out of bed. Hot, brief showers, tea, a snatched bowl of cereal. Low conversation. Wondering what we’ll forget, what vital thing has slipped through the net of our preparations. Clare, soft murmuring from bed. “Good luck.” I nod, and pull the first of many long, held breaths.
On the road as the sky ruddies and glows. The car is full of lights and camera equipment. Hard cases, full of potential. Soft music and quiet talk, booming down the M4 into the day, towards London. The sun is ahead of us, fiery red. A stop sign that we ignore.
The traffic starts to build as we turn into a quiet Hampstead side street. Kiki is outside, waiting. She has yet more baggage, and it’s a squeeze to get everything in. And we still need to fit one more person amongst the gear.
A half hour later. London Bridge. Dom points out a cafe that is a later location. Looks fine. We make an illegal turn into London Bridge station, ignoring angry hoots from cabbies that have the right to do what we cannot. But here’s Hayley, bright as the dawn, and somehow we find room for her.
The first location is five minutes away. A neat little one-bed flat in a quiet situation. It’s full of light, life and clutter, and perfect for what we need. We start to set up as the owner, a friend of Hayley’s, sleepily gets ready for work. We’ve been going for three hours, and it’s still not half past eight.
A little set dressing, finally a coffee. Kiki in a tartan dressing gown and leopard-skin slippers, with socks. Elsie Tanner’s hot younger sister. We load up, shoot the slate, and start to work through the shot list.
Camera troubles. Even with all three lights blazing in the kitchen, and daylight flooding through, the light meter says we’re under-exposed. Dom fiddles with the controls. We all start to sweat a bit, and it’s not just the heat from the lights.
Not sure what Dom's focussed on here...
Lewis arrives. Quiet, polite, wearing a fine choice in retro Batman attire. We set him up with another camera, which means there are now more people shooting the making of than the actual film.
Crisis. Dom thinks the camera isn’t turning over. We have between-channel radio and TV noise roaring in the kitchen, and he can’t hear the mechanism. His gut feeling is that it’s not putting film through the gate. A nervous five minutes while he reseats the battery. We have no choice but to reshoot the last two shots. We may have doubled them. There’s no way to be sure. There’s no way of knowing. With the sound on the radio and TV down, we go for the two shots again. Success. The rattle of the mechanism is a benediction.
We move on.
Two grabbed shots on a bus. I’m worried that people will take offence, but no-one even seems to notice that we’ve got a camera out. Lewis slops over Kiki. Kiki backs into a guy’s lap by accident. The look on his face says that he doesn’t mind. Ten minutes after we get on the first bus we’re on another one, heading back to the unit car. The sky is flawless Wedgewood blue. It’s warm and bright. At a quarter to twelve, we’re back in the car and driving into Soho, on the best day of the year so far.
Twelve thirty. Kiki’s office space, deep in the heart of Soho. Fourth floor, bustling with life, and glorious light pouring through a wall of windows. We’ve lugged the redheads and tripods up four flights of stairs, and we don’t need them. It’s fine. It doesn’t matter. Not having to rig lights means we’re done that much more quickly. Hayley and Lewis become set dressing, and Kiki corrals some of her work mates into taking one for the cause. Five shots in forty minutes, then we’re back in the car back to London Bridge.
In the car, Kiki regales us with stories from the one-woman show she’s writing. The story about the guy with curvature of the spine, and his weird take on improvisational cinema. How she refused a big offer from Coronation Street. And she frets about Natasha Richardson, critically injured in a silly little ski-ing accident that would claim her life the following day. She and Hayley talk agents, while I scribble on my shooting script, and hope to god the timings hold.
A bit of physical direction
Two o’clock, and we’re back on the street in London Bridge. The cafe location Dom found was almost empty, so we scoot up the road a little to a smaller place where punters are queueing out of the door. Two shots, and we can only fit Kiki and Dom in there. This is where timings start to go awry. I can’t count Dom in or out, and have to take his reports on how long the trigger was going on faith. But it’s exactly what I was seeing as I was writing it, so no complaints.
We have lunch at the original cafe location, and try not to flag. Cheeky Kiki eats the sandwich she bought down the road in there, but no-one seems to mind. Or even notice.
We move on.
We piece together the buildup to the “Time Out”, a nested series of zooms and closeups, in a cut-through at the back of Guy’s hospital. It’s perfect. Quiet, but with enough passing traffic that we get some great passer-by reactions when we finally direct Kiki to go loopy. She does a brilliant job, whooping and hollering, flapping her jacket behind her like a Batman cape. The second shot, grabbed while she runs through a busy courtyard, is absolutely priceless. Kiki is breathless and blushing, but it’s good stuff and we all know it.
She's a star, I tell ya. A STAR.
Then to the final location, for the shocking conclusion to the tale. A cut just under a railway bridge hard by London Bridge station. We devise a jittery, single-shot way of making it look like the unit car is heading for Kiki at speed. Hayley, behind the wheel, does a great job of looking scared out of her mind as she accelerates up the alleyway at twenty miles an hour. It looks scary, and I’m viewing it from a very safe position. This one is seriously rehearsed, of course. Killing the lead actress would not make a good end to the day.
One quick shock reaction (helped along by Lewis barking at Kiki at the right moment) and we’re done. There’s a question over the counter on the camera now, which could be reading anything from thirty seconds to a minute.
It’s not even that. We run four seconds of black, and Dom thinks he feels the film run out. Which could be something of an issue, as we have a shot to go. We run the camera anyway, but I don’t think we got it. Maybe a flash. Maybe a couple of frames. There’s no way to be sure. There’s no way of knowing.
And that was it. Pictures done. We quietly de-convene. There are no histrionics, which is always the way with these things. Everyone’s just a bit too tired to make much of a fuss.
Hayley strikes set, and we drop Kiki back to her dogs in Hampstead. Then a quiet beer and a debrief with Dom and Lewis in a pub near Paddington. Turns out Lewis is a major horror buff, which leads to a bit of a geek out, and an internal promise to introduce him to the Sick Puppy crowd. Then home, to Clare. Thinking I might sleep. Knowing I wouldn’t. It had been a day filled with adventure, improvisation, triumph and possible disaster but by god we’d done it. We had a film in the camera.
We have just over a week to deliver the sound, and then the painful part of the process. The long wait while we find out if we’ve made it, if it’s good enough, if it came out. We won’t know until the middle of May. So we wait. And we wonder, and we remember an amazing, inspiring day. From me, Dom, Kiki, Hayley and Lewis, it’s so long, so far.
The story continues in May…
(all pics taken by Lewis Shelbourne. Nice work, that man.)
Let’s get the apologia out of the way first. The London Street Brasserie in Reading is one of my favourite restaurants. Full stop. The service and food has always been impeccable, and I have never walked away from the place feeling less than deeply satisfied. I can recommend the place heartily.
Trouble is, I’m not here to review the restaurant. I’m here to show you the advertising hoarding that’s just gone up on my route into work for the place. Now, let me ask a simple question. Would you be more or less likely to go to the London Street Brasserie if all you had to go on was the recommendation offered by this piece of advertising gold?
Who's For Dinner?
What the hell happened? If the mood the photographer and agency were after was “friendly and welcoming”, then they mis-stepped the mark by a pratfall and a half. The feeling I get when looking at this poster is “she’s about to drop the glass, crawl out of the hoarding and chew my bloody face off!”
Now, I’m prepared to accept that maybe the photo was taken on a bad day. Maybe that’s not a professional model up there, but a member of staff (in which case, my heart really goes out to her) who got caught in a poor pose. But that’s no excuse for a shot like that to make it through the editorial process, get printed up at great cost and put up as an image representative of the restaurant.
That, Readership, is an image representative of a Z-Grade cannibal horror movie. I’m sorry to have to share it with you. But I have to see it every frickin’ day. And it’s starting to get to me.
The London Street Brasserie Girl is in my dreams now.
I’ve been following the shift from the traditional form of music retail to something a little more random access with great interest over the last couple of years. I’m an enthusiast of anything that’s not the HMV style music shed, where a depressingly small range of new release and back cat stock is kept at the front of the store at loss leader prices, while the interesting stuff is racked at the back, extortionatly priced.
With the disappearance of my favourite music chain Fopp last year (although I’m glad to see the brand’s reemerged in a form truer to it’s independent roots, with 7 shops in key locations. Not Reading though, darnit) I’ve found that my shopping for music is all online these days. I will frequently impulse buy using my iPhone, and snag interesting stuff from links and recommendations using my RSS feeds through favourite sites like WFMU’s Beware Of The Blog, Boing Boing and The Word (all on the blogroll to your right, Readership. Have a nose). Making the decision to dump all our CDs onto hard drive has had an impact on the way I purchase and listen to music too. I’m much more likely to listen to random, off-the-wall things (take for example, my 2008 song of the year, a sweet slice of poppy Georgian jazz) and am much happier listening to my library on shuffle than to discrete albums. I grab and listen as and when the mood takes me.
The exception to this rule is, of course, vinyl, which remains a pleasure bordering on the ritualistic and fetishistic, and the one truly joyful way to spend a rainy Sunday afternoon. Rekkids and booze. Ohhhh yeeeah. That little habit is neither cheap nor easy, but I will happily contradict my earlier argument in this case.
I should offer a couple of links to recent discoveries. First up, The Damnwells are offering up their new album One Last Century for free. It’s fine and classy pop and well worth a listen. The main man of the band, Alex Dezen also gives a great argument for why he’s chosen to share his music.
I have never worked so hard or put so much of myself into a collection of recorded songs. It is for just this reason that I want to give it away. To me it makes perfect sense. I just want people to hear this music, and I don’t want them to have to enter into some kind of contractual agreement with a third party to do so. Download the record, copy it and give it to your friends, lovers, and enemies. Whatever. It’s so hard these days just to get the actual music into people’s houses and cars, let alone their ears. Besides, I know everyone’s broke, maybe I can supply the soundtrack. So, I just want to give this music away because I want people to hear it.
You can’t say fairer than that, can you?
The other model to nod at is “Pay What You Like”, which I like for the way it instantly gives the music a sense of perceived value. It’s an experiment that can work very well, as people will frequently pay more for product than you’d think if you give them the choice. Look what that method did for Radiohead, to take the high-profile example. Or, to expand the argument, what it’s starting to do for innovative restauranteurs.
With that in mind, I present Sophie Madeleine’s album Love. Life. Ukulele. One of the sweetest things I’ve heard all year, with solid tunesmithery and a sharp sense of humour. Yours for a minimum donation of three and a half quid. At the very least, check out the single, The Stars.
Finally, for those of you enjoying the pure random thrills of Spotify (and if not, why not?) here’s my first playlist. Arty Gallic electronikie. I’ve made it collaborative, so feel free to add anything you think would suit. Merci, mon Lectorat, et appréciez la musique!
(Postscript, as it’s not out of closed beta yet, but I should point out that WFMU’s Free Music Archive is going to be positively head-expanding when it finally breaks. It won’t be for everyone, but if you have an eclectic ear, there’s enough here to keep you up for DAYS. More news on this later, and if I get any invites you’ll be the first to know. Meanwhile, the site has a couple of taster compos for your downloading pleasure, to give you an idea of whet to expect.)
Those of you that were viewing the site last night may have been a little confused as it went through three looks in the course of a couple of hours.
This is my fault entirely. Spring is coming, and I feel the urge to tinker, re-arrange and mess about under the hood.
I’ve finally settled on a new theme, and have updated the blogroll. We should all be grateful that I don’t have a locally installed version of WordPress, otherwise the site would never look the same from one week to the next.
Its the portability of 8mm that I love, you know...
Things are moving swiftly. Thus I must do the same. Briefly, then.
Shooting on OUT TIME will be at some point early next week. We have screened our test roll of neg. Hooray! It’s in focus! Hooray! The centre’s where it should be!
We are meeting Kiki, our actress tomorrow, and have just had a very successful chat with Hayley, supporting actress and first AD, which may have solved the last of our location issues. Things are falling into place.
Meanwhile, this Friday sees the first preview screening of the Cambridge Super 8 Festival, and we are honoured that Code Grey has been chosen as one of the featured films. Any members of The Readership that find themselves at a loose end and anywhere near The Portland Arms in Cambridge should get themselves in there and give the film some love.
Code Grey will be screened as part of the Festival proper on Friday May 1st, and Clive and I will both be there. Come and find us and say hi. If you mention X&HT, then I will be quietly and happily flabberghasted.
Code Grey’s screening at the Chelsea Arts Club is just the icing on top of the pork pie. They’re feeding us and everything, doncha know. Not with iced pork pies, I hope…
We move on apace, slipping into the final stages of planning before a long day of shooting. Time is, as it inevitably does with Straight 8, slipping away. The final day for submission of pictures is three weeks away.
Here’s where we stand. Script, pretty much there. It needs more of a conclusive breakdown to create a proper shooting script, which I’ve started and will finish this week. Dom will be on recce duty, hunting out locations. We have finished casting, and have two fantastic, talented actors on board that will push us to do our best. We have a tentative shooting date two weeks hence. We are, I think, as set as we can be at this stage.
So, of course, I’m twitchy. This is always the point in proceedings where something happens. Usually, a key member of staff will drop out. If we’re unlucky, everyone will drop out. All we can do is plan and plan and hope for the best, and plan again for the emergency that I’m certain is just round the corner. These films are such small things, but they can really take over your life. A disaster now will echo in your bones and your soul.
Let’s talk about Code Grey. Last year’s Straight 8 has only gone and got itself a life outside the compound. We have a screening at the Chelsea Arts Club on the 16th, along with artists and other film-makers as part of their monthly film night. This is a huge bump to the ego for Clive and I, and we shall struggle to contain the swelling of our heads. We even get fed as part of the deal.
And ***BREAKING NEWS***, Readership. Code Grey has been picked up as part of the Cambridge Super 8 Festival in May. This is of course very good news, as it was submitted without the Straight 8 wrapper. It’s a short film in it’s own right, and doing really well. This bodes well for the Hungarian Film Festival too, which also had a DVD from me. Next job is to see if we can get it into a mainstream festival. The way we’re rolling at the moment, I think we can do it. It’s just a shame we’re a bit late for Cannes this year…
EXCUSES AND HALF TRUTHS 