Friday 16 December 2011

And now with added Zombie

Once it was there. And then it got taken out. But now it’s back again.

Important feedback from Gentleman Jim Eaves: make the film as marketable as possible. Let audiences know what they’re paying for. And more importantly for our immediate future, let distributors know what they’re buying.

And so, today Resurrection officially becomes Zombie Resurrection.

To be fair, the film did start off life as Zombie Resurrection, but we struck off the undead early on when we were worried that we were just going to be labelled as yet another exploitation genre flick. That is until it was pointed out to us that this is exactly what distributors want. Don’t have pretensions to distance yourself from the genre mainstream. Concentrate instead on making a movie that people actually want to see.

Plus it turns out that those nice programmers of Grand Theft Auto IV have already gone to the trouble of pre-emptively sticking up posters advertising the film in all the game’s subways. Theirs has ‘TBone' Thomson and 'Pissup' Hutchison in. Ours, mercifully, doesn’t.

I haven’t played it. No rival gang-members or digital ‘ho’s have suffered in the making of this film.

And with that in mind, Jake and I spent Tuesday up in London fine-tuning the trailer edit. Now that all the pieces are in one place (including a fabulously dark score from Dale-the-tunes), Matt-the-trailer has turned out something that got even Jake and me excited. It pops like a stressed exec in the company bubble-wrap cupboard. One quick grade from Ads-the-DFX and we'll be in business.

So, when the trailer finally makes it onto a computer near you next week sometime, don’t act all surprised at the sudden appearance of a double-barrelled moniker. It’s all part of the Cannes plan, man. Poetic.

Friday 9 December 2011

Two VAT ladies

Put the hoover round – we’re getting audited.

In (yet another) piece of sage advice from that nice Mr Chris Jones, one of the things Jake and I sorted out at the beginning of this whole movie nonsense was getting ourselves VAT registered. Do this and we can claim back any tax that we get charged on business expenses. Like the costs of shooting a movie, for example. A not insubstantial amount of cash, on the scales at which we’re working.

Lovely. In Charmed parlance it’s known as free money.

The downside is that it forces you to be anal about keeping tabs on your company accounts. As this adjective has been applied at me on a number of occasions (and not always with respect either), master of the spreadsheet duties falls to the boy Phelps.

And today I get a chance to show off my adding and dividing-by-six prowess. Today we get audited by the VAT man.

I say VAT man – in the end it was two women from HMRC that drew the short straw, and are currently trawling through a shoe-box full of receipts. What better way for a Billy Bragg fan to end the week than talking with the taxman about purgatory?

Hang about. Where does all this free money come from? Er… from you, the eventual non-business DVD-buying public, it seems. It could be argued that we’ve taken our thirty pieces of silver to collude with the HMRC mafia. We've inadvertently subcontracted ourselves as part-time tax collectors.

Hmm. Thanks in advance, guys. You have my unofficial permission to download 20% of the movie from Pirate Bay if it makes you feel any better. Divided.

Wednesday 7 December 2011

Fuck me - it's Danny Brown!

INT. KITCHEN – Day

A MAN sits with a cup of tea listening to the radio. A football match is playing.

The man is weeping. Tears stream down his cheeks, joined by rivers of snot that meander from each nostril to form a sticky pool on the table below.

Such, it seems, is the lot of a Blackpool fan. At least that's what the BBC would like us to believe in their new inter-programme advert for FiveLive. I can’t tell you how it ended, such was the unexpected uproar in my flat. Fuck Me! It’s Danny Brown!

Last seen chowing down on intestines with an axe in his back, Danny very ably played the character of Beaumont in Resurrection, and now represents the first of the cast members that I have seen on the actual TV since the shoot wrapped (and on BBC1, no less). As a staunch Arsenal supporter, any excuses of 'well, I didn’t see it' should best be addressed to Danny in a French accent.

And no – we haven’t finished cutting the trailer yet. Can you tell? Stalling.