Tuesday 30 October 2012

How to look good knackered

The cinema is booked, the guests invited, and the fat-lady gargling in anticipation.

Despite my natural pessimism, it turns out that the 17th November is very much on for Zombie Resurrection’s debutante ball. Three hundred people from the cast, crew, hordes and their significant others, gathered back in Winchester to reacquaint themselves with the zombie apocalypse. It’s going to be an inordinately silly evening, and I can’t wait.

Just under three weeks away. Tick tick tick.

There are still the last few bits and pieces to nail down, but in a break from tradition I am actually allowing myself relax a smidgeon. The tricky stuff is now done, and the potential to be unpleasantly surprised by what we have yet to receive is greatly reduced. At the moment that we signed off the last of the CGI shots we allowed ourselves to believe that home and dry was a formality.

Such hubris, Phelps. Surely there must still be plenty of opportunities for it all to go catastrophically wrong?

Ah – the unknown unknowns. The only constant in the life of a filmmaker. Those arse-biting moments that come out of nowhere to test the resolve and challenge the best laid plans. All you can do is keep your eyes peeled, breath bated, and double the amount of time that you expect every task to take. It’s going to be an interesting three weeks.

But until we get told otherwise, we get to enjoy that rarest of sensations – quiet confidence.

In fact, the mood in Charmed Central is currently so unflappable that we’ve turned our attention to that other outstanding body of work: the making-of documentary for the DVD.

Regular readers may remember the extraordinary aggravation that we had at the start of the process – digitising 21 hours of behind-the-scenes footage, and then struggling to find the most sensible way of getting them so they played OK on a PC. It was an unwelcome distraction from our efforts to get the movie finished, but one that I’m glad we persisted through. Because last week the finished cut of the making-of documentary arrived in our in-boxes from the mighty Chris Marley, complete with intercut footage from the film, actors giving earnest interviews while caked in honey-blood, and some wholly awful chat from Jake and me holding the whole thing together.

And it’s terrific. Terrific in the way that only something that doesn’t have Jake’s and my fingerprints all over it can be.

All those moments from the shoot that I’d forgotten: Danny sitting on a balsa chair and instantaneously turning it to kindling. Shaun-the-boom-op getting wrapped across the back with another stunt chair to celebrate his birthday. Jade losing it mid-interview when a naked pair of buttocks appeared at the back of her shot. Our lovely horde getting painted and gored up. And long sections of various crew members sat around waiting for everybody else to get on with it. One quick re-working from the ever-dependable Dale-the-tunes to lay an authentic Zombie Resurrection musical vibe over the top and we are in business.

And, after watching it back, I genuinely have no idea how we managed to get a film shot at the same time.

But shoot one we did. Better get those RSVPs in for the 17th November if you don’t believe me. Unwinding.

Saturday 20 October 2012

Glimpses of a brighter beyond

Oh, we are close.

I mean so close that we can almost smell the finish line. It’s a bizarre feeling, like reaching the final chapter in a book that’s taken two years to read. But it has cheered us up somewhat.

On paper, the day-job hasn’t changed too much. We’re still taking daily receipt of the remaining CGI shots, and trading finesses to the sound, music and title sequence with our post-posse, but we are close enough now to the end of the tunnel to know that the light wasn’t a train rushing towards us after all.

The tally: only four remaining CGI shots, 48 tweaks to the sound mix and three minor changes to the titles. By this time next week we should actually have a finished movie. I know I’ve said this before, but this is the first time that I’ve actually believed it myself.

And to think that our initial intention had been to take the finished film to Cannes last May. Only five months late, Phelps. I’ll leave it to you to decide whether this represents poor project management, staggering naivety or unwarranted optimism on our part.

We crossed an important threshold last week. There were four bastard CGI shots that had been lurking in the wings for a couple of months, which involved taking out green legs and replacing them with a knotted stump. Despite our best efforts on set to collect all the useful footage of empty frames and replacement elements, making these shots look good was always going to be a challenge. A challenge not improved when the compositor that was working on them suddenly upped and left for Australia, leaving behind only a set of undecipherable scripts on a flavour of software that no one else in the team was using.

So, the shots have sat on a back-burner for a while, thwarting all attempts to plan for activities beyond the end of the film as they waited for someone with the requisite chops to come along.

And then, as if by magic, along he came.

Suddenly our world gets that much brighter. The shots look so damn good now that people are going to be surprised when they find out that actor Joe is actually bi-pedal in real life (and people blessed with the Horror Channel can check this out for themselves tonight at 9:00).

And we relax. Finally.

Our initial approaches to the world’s finest horror festivals have yielded a paltry return, but it does mean we can now start planning the most important screening – showing the movie to the cast, crew and members of our zombie hordes. There are still some logistical issues that need to be ironed out, but what I can say at this point is that it can’t hurt to keep the evening of 17th November free. And be in Winchester.

That said, the last two years have been a valuable lesson in the perils of counting chickens… better write it in the diary in pencil, eh? Hedging.

Monday 1 October 2012

Yawn of the Dead

It’s taken a while, but I am now genuinely sick of all things undead.

Fed up, pissed off, irritated and narked. No more runnething over for Andy’s cup. It’s now officially half-empty.

And we are so close to being done. I mean, we're within a gnat’s gland of complete. But why does the last 1% of the work take a ridiculously disproportionate amount of time to finish? With all memories of our last moment of creative excitement firmly in the rear-view mirror, the process has become a struggle for the line.

I guess this isn’t unique to making a movie. A lot of complex projects hit the moment of diminishing returns at some point, where the effort required to make incremental improvements suddenly gets larger and larger. Nothing is ever finished, only abandoned.

Part of my antsiness is plain boredom with the process. We get sent something from someone in our post team. We slot it into the movie. We see / hear whether we like it or not. We send our notes back. We rinse. We repeat. Sure, in and amongst it all, our lists of outstanding issues with the audio and VFX shots are growing steadily smaller, but every day the curve is levelling off further. A slowing trend towards finished, which sits tantalisingly just out of reach.

And perversely, we’ve never been busier. Trips to London to snipe off moments of problematic audio and to swap across data because my provincial broadband is useless. Hours spent analysing why a shot or sample doesn’t work, or trying to translate an emotional reaction into a logical list of fixes. Days when all I do is act as a digital sheep-dog, making sure data goes to the right people and watching blue bars on my laptop slowly climb to 100%.

But actually, my disquiet is probably more to do with that nagging voice at the back of my head telling me I really should be doing something else. I don’t think I’ve learned anything useful about filmmaking for a while, other than skills in diplomacy and project micro-management, and it seems cruelly out of sorts with my experience of the last couple of years. And with the tank of redundancy cash now down to fumes, it’s time to get a proper job, feed the mortgage, and develop a sense of perspective about what the last two years have taught me and what I would do differently if I go round again.

So, no September cast and crew screening, I’m afraid. But definitely October. Unless it’s not. And if you find that frustrating, imagine how I feel. Whining.