Letters from an Ordinary World

Has it really been that long?

Once upon a time you couldn’t shut him up, and then suddenly... nothing. Not a word since April. He doesn’t write, he doesn’t call, he’s just vanished into the blogosphere. Filmmakers, eh?

And so we start with an apology. Sorry. It’s been way too long.

Part of the extended radio-silence is down to the fact that Jake and I aren’t actually doing anything on the movie anymore. Once we had dropped off a hard disk with a (greatly pared-down) collection of finished stuff for our Sales Agents at the end of May, our work here was pretty much done. Rest easy, son – the experts are on the case.

But mostly it's because this bit doesn’t feel like part of the same adventure anymore. If this was a movie, it would have faded out on the applause at the end of the cast-and-crew screening. This bit actually feels like the first act of the next movie, where we see our heroes go about their daily lives in their Ordinary Worlds, just waiting for an inciting incident to come along. Since the screening, we have both had to find day-jobs, while Jake is also busy planning a wedding and finding a place to move into. I've wound up with employers who routinely insist on shipping me out to the far-flung corners of the planet, and when you’re on corporate expenses time you never find yourself sober for long enough to throw a coherent five hundred words together. Oh, gidday from Melbourne, by the way.

But, behind the scenes, stuff has been going on. Not at a rate that demands frequent blogging, but important stuff. And rather than apologise to every member of the cast and crew individually when they text me for an update, here’s where we are at.

First up, we have now sold the Japanese distribution rights. I say ‘we’, but actually Moviehouse Entertainment did all the heavy lifting at Cannes. The first territory to fall marks a profound moment in the lives of independent movie producers – it’s the difference between being a ‘filmmaker’ and a ‘distributed filmmaker’. Semantics to some, but absolutely crucial to the people that dole out UK and European film money. That's in the unlikely event that Jake and I ever manage to write a screenplay that crosses the necessary thresholds for art and decency.

Being honest, I am more than a little surprised that the Japanese were the first to bite. 76 minutes of hostile, sweary nonsense for a more polite society. Presumably somewhere in Tokyo, an English language scholar is going to be given our dialogue sheet to translate, and will no doubt reflect for a moment on where their years of study and experience have brought them. If anyone knows the Kanji character for ‘idiot gentleman’, please let me know. I have a feeling it’s going to appear fairly frequently in the subtitle track.

And it looks like we may have sorted out a festival premiere. Nothing confirmed yet, but anybody that’s going to be in Chicago at the end of September and fancies meeting Robert Englund and watching Zombie Resurrection lose its festival virginity should make themselves known now. As much as anything else, I’m looking forward to seeing whether the jokes that we wrote in autumn 2010 are actually going to get a laugh.

Chicago? There must be some kind of work-related meeting or something that’ll warrant me being flown out to the Windy City that week, surely? Conniving.

Framed-up

Q: When is 24 not 24?

A: When it’s actually 23.976 – a piece of the most irritating kind of Final Cut Pro nonsense that has cost me half a weekend. And the sunny half to boot.

This is all about the frames per second: the number of different pictures that get flashed up in front of the audience’s eyes every second. European TVs and DVDs do it 25 times (well, they do half of a picture 50 times a second). Go see a film in the cinema and you’ll be presented with 24. And Peter Jackson has been known to go as high as 48.

And in America? 29.97 frames per second. Not 30; 29.97. Who ever thought that was a sensible idea?

Again, probably best not to start with the rant before setting the context. You may have recently noticed some new pictures and links appearing on the Charmed website, directing more enlightened distributors towards our Sales Agents Moviehouse Entertainment, who are proudly carrying the banner for Zombie Resurrection in its onwards march into DVD emporia near you. The contacts are signed, a skip-load of DVDs passed across to them to hand out at Cannes, and the unmanageable list of must-have deliverables bartered down to the absolute necessities.

Gone are the expensive HDCAMs and DigiBetas, to be replaced by a single full-fat ProRes file delivered on a hard disk.

At 24 frames per second.

And while this was cause for some jubilation in Charmed Central, it did raise one important issue. We didn’t shoot the film at 24 frames per second. Like all good Europhiles, we went for 25.

This was, I should point out, not an arbitrary choice on our part. If you start to read the Guerilla Filmmakers Handbook it’s written there on one of the commandment stones. On page 7, even before you make it to the Contents pages, the decision has been take out of your hands: 'Thou shalt shoot, while living in PAL land, at 25 fps on film, or 25p on HD, irrespective of what the other soothsayers advise. They be-eth wrong!'

Thinking about it, it does make sense. Outside of the festival circuit, Zombie Resurrection was never intended for a cinematic release. It’s a low-budget zombie film that doesn’t have Brad Pitt in it.

And so we plan for the DVD. 25 frames per second. Done.

So the question before us now is: 'how do we make a 25 fps film into a 24 fps film?'. And the easiest answer is just to slow the whole lot down by 4%. No one outside of the production team will ever notice, we are reliably assured. Oh, and maybe the actors, who will wonder which slightly-more-baritone replacements came in and dubbed all their lines.

Simple. On paper this should be a stroll through the roses. Conform the video footage to 24 fps in After Effects, slow down and re-sample the audio track, introduce them to each other again in the editing software, et voila!

Except Final Cut Pro was written by Americans. Americans with their NTSC TVs and whimsical sample rates.

It is, apparently, far easier to make an American DVD if your frame rate isn’t quite 24 frames per second. No – 23.976 works so much nicer. But, hey, it’s close enough to 24 that we can probably name all the software templates in Final Cut Pro as 24 fps. Round it up, why don’t we? Don’t want to confuse the punters.

And so somewhere in sunny Hampshire, a lonely vitamin-D deficient film producer gazes sadly out of his window at all the other kids playing in the street, wondering why by the end of his film everybody’s dialogue is just a tiny bit out of sync.

So endeth the rant. I’m off to the pub. Spent.

Body of Christ?

'Moist'. Now officially my least favourite adjective.

It’s a convoluted story that starts with a simple request from our Sales Agents, and ends with me in trauma counselling. However, persist to the end of the post and you will be rewarded with the link to our brand new trailer.

I say 'brand new', but it’s more 'variations on a theme'. But for those of you that watched the trailer that we stuck up last January just after our first pass on the edit, and were concerned by an absence of gore or people running about, this might just be your lucky day.

Anyway, I digress.

I mentioned in my last posting that Jake and I came away from the meeting with the sales guys with some homework. An updated trailer and a copy of the poster art for them to take to Cannes as bait for the Zombie Resurrection distribution mousetrap. And it all seemed so straightforward at the time – swap out the shots from the original trailer with the shiny graded ones from the movie, and send them the best quality JPEG of our picture of the zombie Messiah crucified on a cross of blood.

Twenty minutes work and the price of a first class stamp. If only every meeting was so simple.

That was until we got the details through.

Our poster art was prepared originally for a bunch of flyers and DVD covers to make ourselves appear slightly more presentable at last year’s Cannes festival. It had to look arresting and intriguing. It had to give potential sales agents and distributors the warm glow that there was a way that they could eventually market the movie. And it had to look presentable on an A5 piece of card.

But our Sales Agents have bigger plans. A1, to be exact.

I’ll save you the trip to Google - 841 x 594 mm. Movie poster size.

Anyone that’s ever printed out porn that they've downloaded from the internet expecting it to look like a glossy top-shelf mag will know exactly what the problem is. The cracks start to show.

So, while the face of our zombie Messiah was lifted from a suitably detailed image shot by Rob-the-photo in his on-set studio, the rest of him is appropriated from a screen-grab from the film. High definition, sure, but not movie poster definition.

Bugger. It needs fixing.

And the quickest fix – sorting out a replacement shot of the Messiah’s body to overlay on top of the unusably pixelated torso. And that means digging out the costume that my brother wore continually for three weeks under hot set lights for some proper photos.

This is where being the person in the group with the least technical aptitude really sucks. Jake is the camera guy. Andy gets to be the stunt double.

Eighteen months hermetically sealed in a plastic bag in Jake’s parents’ loft later, and the bloody costume was still damp.

And it stank. My God, did it ever stink. A potent combination of mould and re-animated sweat. I never knew I could trip my gag reflex so hard and often without actually crossing the expulsion threshold. Although I did come dangerously close when I stuck my hands into the pockets and gushed into a collection of my brother’s old tissues, their summer 2011 payload maintained in a perpetual state of liquidity.

Oh dear – it’s making me retch just typing this.

Anyway, by 2:30 AM last night, it was done. A poster fit for a wider canvas, and I can’t say that it wasn’t good to feel a little bit like a movie producer again after months in an office. A sensation that persisted up until my alarm went off this morning and I realised that I still had to go to work.

Only our mother can tell us apart, although I always imagined that the Son of God would be taller. Stunted.

So, where’s our bloody movie, Phelps?

Fly free, my pretty.

Today almost felt like being a filmmaker again. No alarm clock, no creased shirt, no office peer-pressure to have a shave. Just a cheeky midweek trip to London.

I should start this posting with an apology. To everyone that has gone to the blog vainly trying to find out what’s happening with the movie, to everyone that has called, texted or emailed me this year – sorry. It’s not because we’ve been distracted by too much suckling at the teat of the man, it’s because we’ve not had too much positive to report.

I blame HMV. The bottom has fallen out of the UK distribution market since it went into administration. The distribution companies are all, one imagines, creditors of the ailing high-street DVD stockist. And some companies, such as Revolver, are faring worse than others.

Besides, I’m a sucker for making the whole movie-making process look easy. Easier, at least.

But today was an important day. Today we handed the whole shebang over to a Sales Agent.

Yup. As of this afternoon, responsibility for the sale of all UK and international distribution rights finally lies where it should – with the experts. And, rather incongruously, this is where the real hard work starts for Jake and me.

Anybody that has been through the process of engaging a Sales Agent to secure distribution for their movie will tell you all about The List. The exhaustive catalogue of a hundred things you need to sort out to enable the movie to get sold. A 16:9 version of the film on HDCam. Ditto a 4:3 version and a 1:2.35 version. Both PAL and NTSC equivalents on DigiBeta. Music cue sheets. A hundred pictures. An MPAA certification. E&O insurance. Re-written screenplays and every combination of music, sound effects and dialogue delivered on ten different flavours of digital media.

It’s genuinely horrific.

However, this is early in the process, and certain things are more important than others at this stage. For them to take the film to Cannes and start the selling process, we really only need a trailer, a poster, a whole bunch of DVDs to give away, and a short synopsis.

Oh, and to be clear here – they’re talking about our existing trailer and poster art.

Yeah – the trailer that we cut together last January before we had any sensible gore or grading. That one. I had, naively, imagined that this would be useful only to break the ice with industry professionals, and, to be fair, it did that fairly admirably – the Sales Agents that we are going with were people that we met and auditioned at Cannes last year. But, at some point in the process I did think that responsibility for a proper trailer and key art would be passed over to someone that knew what they were doing. It may look like art, but it’s all craft and experience.

Oh no. It turns out that this is up to us.

And this is where our hard work starts. A complete re-working of the trailer to improve the picture, sound and blood content. Oh, and losing the swearing and adding in more running. And if we can come up with an easier-to-understand tagline, that might be helpful too.

But at what point in the process do we get relieved by the professionals? Is there a possibility that whatever trailer Jake and I pull together by Easter will actually be used to coax unwitting members of the gore-buying community into purchasing the DVD? And will Amo’s temporary poster art be on the box?

More importantly, what’s going to happen to the 18,000 hits that the last trailer has already amassed? Don’t think that you’re not going to be expected to help out once the new trailer is up on-line. Counting.

From rush-hour, with love

If this was Hollywood, our story would have ended at the cast and crew screening in November.

CUT TO: Eric vs. the zombies. A crash to black and credits start to roll. Silence from the room. The camera pushes in on the nervous faces of the two filmmakers as the lights go up. The men glance at each other – they slowly stand to face a barrage of flack from 180 unhappy punters. One of them opens his mouth to speak, but a single clap rings out from the back of the room. The men glance across, confused. The clap is joined by another, and then by more and more people applauding, until the whole room are on their feet, cheering wildly. The filmmakers are overcome with emotion. A celebratory fist is thrust into the air in slow motion as we fade to a triumphal close.

This, however, is Hampshire. So we have ended up with a dramatically-superfluous fourth act – Jake and I try and sell the bugger.

I’m getting slightly ahead of myself. I haven’t contributed anything to the Zombie Resurrection story since November, so we have some catching up to do. And from a production perspective the two most profound events since the screening have been Jake’s and my successful re-integration into the world of the day-job.

Well, the holiday had to end at some point.

And while I (at least) am quite enjoying my new daily activities, I do appear to have wound up with exactly the kind of job that I wasn’t looking for. And it’s all to do with labelling.

More specifically, it’s all to do with how you answer the question 'what do you do?' Over the last two years whenever I felt myself reaching for the answer 'filmmaker', I knew exactly what the next question would be. 'Oh really? Anything I might have seen?'

'Um, well, it’s kind of in post-production at the moment…'

Ah – so you’re not really a 'filmmaker', you’re 'making a film'. Semantics, yes, but there are a lot of people that we’ve met who are 'making a film'. Anyone with a good idea / screenplay / mate with a camera / etc. is 'making a film', especially when they're trying to chat someone up.

Until your movie is available in ASDA or Amazon, it’s your fault that there is a glaring cultural gap in their film-watching history.

When I look back on my unsuccessful job-hunting strategies at the end of last year, it seems in hindsight that I was guided by ridiculous narcissism. Don’t go looking for anything that resembles a career, Phelps, because that will label you as an 'engineer who happens to have made a film'. Get a job that has 'temporary source of cash' stamped all over it, and avoid the kind of nuanced conversations about where your working loyalties lie that trainee baristas and shelf-stackers never get into.

And in this regards, I have failed.

Failed, thanks to the actions of an eagle-eyed recruitment consultant. I have somehow swapped my carefree lifestyle for one of alarm clocks, freshly-laundered shirts, self-enforced curfews and a commute. And a job that painfully resembles what I was doing when I got laid off two years ago.

I once made a zombie film, you know? Back in that two-year career break.

And here is where I get to stop whining. While I can feel my life starting to speed up again, the novelty of feeding the mortgage hasn’t worn off just yet, and there are plenty of jobs that I could be doing that wouldn’t be half as entertaining. And it’s not like we’ve let losing forty hours a week get in the way of selling the movie.

Oh – that? That’s a story for later. Back-peddling.

The coming together

And relax.

What a weekend… Saturday was as much fun as I’ve had in as long as I can remember, as we welcomed an insane amount of people to the cast and crew screening of Zombie Resurrection. Cast, crew, zombies, post-production guys, people from the various locations at which we shot the bugger, the guys that did all our set catering, investors, IndieGoGo supporters, mentors, friends and family. All in one place to enjoy 76 minutes of gore-laden sweary silliness.

And it was terrific. 180 people laughing in mostly all the right places, with the freshly-graded film looking and sounding lovelier than it ever has done before. And we got to hang out with a bunch of pals that we hadn’t seen in fourteen months.

Not that anything ever goes completely smoothly. The cinema was hosting the thematically-perfect Third International Death Day Conference beforehand, and when we arrived to set up at 6:00 they were showing no signs of letting up. And bitter experience insists that you’re never beyond the mercies of technical SNAFUs until you hear the last strains of the end-credits.

But when the lights went up at the end of the screening I could smell the stress evaporating.

Sure, it’s a wedding audience – a room filled with people willing the best-man’s speech to be that much funnier than it would otherwise be. Someone would have to be supremely un-classy to go up to a couple of filmmakers at their first screening and berate them for the idiotic way that they’ve wasted two years of their lives, but from my vantage point at the back of the cinema people did genuinely seem to be enjoying themselves. Jake and I lost all sense of perspective on the movie a long time ago, but until we get told differently we’re taking Saturday as an indication that we’ve done something right.

And it was at this point that I may have slightly over-relaxed.

As the audience de-camped back to the bar, and with our responsibilities finally discharged, everything inevitably degenerated into the kind of extended session that my body hasn’t been able to cope with since I was 25. Sat in my flat at 4:00 AM with the last of the stragglers pillaging the forgotten bowels of my booze collection, I should have known that Sunday was going to be a struggle.

But that aside, it’s a massive Charmed thank you again to Christian for organising the cinema, and to everyone that turned up on Saturday night. We wouldn’t be here without all your support and generosity over the last couple of years. You’ve made two happy people really old.

Sadly, photographs from the evening are in short supply (and if you have any good shots please feel free to post them on the Charmed Apocalypse Facebook page), but I did get sent one truly disturbing MMS from my brother yesterday. Blog readers with good memories may remember a rather foolish bet that Jake and I made with each other in January 2011, a bet that we were finally able to make good on last Friday.

So, so wrong. Please don’t this be the only record of an otherwise excellent evening. Muted.

Picking up the pieces

The only thing that you can be 100% sure of in post-production is that no matter how much time you set aside to do something, everything will only come together at the very last moment.

It’s been three weeks since we arranged Saturday’s cast and crew outing to the nicest bit of Hampshire. Three weeks, then, for the very last tweaks to the picture and sound. Extending a zombie growl here, making an exterior shot slightly bluer there. Plenty of time.

And yet, with four days to go, we still haven’t received the graded copy of the film or the final stereo mix-downs. Or, in non-techy speak, ‘all of the pictures’ and ‘all of the sound’.

There must be a secret post-production union somewhere that has guidelines to ensure that movie producers are never allowed to fully de-pucker. Let’s see how badly these filmmakers really want this. Enough to cry on the phone? Enough to open an important artery?

To be clear, it’s not enough to get all the constituent components through on Saturday afternoon and then wander straight in to the cinema. There are a couple of days’ work at our end piecing everything back together again, and this supposes that everything we get in works perfectly first time. It’ll take a good eighteen hours just to crunch the film into a format that the projector likes using my Mac, which the local Apple store recently euphemistically referred to as ‘vintage’. No amount of prayer, whip-cracking or sobbing is going to boost the processor speed.

But we’ve still got four days. Plenty of time. *Clenches*

On the plus side, if everything goes to plan, Saturday night is going to be an extraordinarily entertaining evening. 180 guests, all the principal cast members back together again (with the notable exception of Rachel, who is on tour with a show), and loads of our crew, zombies and investors. And if you’re expecting an invite but haven’t had one through, check your spam directory and get in touch.

And Plan B? Print out ten copies of the screenplay, dig out the costumes from Jake’s attic, boil up a gallon of honey-blood and re-enact the movie live.

Thinking about it, that may actually be quite a lot of fun. Zombie Resurrection – The Musical, anyone? Strained.

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 17^th 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 17^th November if you don’t believe me. Unwinding.

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 17^th 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.

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.

Y'all

No holiday to Texas for Jake and Andy. Not this year.

Yesterday the official word finally came back from Fantasic Fest – thanks, but no thanks. It was one of the politest stock email fob-offs that I’ve ever been sent (Texans are renowned for their good manners), but any hope for a world premiere in the Lone Star State is now firmly quashed.

And the mood in Charmed Central? Mostly relief. Relief because the thought of having to craft a completed movie from the current set of best-guess jigsaw pieces over the next few days would spiral both of us into the worst kind of depression. Twenty months into the journey, and putting anything less than gorgeous in front of a paying audience will simply not do.

That’s not to say that we aren’t considerably closer than we were last week. The music is, well… done. The sound is down to the final tweaks and level changes. And a concerted amount of activity has delivered us the bulk of our remaining VFX shots.

But it isn’t finished.

The tally as of six pm today: 116 audio tweaks, six more VFX shots that we have yet to receive, another 38 that need playing with, an almost-there titles sequence and a technical grade that should be ready at the end of the week. But, as we found just before the shoot, it’s the little things that swallow up all the time.

So Jake and I get a couple of weeks reprieve.

Phew! But even so, it’s still a kick in the balls. I’ve never been great at dealing with rejection, although to be fair I don’t take compliments that well either. Fine – it was an early version of the film in super low-res that finally uploaded 36 hours after the cut off, full of green socks, sections of muffled dialogue and a confusing third act. Sure – it’s an American festival and they may not appreciate the British humo(u)r or understand Mac’s Scottish accent. OK – so this is the most prestigious event in the North American horror calendar and we were in competition with a bunch of high-budget offerings with big names and expensive cameras.

But this is the film about the zombie Jesus, people.

So, a small army of post-production elves allow themselves to relax slightly, and a thousand Southern rednecks are denied the opportunity to lynch two limey blasphemers before anyone else gets a chance to. Their loss, it seems.

One down, three more to go. Packing.

Fright-night

If hanging around on a tenterhook is your idea of fun, may I suggest submitting a film to a festival?

With the Texas Fantastic Fest due to kick off on September 20^th, we still haven’t been informed whether we’re in or out. And we aren’t due to get the final word until the 7^th September. That’s a lot of house to get in order in under two weeks: pulling together a press-pack, squeezing the movie onto an HDCAM tape, booking flights, finding a hotel. I mean, Fantastic Fest would be doing quite well just to get all their printing turned around in time.

But this is the way they roll, and until we get told differently we need to keep the testicular cuffs wrapped tightly around our VFX, titles and sound guys. And so far everyone appears squeakily confident.

Not that anything ever works perfectly first time. There was a trite project management sound-bite that my last employers used to bandy around – failing to plan means planning to fail. But actually, I find planning to fail a much safer default. If we ask for stuff a few days ahead of when we actually need it, it means that when the inevitable internet issues and incomplete deliveries push everything past the deadline, it doesn’t automatically drop us in the shit.

And with the Charmed-imposed finishing date of the 7^th September looming large, we had a bonus moment this week to reflect on our progress. The FrightFest screener.

God, I love FrightFest. What better way to spend a glorious summer bank-holiday weekend than sat in a dark room ploughing through a mountain of gore and monsters? It means I can switch of that nagging voice that tries to tell me to get off my arse and head outdoors and make the most of whatever fleeting sunshine there is. Hey, I paid good money for the opportunity to sit indoors, and that’s exactly what I’m going to do. Five days, 35 films, ten KFC meals and five late night boozing sessions amongst the horror faithful.

Heaven. And, yes – I do realise that FrightFest just happened last weekend. Without Jake, me or Zombie Resurrection in attendance.

Not this year, sadly. A mix of catastrophically depleted personal funds, an evolving production diary that doesn’t allow us to plan time-off more than a week in advance, and all the work involved in getting another cut of the film together.

But there is another. The FrightFest Halloween all-nighter. A bonus selection of horror mayhem on the last Saturday of October, back in the West End. The spiritual home for the UK premiere of Zombie Resurrection.

And they want screeners today. No rest for the peddlers of the wicked – the poor FrightFest guys get to move seamlessly from watching films in a cinema all weekend to watching more films from the comfort of their respective sofas.

Zombie Resurrection has moved on substantially from the earlier screeners last month. Glen-the-sound has a bucket-load of ADR to play with, Dale-the-tunes has had another spin with his music, Ads-and-Matt-the-VFX have been sending through plenty of updated splatter, Tom-the-foley has been tirelessly generating nastier zombie noises, and Marcelo-the-edit has fixed some of the more persistent confusions from the test screenings. We can do so much better now.

And FrightFest deserve a better screener. Send us your latest, gents, and let’s see where we are.

So, after another mental couple of days, the DVD that got delivered to them yesterday is that much happier. All of the ADR is in, all the cracks in the music resulting from the final edit have been pasted over, and we are now officially without a green sock to be seen.

Happier, but not quite there yet. There is still some way to go before we can unleash it on the paying public: another 22 CGI shots, 23 more that need attention, and 117 tweaks to the sound. So, it’s another busy seven days on full alert as we snipe off these last moments, and only then do we get to find out whether we needed to rush after all.

But in any case, September is when we plan on gathering the cast, crew and horde together for the first mass screening, at an awkward time of day on an as yet undetermined cinema screen that will be mildly inconvenient for most people to get to.

And sadly, this will also be the moment when rash pub promises come back to blight us on the arms – it’s almost time to start looking for a tattooist in the Winchester environs to dispense a couple of Charmed logos. Any recommendations? Stuck.

Mac-spletives

And so, 34 bread-based lunches later with Dale-the-music, Glen-the-sound and the eight Zombie Resurrection cast members with sound to fix, yesterday we finally say adieu to our ADR.

The final tally – 225 new sound snippets to improve our aural landscape. The odd line of dialogue with too much noise on it, grunts and groans from various bludgeonings, swathes of zombie growls, screaming, weeping and manic laughing. And three bonus lines of dialogue to assist the more confused viewer through the final act.

Hampshire has already said another fond farewell to the delicious acting prowess of Rachel, Joe, Simon, Shami, Eric, Danny and Jade, and it was the incomparable Jim Sweeney that was the last through Dale-the-music’s Southampton studio, flying down from Glasgow yesterday just to swear into a microphone.

One of our deliverables for international sales is a re-written screenplay, with the original dialogue swapped out with the actual lines spoken in the movie. It's an essential document for subtitling and dubbing the film for foreign markets. When I got onto this couple of weeks back, I had naively assumed that this would be a fairly simple exercise – after all, Jake and I went to a lot of trouble finessing the dialogue before the shoot to make the lines trip easily and effectively out of the mouths of the actors. Surely a professional respect for the written word would ensure only minor deviations from the page?

This, it seems, is not how it works. Seven hours later and I had effectively re-transcribed the entire movie from scratch. And it was a hell of a lot better than the one we wrote.

But along the way I did get some interesting insights into the acting process.

Regular attendees to the blog will know that Jim plays a character called Mac in the film – a veteran soldier with a voracious appetite for a very specific brand of zombie carnage. And an uncanny ability to cut directly to the insult. My recent exertions transcribing the film into Final Draft allowed access to some enlightening statistics: Mac has 888 words of dialogue, and the highest swearing-to-rest-of-sentence ratio of any character. And this was just the swearing that Final Draft’s profanity filter could identify – the vaginas, head-raped cock-parks and cock-in-anuses have all unwittingly passed through the algorithm with an official safe-for-PG-viewing stamp.

And so it came as quite a surprise to me to find that Jim had somehow secreted another twenty 'fucks' into the film above and beyond those allotted in the screenplay. Mac now defaults to dropping in expletives where a lesser man would use a comma, and probably means that any future trailer cut for universal viewing won’t feature the big man with his mouth open at any point.

Although, to be fair, Jake and I didn’t go out of our way to help. After getting Jim to roar repeatedly at an empty Southampton graveyard to 'shut the fuck up' (Charmed Apocalypse’s new preferred quiet outdoors spot – see the earlier blog entry for the problems we had with Rachel and Joe), our final act in the studio before dropping him back at the airport was to record some personalised Mac-based ringtones for our high-rolling IndieGoGo contributors. It was one of the perks we offered, courtesy of Zombie Resurrection’s 'swearing connoisseur'.

Some advanced warning to Marty, Debbie, Adam, Andy and Chris – better not assign these to anybody in your phone book that might call you when you’re in a public place. One for when the mother-in-law rings, I recommend. Incarcerated.

Back in the loop

And suddenly it’s all go again in Charmed Central.

After those long painful weeks of hearing about all the hard work required to finish the movie only through despatches back from the post-production guys, Jake and I have found ourselves firmly in the mix again. Gone are the thoughts of 'is this the right moment to start looking for a proper job before I default on my mortgage'. Making a movie has once again become a full-time enterprise. Full-time, but with the odd eighteen-hour marathon thrown in for good measure.

It seems that we are officially into the movie-making end-game.

The September festival screenings have probably done as much to galvanise everybody into making this last push as anything else, not that we’ve heard anything back yet from the big three that we put in for last month. But if Texas, Toronto or Sitges do come calling, we need to be ready to answer.

So, we set a date for delivery of all the finished pieces – 7^th September. All the VFX shots, grading, sound, music and titles.

And throughout the diverse Zombie Resurrection post-production crew members, minds focus. Here is a digest of the activities of the last week or so: 

Tuesday – our second test screening of the movie to complete strangers in Winchester (with a massive thank you to Christian, Jeff, Adam, Ashley, Joe, Naomi and Becca for laughing in mostly the right places). 

Wednesday – a meeting with our VFX guys to discuss the CGI shots that we had already received, and to agree a schedule for the delivery of all the rest of them.

Thursday – an audio scrutiny of the film to finalise all the remaining ADR samples that we need to collect from the other six cast members, followed by a thorough analysis of the feedback forms from the two screenings to look for common threads (and a minor dialogue re-write in the final act to deal with the confusion that some people were experiencing).

Friday – more VFX shots.

Saturday – Simon and Shami join the posse at Dale-the music’s studio in Southampton to do all their ADR.

Sunday – Eric and Danny do likewise.

Monday – St. Marcelo-the-edit comes to Winchester to undertake the final finessing of the film down to our absolutely, totally finished cut, honest.

Tuesday – more VFX shots, with another meeting with the guys in the evening.

And today – our penultimate ADR session, with Jade.

And on the seventh day He rested. We, however, should be so lucky.

But what the hell would I do with a day off? It’s not work unless you would rather be doing something else. It’s a taste that’s going to make my delayed search for a day-job that much suckier, but then again my CV must have flight-risk written all over it anyway. Destitute.