Under-delighted

Finally, today the ball-ache is over.

I say over, but really it has just changed from a stamping pain to a dull throb. Today Jake and I finished auditing and cataloguing all our movie and sound files, in anticipation of handing the whole lot over in a tidy state to an editor. Two weeks of comparing our meticulous Script Supervisor’s notes with the contents of three hard drives, trying to make sense of it all.

Today we re-named our last file. And it was at this point that the dull ache set in to the Charmed testes.

Because it was at this point that we got the final tally of what’s been lost in the move: fourteen shots and 201 sound files.

Nowhere to be seen. Vanished. Gone forever.

After months writing the script, half a year of pre-production and an insane four weeks waving a camera at some acting, it all comes down to what footage you have. At this point the script might as well go in the bin. These are the only puzzle pieces you have to play with, and you have to make the best picture you can from these and these alone.

So finding so many pieces missing from the box can only be described as disappointing.

Sure, we have 1,653 other shots to play with, and 1,235 perfectly OK sound files. But that’s not really the point. As an example, three of our missing shots are empty frames of sets - clear all the actors out of the way and just film the stuff they’re stood in front of for ten seconds or so. While this is not particularly useful as part of an edit (which is presumably why they got deleted, and then carefully deleted from both of the back-up disks too), they would have been massively helpful for our digital FX guy when he has to remove one character’s missing leg (which got filmed in a green sock). I don’t think it’s an insurmountable obstacle, but it does mean that what might have been a two hour job now takes him a week to do (disclaimer: actual timings for DFX work may differ wildly from these completely pulled-out-of-my-arse guesses).

So Monday night in Winchester finds me not in the finest of moods. 

We tell ourselves that it is what it is, and we’ve just got to make the best of what we have. There are no show-stoppers in the missing footage, and we’re not phoning around to get everybody back for pick-ups just yet. But this was the easy hurdle in the editing process, and higher fences await. It doesn’t feel good to be tripped up so early.

But then again, if every blog entry was just me being cheerful you’d smell a rat. This making a movie lark is difficult, you know. Pungent.

Putting the iHoover round

Damn this tidying up.

The march towards getting all the information together to pass on to an editor continues with a slow and painful grind. A lot of playing with spreadsheets, colour-coding files, searching through sound files to try and tally up with bits of speech or noises on un-slated footage, and a lot of sitting on our respective fat arses staring at computer screens.

And so Jake did the only sensible thing that a man can do under these monotonous circumstances. He went on holiday.

Well, it was really just a long weekend (albeit longer than most long weekends), but he did leave me with the singular pleasure of logging and re-naming all the sound files while he was away.

1,235 different WAV files, each with a name completely un-correlated with the scene, shot or take. That’s 1,235 different times I get to listen to Lois our Sound Recordist say 'speed' and me say 'Action'. 20 GBytes of data (or just over 19 hours, in old money).

It is what it is – a phrase quickly becoming the Charmed mantra. And so we push on.

Anyway, fresh from the shameless tarting wing of the company comes this recent moment of Resurrection buzz-building, ably decorated by Eric Colvin (in the orange) and Joe Rainbow (in the fatigues), with the freshly zombified Sam Purnell below them. And, yes - Jake really does talk like that when he’s being interviewed, exclamation marks and all!

So, another couple of hours with the rename button await before bed-time. However, as a fitting accompaniment, I have been mostly listening to the infectiously spiky riffage of Mega City Four on Spotify all evening, a band graced by the guitar talents of Danny Brown, the actor that plays Beaumont in our movie. A man with more talent than me would attempt a mash-up with some of the character’s dialogue. God knows I have enough sound files at my disposal.

Now that’s the proper way to avoid an evening's work. Not today, sadly. Muffled.

A thousand toothless cuts

It’s been a mixed bag of mood down at Charmed Central over the last couple of days.

I blame the bloody edit. Not, I should mention, the sterling work that Sam and Alex have done to get the first assembly together, but the shear amount of wood that we are failing to see for all these damn trees.

So, we do indeed now have a cut of the movie to watch, coming in at around the 1 hour 45 min mark. And it does everything that a first assembly should do – it infuriates, reassures, depresses and occasionally entertains. It allows us to re-enjoy all the stresses of the shoot, but from the comfort of the office.

But deep in the heart of the footage, there is most definitely a movie screaming to be let out. Thank goodness.

Much of the chat over the last couple of days has been about where we go from here. Original plans were for the two of us to take the footage and stitch the movie together over the next few months using Sam’s assembly as a springboard, but this may have changed.

It’s because a few little things are niggling us.

First up, editing a whole feature (with action sequences, horror and quiet interludes) demands serious craft and experience. Sure, Jake and I have both edited stuff in the past, but not on this scale, and not with the same potential audience that we hope to coax into watching this film. A passing knowledge of the basic rules of how to stick tab A into slot B just isn’t going to cut it (no pun intended). We simply don’t have the chops that a proper editor does, and our film will be all the worse for it.

But more than that, I have a fundamental problem with people that write, direct and edit their own stuff. Editing is the final opportunity to re-write the movie, and Jake and I are so mired in the minutiae of the film that we don’t have the required perspective anymore. If you want to see what I mean, go rent a recent Kevin Smith movie.

So, given our aim to hit Cannes next May with the finished product, the chat has been mostly about bringing someone in. A whole different can of worms.

Chief amongst these is gathering all the ingredients together in a palatable form to hand over to someone else. Which means ploughing through all the shots and trying to tie them up with the Continuity notes that Amy our Script Supervisor has meticulously prepared for us. And then making sure that we have all the available footage in one place and labelled properly. Our camera’s compact flash cards had a habit of corrupting the odd file, forcing us to try and find the missing shot on our back-up SD cards. We have to check that all our second unit footage has been logged. We need to tie together shots which were missing a slate for one reason or another, etc.

Ah. More Excel. Marvellous.

Actually, what it is is a slow and painful trawl, and should keep us suitably under-entertained for at least a couple of weeks. Don’t expect to read anything too insightful on the film-making process till October.

As an aside, I suffered a moment of consternation while we were filming when it turned out that an earlier blog about the joys of smoking had inadvertently lured some of the cast back into old and bad habits (at least for the duration of the shoot). Everybody parted ways after the wrap party vowing to knock their respective habits on the head before rejoining the real world. I am slightly ashamed to admit that I have made absolutely no leeway into becoming that cleaner, healthier Andy since then, and I hope the others have fared better than me. I am, however, sadder still to witness the early buds of a nicotine attachment from m’colleague at Charmed Central (although he does seem woefully late to the party). Double the reason to sort it out, Phelps, before the whole production collapses under the weight of carcinogens.

I blame the bloody edit, although I may have already mentioned that. Repetitive.

Whimpering when only a bang will do

Well, that was a bit of a damp squib.

Oh, welcome back, by the way. With the weeks of pre-production panic, shoot insanity and psyche re-balancing now officially things of the past, hopefully we can get back to more regular communication. Having just spent an especially relaxing week sat indoors watching Wales getting rained on, I am now officially champing at the bit to dive into the post-production.

And as I mentioned in an earlier post, the 12^th September was planned as the date that Jake and I would reconvene in the Charmed offices, and gaze wistfully over the fruits of Sam’s first assembly edit.

On paper a first assembly is no massive milestone – simply a rough edit that has been quickly pulled together to check that we have all the shots that we need to make a movie. Sam, along with our Digital Imaging Technician Alex, has been meticulously building this as we went along throughout the shoot, from the comfort of a number of silos suitably removed from all the action and production faff.

So, no massive milestone. But then again it is our first opportunity to watch the whole film.

Tradition dictates that directors and producers walk way from viewing their first assemblies in exceptionally bad moods. The temptation, I guess, is to watch it as you would a normal movie, even though the shots have been stuck together in a fairly utilitarian manner, the sound is all over the place, no one has even thought about the pace of the film, and there’s no music or foley, or digital FX. Instead you’re presented with a smorgasbord of off-mic dialogue, performances that look different to when you were shooting them, un-fixed continuity issues, prized footage buried in a soft focus, etc. etc.

So Jake and I were bracing ourselves for a thoroughly miserable day. That is until last night, when it became evident that Sam needed an extra 24 hours to tidy the edit up further.

And so our day of communal Charmed trauma has been commuted till tomorrow. And a morning that should have propelled us into the boozer at lunchtime to reflect on the error of our ways passed by without issue.

Meh. Tomorrow we hit the ground running. You have been warned. Stretching.

24 Days Later

So, anyway – we’ve only gone and shot a bloody movie.

Yup – five zombie hordes, two visits to A&E, 1400 baguettes, just over a kilometre of gaffer tape, one awesome wrap party and a spot of mild breaking and entering later, and if everything goes to plan we’ve now got all the pieces to put together the Resurrection jigsaw.

 

I only wish I’d watched more Big Brother before kicking off, as this would have been a valuable insight into what the life of a feature crew is like. Thirty strangers get locked into one place for a month, where they have to get on and grind through the slow (and often extraordinarily dull) mechanics of making a movie.

And in and amongst this motley assembly I’ve met some people that I will be friends with for the rest of my life. Or till the cast and crew screening (ETA next April), whichever comes first.

‘Nuff respect to the Resurrection posse over this last month – some delicious talent in the mix and just the right amount of collective group insanity required to push through en masse to the finish line. It’ll be a while before I can watch Predator again, in any case.

And my God, was it ever hard work. Hard work in a way that no amount of making shorts can ever prepare you for. At any one moment over the last month there were at least thirty challenges that needed solutions (for any female readers, understand that the maximum number of concurrent thoughts that a guy can have before he steps out of his comfort zone is one). For the first two weeks Jake and I were surviving on about three hours kip a night, and it was a regular feature that I would need to pull over after dropping the last person off to have a sleep in the car before I could muster the fifteen minute potter up the M3 back to my sofa.

So, the question that Jake and I are wrestling with is what happens now? Our outlook has been deliberately separated into two files marked 'pre-27^th August' (i.e. needs a decision now) and 'post-shoot' (some mythical land in the distant future). And now we’re there, it’s turned out to be a very strange and foreign place. Life beginning again for the last two evictees.

In any case, before then we all get some time off from the Charmed enterprise. Everything starts again on the 12^th September, when Jake and I get to gaze over the rough on-set assembly that our editor Sam has been compiling, and to catalogue around 1200 sound files. Sam’s edit was intended to be our insurance against pick-ups (and fuck-ups in general), and the noises from the suite are pretty positive that we have everything.

Really? No pick-ups? I remain to be convinced, but thoroughly delighted if it actually turns out that way. Let’s just say that we’re not going to be filing the props and costumes just yet, no matter how badly they smell.

So, another enormous and sincere thanks to everybody involved in the cast, crew and hordes, as I drop off the radar for a couple of weeks to re-charge the severely depleted batteries and re-acquaint myself with my son and girlfriend. In the meantime, keep an eye on Rob’s pictures and see you on the other side. Gone.

Half time

It’s half-time, and we get to hand around the oranges in anticipation of an exciting finale to the shoot.

So far so good – we have some great footage and nailed-on performances from our supremely talented cast. We have made our pages for the first two weeks and have broken the back of the tricky gags and horde activities. The next two weeks will be (on paper at least) considerably easier, and I achieved my first sensible night’s sleep last night safe in the knowledge that we should end up with all the puzzle pieces from which to build a movie come the end of the month.

Irritatingly, the sensible night’s sleep started at about midnight, and I may have just reset my body clock to day-time hours. I have a feeling that 3 AM Andy may be rueing that decision.

In any case, it’s an early start today to get some shots of the party getting into the refuge at golden hour, and we should be done in good time tonight to let the cast and crew out early.

Yesterday evening, after shifting all our gear to a new location, a mini posse of cast and crew hit the Charmed local for a couple of beers and a chance to chat about stuff that wasn’t just zombies, all without the pressure of a camera in the face, someone tapping a watch and a room full of waiting people. It was a very enjoyable and relaxed evening, although it may take a few months to get my alcohol tolerance back to pre-shoot levels (Two pints? Really?)

Anyway, time to get going, but before I do I thought I’d share a couple of links from the more diligent and energetic bloggers within the team. Alex, our Digital Imaging Technician, has somehow been finding time everyday to file his thoughts from the edit room - http://runningwithzombies.wordpress.com/

…and Rob, our Assistant Camera-man, has been posting some highly entertaining photos from a studio that he has set up at the location - http://welcometothedarkslide.blogspot.com/

Tonight everybody gets camera time as we wait for the sun to go down between set-ups. Keep checking back. After a night off, this is as good as any of us are going to look this week. Refreshed.

Apocalypse now

A rare opportunity for reflection as Britain burns around us. This is a prescient moment to be documenting the end of days, it seems.

So, we are now eight days into the shoot, and a set of lessons for the next time round has already emerged.

• Don’t work with blood gags. Just don’t. They are messy, sticky, mess up your continuity when they cover actors’ faces and clothes in a different way to how you expected, and never look as good as had you imagined them in your head. One face cast prosthetic which should have spurted gore from the temple sprung a leak when pressurised, and pissed red syrup out from under the chin. Not what we were hoping for.
• Continuity. Man, oh man – it is such a pain in the arse to get this right. We have already had to re-write two bits of script to get around continuity problems, and our opportunities for fixing future problems are getting fewer and fewer. And this is with an absolutely awesome Script Supervisor on the case.
• Night shoots are a massive ball-ache. You spend every day squeezing in shots to chase the sun-rise, and are forced to compress and improvise diet-versions of gags and action on the fly to make your shots at a time when everybody is powering down mentally.
• Why didn’t we write in more acting moments? Big action sequences are a massive drain on the actors. Yesterday was one of our set pieces, and we ended up having to splatter our already-knackered cast up at 5:30 AM just to get a single shot of them braining a zombie with poles. Some of them are excused for being a little pissed off on their way home.
• Sleep. Shooting hours, stress and never being able to switch your brain off make this an extraordinarily valuable commodity. I have taken to smashing a couple of impromptu beers at the end of each day just to give myself a fighting chance of falling asleep. Alcohol as medication. Not a positive step, one imagines.

And the saving grace - our stellar cast and crew. We have chanced out here and somehow avoided any divas and dick-heads. Most of these people I have never worked with before, and it is absolutely down to luck rather than judgement that we ended up with the soundest of all posses. I can’t imagine what it’d be like if we had to put out fires all day long as well.

So it's back to the front we go. It’s a day of acting to look forward to (with a few pick-ups from yesterday thrown in for good measure). Let’s hope this resets everybody in time for another hitting and biting session tomorrow.

But are you actually enjoying yourself, Andy? It’s not an easy question to answer. I absolutely loved the mega-horde day last Friday (a day that was itself responsible for more than one sleepless night over the last month), and I really get off on watching our cast when they’re given a chance to act. But the stress is just enormous. One dropped continuity moment, one under-dressed set, one clunky edit because we were hurrying to make our shots and wrap on time – all things that drop a viewer out of the film.

And here endeth the lessons on the most important one of all – be careful what you wish for. Ask me again on the 28^th. Tense.