Achtung Riviera

Well that came around quickly.

Yup, this time tomorrow, Jake and I will be basking in the Mediterranean summer heat at the Cannes Film Festival, swimming with the sharks and doing our very best to stay away from the sharp bits. It’s our first foray into the world of the hard sell to distributors and sales agents, and I can’t wait to test our wares against the great and the good at the money end of the industry.

Tomorrow we get to see why they call it show-business.

Cannes is basically two separate film events happening one on top of the other: the glamorous red-carpeted one filled with the beautiful people and baying paparazzi that you see on the TV, and its idiot cousin (the Marché du Film) which happens in the bowels of the same building. It's an enormous warehouse of stressed filmmakers, distributors and sales agents, all hawking their B-movie fare around trying to secure that elusive Taiwanese DVD release.

Guess which one we’re going to be at.

Trust me, we’re going in armed. A gorgeous looking and sounding 6-minute précis of the movie, wrapped in a suitably sacrilegious sleeve, and with a skipful of A5 flyers. Come on, distributors of the world. Who wants some?

Even though we’ll be dropped into the festival as a couple of neophytes, we have dug out so much information about what goes on that I almost know what to expect. We have sat through Chris Jones’ on-line seminar for Cannes virgins, devoured the How to Sell your Film Without Selling your Soul e-book, and received advice from just about every filmmaker that we’ve met along the journey.

Safe to say that there doesn’t appear to be one best way of approaching Cannes and of finding distribution. People only know what did and didn’t work with them. That said, certain universal truths have emerged: don’t buy a drink in a hotel bar (€100 for three cocktails), don’t buy a drink in a nightclub (€70 for two 33 cl stubbies), and if you find a party that’s offering free drinks don’t leave before you’ve had enough to drink.

And, who better to give us our final steer onto the inside track than the legendary Johannes Roberts, writer / director of the Zombie Resurrection template F. He very kindly took time away from distribution activities of his own on his latest feature Storage 24 to hook up with Jake and me in a London coffee-shop. To even up the numbers, Johannes brought along his flatmate James Harris, producer of Psychosis, Screwed and the soon-to-be-released Cockneys vs. Zombies, and even before the Frappuccino had had time to settle the two of them had launched into a torrent of distribution advice that made my hand hurt.

Johannes and James have been around this loop so many times before that they know practically all the short cuts. To go into details would I’m sure jeopardise their respective futures in the industry, so let’s just say we are now in possession of some very promising marketing strategies. It has to count amongst one of the most productive coffee breaks that I have ever experienced, where just one piece of good advice might translate to literally thousands of pounds in sales revenue. Thanks again, guys – you left us with spinning heads and all the better prepared for it.

And in our last act as Cannes virgins, Monday night was spent in the esteemed company of some of the Zombie Resurrection stars, in what we’re now happy to refer to as the best boozer in London. Inevitably any festival conversation was soon side-lined by discussions on the merits of yellow trousers (firmly pro), the best kinds of adverts to be in, and cataloguing all the places that one of our prop guns had been before Shami seized an on-set photo-opportunity to gave it a big lick.

  

The last fifteen months have been one extraordinary journey, but tomorrow we finally get to approach the inner-most cave. I’ll try and post some updates from the front, but let’s see just how much time we have. We go out as boys, we return as warriors. Bravehearted.

Making the grade

On a gloriously sunny spring morning in early March, Captain Jamie-the-marine must have thought that Jake and I were being a couple of prima donnas for insisting that he wore a plastic night-vision headset.

To be fair to him, I did sympathise. You couldn’t see a thing through the prop goggles. It was hard enough to negotiate the way around my flat with them on, and we were making him run blind through dense woodland with only the promise that we’d yell 'stop' if it looked like he was about to career into a tree. It’s a level of production respect that’ll be responsible for a thoroughly boring out-takes reel on the DVD.

But all the scariest horror movies happen at night. Sadly, even the happiest cast and crew get grumpy if you stand them outdoors at 4 AM in March while you faff about trying to swap out the blown fuse on a generator just because you haven’t got enough light. So this is where the movie magic comes in. Shoot it all during the day and then turn the brightness down later.

Sod it - we’ll fix it in post. The rallying cry of failed filmmakers the world over. We can just paper over all our ineptitude and incompetence when we’re grading the movie.

Grading is a massively complicated and laborious exercise. First you have to adjust every shot to match up the light levels, and balance out any differences in colour, hue and chroma. You're basically dealing with all the footage as it comes directly from the various cameras. And only then can you start to make the movie look like how you actually want it to look.

So when I say turn down the brightness, it turns out that it’s slightly more complicated than that. This is why Ads-the-grade is on speed-dial.

'The thing you’ve got to realise about Ads', his business partner Matt-the-VFX assured us at the time of the first trailer, 'is that he’s a bloody genius'. It’s complicated, but it’s well within his talent set.

Repeat blog attendees may recognise Ads-the-grade as Ads-the-VFX. The man has been extraordinarily busy of late. And today he sent through some screenshots from the graded Cannes trailer for Jake and me to check over.

So this is what the film’s actually going to look like.

And in amongst the screen-grabs were some of Captain Jamie-the-marine. But at night.

Jake and I have always wanted to go for a really bleached out and desaturated look for the film. It’s all to do with the rods and cones in your eyeballs. When it’s dark, a more sensitive set of photoreceptors take over, only they don’t do colour very well. And, bloody genius that he is, Ads-the-grade has made it so.

Before…

…and by moonlight…

This month has been conspiring to surprise and delight me at every turn, with the astonishing quality of stuff that's coming in from our post-production posse. It seems that the less that Jake and I are involved in the minutiae of making the film, the better it gets. Contrary to popular belief, these guys could polish a turd. I just can’t wait to see my face in it. Reflective.

Batmanned

With the considerable firepower of Ads and Matt-the-VFX, Dale-the-tunes, Glen-the-sound and Tom-the foley all laser-targeted onto the extended Cannes trailer, in a distant part of London at least some work on the actual movie continues unabated.

Not that the work that the others are doing won’t make it into the final movie. It’s all about prioritising their activities. All the right notes, but in the wrong order.

But in the darkest recesses of Brockley, London SE4, Rup-the-titles is currently sat surrounded by unpacked boxes calmly plugging away at our opening title sequence, unaware that elsewhere on the zombie rollercoaster people are manically throwing digital blood about the place and learning French.

I’ve known Rup-the-titles since I was a kid, when he and his brothers were known to all in the area as the under-age drinkers. Thankfully, things have moved on. He got older.

In some ways, Rup has wound up with the hardest story-telling challenge of the whole movie. We open the film on day zero of the apocalypse to show the Kate-the-scream falling foul of Captain Jamie-the-marine. And then we re-join the action 15 months later. As you can imagine, quite a lot has happened in this time.

And there ain’t nowhere else to show it except in the titles.

So, in 1:45 seconds, Rup has been tasked with the responsibility of showing a load more soldiers going zombie, a bunch of people getting bitten, the total collapse of civilisation as we know it, the scary zombies slowly rotting away to shambling bags of pest, the start of the fight-back, and the establishment of the enclaves within which the survivors all congregate.

Oh, and he should really try and get the names of the cast and heads of departments in there too.

And the chosen medium? The animatic. A living comic with bits of animation, camera pans and zooms. Not our idea, but his, and judging by the early test footage that he has sent through it’s a stroke of genius. This is going to be a lot of fun on the big screen.

But it was only when Rup mentioned that he had hooked up with a comic book illustrator for some of the more detailed punch-ins that cogs started turning in Charmed Central.

Being the flighty London socialite that he is, Rup doesn’t just know any old flavour of illustrator. Enter the formidable Mike Dowling, with titles such as 2000AD and Batman in his artwork canon.

Damn!

But wait a minute. We’ve got a moment in the title sequence when we see humanity reassert itself against the rotting zombie plague. A ragtag band of wannabe soldiers running and gunning through the badlands. Isn’t this basically the same backstory we had written for Mac, Zombie Resurrection’s unhinged bane of all things undead?

You know, wouldn’t it be quite cool to see Mac getting his gun off in the title sequence?

Yes. Yes it would. Can Mike make it so?

And so once again we shamelessly drag the newly muppeted Jim Sweeney back down to our level. Any attempts to try and escape the clutches of the zombie horde by working with Ken Loach will ultimately prove futile.

There are very few things out there that go beyond cool - becoming a cuddly toy is just about the only thing that comes to mind. But into this tiny list we now need to include getting your face drawn by the guy that gets paid to sketch Bruce Wayne. We always knew that Mac was going to be most people’s favourite character in the film, but I had no idea that Jim was going to be bogarting all the after-dinner treats like this. Immortalised.

Amo. Our mess. Oh, mate!

Twelve seconds.

This is the amount of time it takes in a job interview for the interviewer to make their mind up on whether they’re going to employ you or not.

Think about it – twelve seconds. If your handshake is too limp, or your opening 'wotcha' isn’t delivered with the right amount of panache, or you’ve chosen the wrong Mr Man character for your tie, it’s all over. Everything else is window dressing. The job owner is just going to be filtering whatever follows into justifying his initial gut feeling.

And it seems highly likely that distributors and sales agents operate on a similar timescale. Probably less, if anything. They’re not worried about the quality of the movie as much as they are in whether it’ll fly off a shelf in Asda.

So, it’s all about the first impressions. I see five days in a suit in the hot Cannes sunshine in my immediate future. *sigh*.

And this is where the key art is so important. In fact, it's possibly more important than the quality of the actual movie. We need to show distributors and sales agents something awesome and arresting that resembles a DVD cover. We don’t get twelve seconds of glance time to work with in a busy supermarket, as our prospective DVD purchaser scans the array of available titles looking for something mildly diverting for a gory Saturday night in.

Enter Amo – graphic designer extraordinaire. Using only a bunch of Rob’s stills from the set, can he sort us out a poster?

Er, yeah… we’re not sure quite what we’re after just yet… can you, you know, have a think and come up with some ideas? I mean, the Zombie Diaries covers were quite nice, and clearly worked well enough to shift a bunch of copies of the film. You know… so like that. But not exactly like that. Please.

Ah – how creative professionals love tight briefs. I think that’s why most of them see themselves as super-heroes.

Well, whatever we said seems to have paid off. Yesterday, Amo-the-pictures delivered the final spin of the key art to us, and Jake and I have been dancing circles around the office ever since. Add a couple of juicy quotes from some of the more visceral fan-site reactions to the original trailer and we’re in business. Any DVD that has 'a truly sick zombie flick' on the cover has already won me over.

I mean, how good does that look? Direct from the deliciously dark sickness at the heart of the brooding psyche of sweet Amo-the-pictures. You’ve done a man’s work, sir.

Now if there was only a Mr Dead to screen-print onto some ties we’d be home and dry. Sort it out, Hargreaves. Arrested.

Shaven, not stirred

When you’re staring into the dark chasm and everything looks impenetrable, I recommend getting a Brazilian.

It’s all about Cannes in Charmed Central at the moment: booking meetings with distributors and sales agents, shopping for French SIM cards, and securing the enormous quantity of marmite and decent tea that the lovely Amanda-in-Nice has requested in exchange for the exclusive use of her spare room over the course of the festival.

And key amongst the preparation activities – getting a Cannes Trailer together.

Yeah. Not just any old trailer. This one has special needs with a set of unique demands dictated by the great and the good at the business end of the film industry. Six minutes long, with the whole story played out in a heavily redacted form. No one that buys and sells movies for a living has time to watch them. In fact, accepted wisdom has it that most of them don’t even like movies. Take them a DVD copy of a film and they’ll watch it on fast-forward, pausing every once in a while to check that it’s in focus, and at every super-gory death or moment of cast nudity.

Super-gory deaths we can do. However, the only pair of tits will be the ones offering up the trailer DVD.

OK – so we need a six-minute cut of the film. This should be roughly 8% of the work involved in editing an eighty-minute film, shouldn’t it?

Well, yes and no. But mostly no. Just like the original trailer back in December last year, Jake and I quickly tied ourselves up in all the wrong kinds of knots trying to pull this together. Quickly the trees appeared in front of our respective gazes, when only wood would do.

St Marcelo to the rescue. Again.

Just when he thought he could take some time away from all things undead and concentrate on proper editing gigs, he gets dragged back into our tawdry world. Even while fighting through the back-end of some kind of ‘flu (no doubt brought on by his Brazilian metabolism’s expectations of a spring season when you don’t need to carry on wrapping up warm), the sweet man came though for us again. On Tuesday Jake and I wandered up to London to sit in his flat and finesse the last few details of the trailer with him.

And it looks terrific. It rattles by with the assured grace normally associated with a stampede, levelling all before it. With spaces for some early CGI-enhanced shots from Ads-the-VFX and a schizophrenic soundtrack from Dale-the-tunes, this is going to be one hell of a calling card.

In fact, the only person that might feel slightly aggrieved is Georgia, whose character we have had to excise completely from the trailer to keep the micro-narrative under the six-minute mark. Sorry, Ms Winters. I am aware that apologising to you is becoming a bit of a habit of late.

And I only wish I could let you all see it, but it’s so laden with spoilers that you’ll not want to eat the main course. Strict.

Stars on a stick

Is it wrong to still get childishly excited every time I see one of the Zombie Resurrection cast members on the TV?

Thankfully, after the impromptu shock of catching Danny Brown weeping into his radio a few months back on BBC1, I can at least give you a bit of notice on the upcoming fortunes of some of our other actors. While all the Zombie Resurrection post-production hard work is happening elsewhere, it’s time for me to catch up on my viewing. And it’s a bumper crop.

First up, to give you enough time to set your preferred format of televisual recording apparatus, a taste of life before Zombie Resurrection for the mighty Joe Rainbow. Tonight, at 9 pm on The Horror Channel (Sky 319, Virgin 149, Freesat 138) a grateful nation will be treated to Joe Rainbow’s first outing as a zombie in Stag Night of the Dead.

The film is a hoot, made hootier by the fact that Joe gets the best line in the film. Stay in and pine for a time when Zomball becomes a reality. Joe also hooked us up with Neil Jones, the director of the movie: a valuable source of useful info on avoiding the distribution pitfalls for low-budget British zombie flicks.

Forewarned is forearmed, and we now have plenty more plates in the Cannes bullshit armour. It’s enormously appreciated, Neil. Thanks.

And on to stick-right – the milky-boy-kid Simon Burbage. Or 'internet sensation Simon Burbage', to give him his full moniker, as the trailer for his upcoming movie Pulp has now officially gone viral. This looks like it’ll be a whole lot of fun, extremist views on the Holy Trilogy not withstanding.

And then it’s the big man, stick-left. The freshly muppeted legend that is Jim Sweeney, swapping bloodied fatigues for an XL stab-jacket in the new Ken Loach movie The Angels’ Share. The fact that I’m now down to one degree-of-separation from the man that made Kes and The Wind that Shakes the Barley is already on my CV.

You have your viewing orders for 2012, people: undead stag parties, comic-book geeks and teenage whisky heists. Only then can you go see Batman in good conscience. Assigned.

The digital hand-over

The pace car has pulled into the pits, and now we get to hear the glorious roar from the more powerful engines.

As in F1, so in post-production. There is a strict hierarchy and an order to the various tasks. It’s a relay, and not a sprint. But before anybody gets a chance to play with the footage you need to lock the cut down.

And after two weeks of entertaining St Marcelo in Winchester, we’re there. 78 minutes of shambling hordes, miscellaneous bludgeonings, excessive swearing and Danny Brown looking sheepish. After building in all the comedic beats and adding a bunch of people running through woods with toy guns and cutaways to exteriors, we have reclaimed seven minutes of film from St Marcelo’s original pruning. And the mood in Charmed Central is extraordinarily positive.

Finally, finally, we have a DVD that our post-production team can watch that Jake and I are happy to stand behind. This is our film, like it or not.

The rain break is over, and the rest of the grid can begin the race proper.

So, this week in Charmed Central has been enormously busy – chopping the film up into manageable chunks and handing them over to our merry band of post-production experts to work their magic on.

First up: Dale-the-tunes on Monday. It was the turn of Glen-the-sound and Tom-the-foley on Tuesday, and then a big box of all the shots that need a little CGI to Ads and Matt-the-VFX on Wednesday.

And sadly it was a big box. For all our earlier intentions to get as much of the gore done in-camera, and thereby honour the films that made us fall in love with horror cinema as younger men, it turns out that we still need 88 different digital enhancements. Some of them were always planned in (see, for example, the IndieGoGo video of recent amputee Joe Rainbow wandering about in a green sock). Some of them are simple augmentations of the footage (muzzle flashes, smoke from guns, and getting rid of that red light that we failed to spot on a smoke alarm). And some of them things we just couldn’t get working on the shoot (such as my brother’s pathetic inability to cry me a single tear on demand at a key Messiah-of-the-undead moment).

But, as the silence fell across Winchester on Wednesday night, Jake and I relaxed with piping-hot mugs of Encona safe in the knowledge that the mightiest of engines were now in full voice. This is a really terrific post-production team. If we’re happy with the movie now, just think how good it’s going to feel as the fruits of their labours start filtering in.

And so, a man’s thoughts turn to Cannes. Poster art, scheduling meetings, and a 6-minute digest of the movie to tart around a cathedral-of-film filled with distributors and sales agents.

With this in mind, we now welcome St Marcelo back to Charmed Central. The man that turned 91 flabby minutes of Andy‘n’Jake’s limited editing prowess into a watchable 71 minute movie gets the chance to get really aggressive on the footage. Can you please now do it again, but lose another 65 minutes?

And they’re off. I wish all but six of you a very restful and relaxing Easter break. Whipping.