Into the great beyond…

Sobering times in Charmed Central.

So, let’s just take a moment to consider where we currently are with Zombie Resurrection. The first pass of the music is written, the sound is tidy, and everything has been coloured in. The current best copy of the film still has a long way to go before it’s finished, but it does finally look and behave like a film should. Prospective horror festivals will accept nothing less.

Zombie Resurrection is open for judgement.

With our eyes on an early September finishing line (to hit the first of the possible festival screenings), this is now the last moment we have to make it better. Over the 150 times that Jake and I have watched the latest cut over the past few weeks, a couple of moments have jumped out at us that need work. Tweaks. Nothing drastic. A finessed edit here and an extended beat there.

But, really, what do we know? 150 viewings later and the jokes aren’t funny anymore. The jumps don’t shock, the gore doesn’t offend, and the emotional moments don’t move. For us the film exists as a series of moments: shots needing light balancing, dialogue needing replacement, bludgeonings needing a coating with digital gore.

Gone is the big picture. Gone is any concept of whether the film actually hangs together as an entity.

And now is the last moment that we have to sort that out.

So, now is also the perfect moment to get a bunch of people together who have no previous attachment to the film, and ask them. The great British zombie-loving public. These are the only people we can trust to let us know where the problems are.

Time to organise a couple of screenings. Get in a load of beer and pizza, sit a panel of people that we’ve never met before down in front of the largest telly we can find, and watch them watching it. Our first completely dispassionate audiences.

And it’s as daunting a prospect as we’ve had to face since the shoot wrapped. Well, more specifically, since I had to deal with the unwelcome stains on my girlfriend’s floor after the wrap party.

The first session was last night, hosted by hero-zombie-Ross in his Winchester cathedral of technology. Having taken a slug to the head over the course of the shoot, he isn’t allowed to have an opinion, but his pals are. Grab a beer, sit down, and get comfortable, Simon, Louise, Row, Daren and Ormy.

Please don’t underestimate what a painful evening this was for Jake and me. Sat to one side, the film suddenly seemed to race by without ever catching its breath. Wasn’t that last moment meant to be funnier? Did anybody actually find that last jump scary? Can anybody understand Mac’s Glaswegian accent?

And the biggest laugh of the night? An overly-graphic sound effect that Tom had added to his foley reel to accompany the premature ending of some woodland coitus. It’s an immediate answer to the question that Jake and I had been wrestling with beforehand – is that squelch just a little bit too much? No, it turns out.

A braver man than me would have looked at the completed questionnaires by now, but I may save that moment for a stiff scotch later in the week. We have another screening in Winchester University on Tuesday, bizarrely back in the same room within which we shot all our Chapel footage last year. It’ll be interesting to see whether they’ve managed to get all the blood out of the floor tiles.

So, until then, I’ll content myself with the nagging butterflies, and save the analysis until all the votes are in. But in any case it’s a big Charmed thank you to Ross, Simon, Louise, Row, Daren and Ormy for giving over their Friday night to make two grown men nervous. Suddenly I understand where all the worry-lines on Andy Murray’s mum’s face have come from. Tweaking.

Building sound-castles

Bloody kids.

Yesterday marked the beginning of the ADR process – gathering all the replacement bits of bad-quality dialogue and miscellaneous bonus grunts and groans from the cast.

Automated Dialogue Replacement, although I’d be interested to know how the word 'Automated' found its way into the acronym as it was a far from straightforward exercise. But Sunday was decided to be the moment to take a day off from watching people running around on the telly to kick-start the process of making Glen-the-sound’s life easier.

Step forward Rachel Nottingham and Joe Rainbow, Zombie Resurrection’s naïve teenager Becca and officious party leader Gibson respectively. Good solid professionals to call upon to play the part of cast guinea pigs. Nothing too strenuous missing from their collection of on-set dialogue - just some extra sounds of weeping, exertions grunts associated with various zombie bludgeonings, and long swathes of the deranged kind of Tourette’s that arises during the slow transition to zombiedom.

And a couple of lines from the first act of the film, where the extraneous noises evident in pre-apocalyptic Portsmouth woodland simply couldn’t be scrubbed out.

There is, it seems, an adage in getting good quality ADR – if you’re replacing lines originally spoken outside, you need to get the sound recordings done outside too. Unless you’re doing all your ADR in a perfect anechoic environment, there will always be a little room reverb evident in what you record in a recording studio. It’s OK for all the inside stuff, as you’ll then be adding a whole load more fake reverb to the ADR tracks to make them match the rest of the dialogue from the shoot. But once even a little bit is on there it can’t be taken off.

In the great room-less outdoors, these lines will stand out like a green sock on a bloodied stump.

And so we face problem number one: is there anywhere in Hampshire that is suitably quiet? Somewhere acceptably close to a car park, but away from planes, trains, automobiles, dog-walkers, fields of livestock, chirruping crickets or tweeting birds?

Or, more importantly, bloody kids?

There is something about the eager squeals of children that carries for miles. Too much car noise? Just head deeper into the woods. Aeroplanes? Hang back for 20 seconds and it’ll be gone. But the sound of an eight-year-old having fun anywhere in the same postcode? You’re waiting for nap-time before that’ll get any better. And while I can’t blame any parents for wanting to take full advantage of the few days of actual summer that we’re going to get this year, please know that your selfish pursuit of fresh air and exercise is making our lives really tricky.

But, a hundred takes of all the swapped-out dialogue later, and Glen-the-sound was finally happy that he’ll be able to fabricate quiet versions of all our troubled chat, even if it’s a syllable-by-syllable Frankenstein agglomeration of acceptably noise-less moments.

And so we get to head indoors, over to the recording studio built at the back of Dale-the-tunes’ garden.

This is where all the movie music magic happens. A grown-up potting shed into which Dale can escape from the wife and kids, and actually do something worthwhile other than sipping scotch and pretending to whittle away at a piece of wood while listening to the Archers. Sound-proofed, covered in acoustic diffusers, and with a bloody-great piano in the middle where the lawn-mower should be.

And it was at this point that everything took a turn for the smooth. As Rachel screamed and Joe sweated, we powered through the rest of the list with grace and agility. Outside in the garden no one was any the wiser about the cacophony of shrieks and growls that have left me with slight tinnitus this morning. Anybody needing to gut a pig or torture a suspect in a residential setting could do a lot worse than phoning Dale-the-tunes up for copies of his architectural plans.

And at eight o’clock last night we stepped outside into a welcome cool breeze with 2/9s of our ADR firmly in the bag. To Glen-the-sound and Dale-the-tunes, it’s an enormous Charmed thank you for giving over your Sunday to our screamy silliness. To Rachel and Joe, it’s our eternal appreciation for coming back to Winchester almost a year to the day after we started shooting to re-enjoy the horrors of life on a zombie set. To all the other cast members, prepare yourself for a phone call.

And to the parents of small children in the environs, what’s wrong with the X-box or the cinema? If it’s fresh air and countryside you’re after, open a bloody window and buy a pot-plant. Incredulous.

Zomtography

With only a week to go, now seems like the perfect time to let you know what you’ll be missing if you’re thinking of wasting the next two weeks sat in front of the Olympics.

Down on the South Coast we’ve got better things planned for the first half of August. The terrifically talented Rob Luckins, he of photographic duties on the set of the movie last year, is having an exhibition. And there’s not a discus, high-jump or sand-pit in sight.

Unlike some of the key roles on the Zombie Resurrection crew (I’m thinking of Director and DoP here, particularly), taking photos is what Rob does for a living. Well. When he’s not pointing a camera at somebody, he’s teaching other people how to, and so it may come as no surprise that he’s amassed quite a lot of them by now.

Enough, it seems, to decorate Room 237, Portsmouth’s premiere comic-book store, with some of his choicest cuts.

Disappointingly, it won’t be wall-to-wall zombie carnage, although by popular demand last summer’s undead will be making a solid appearance. This is the problem when you spend the rest of your time taking photos of Mike Leigh and Wayne Hemingway – they tend to get grumpy when they’re bumped by a bunch of nutters covered in blood. One sympathises.

Anyway, for those zombie-enthusiasts in the environs, it’s a no-brainer. For everyone else, it’s a road trip. Catch it while it’s still squelchy. Shot.

Beaten into submission

Jesus H Ripe – that was harder work than I had imagined.

To save you any angst and stress, I should reassure you all up front that the screener did get finished, and was submitted in time (just) to Fantastic Fest, in Austin, Texas. The US’ largest horror film festival would be an awesome place for a world premiere.

Well, I say 'in time'. Actually, by the time that the film had finally successfully uploaded to the extraordinarily flaky WithoutABox site on about the eighth time of asking, it was about 36 hours past the deadline, but a severe amount of apologising and mea cuplae to the organisers later and we are officially locked and loaded.

But this was no easy ride. I haven’t had so little sleep over such a long period of time since the shoot.

The division of labour broke down something like this: Matt-the-VFX was pulling together the last of the VFX shots through till Thursday lunchtime, and then FTPing the buggers across to us. Meanwhile Ads-the-grade was making the whole movie look pretty and FTPing his bits across in stages. Glen-the-sound was tidying up the last bits of problematic dialogue, and Tom-the-foley was manufacturing some deliciously sick zombie noises. Andy-the-dog’s-body was downloading everything as it came in and putting the jigsaw together, while Jake-the-actually-knows-what-he’s-doing was grading the bits of the movie that Ads didn’t have time to get on to, adding muzzle flashes where appropriate, and plastering over as many cracks as we could. 

An insane amount of juggling. But by the time that I left Jake’s hive at 5 AM on Friday morning, we had all the right notes in mostly the right places.

Friday’s activities were to be so much simpler – one final quality check viewing, render the bugger off and fill in all the submission forms. And we had until midnight before the deadline ran out. Masses of time.

And relax…

Ah no. Not in Charmed-land. Nothing ever goes that smoothly. The forms were simple enough, but getting them a copy of the movie in the format they wanted was an exercise guaranteed to confound even the most patient of filmmakers. It was the initial promise of 36 hour render times, and a website that just wasn’t interested in accepting our film, no matter what browser, broadband provider or OS we tried.

But by 4 AM on Sunday morning it was there, courtesy of Jake’s girlfriend’s parent’s broadband, and via an enormous amount of industrial language.

And it’s my sincerest apologies to Nik-the-zombie-extra, whose fortieth birthday party on Saturday night was the final casualty of the enterprise. Sorry, mate – I’ll make sure I’m at your fiftieth, if you’re still talking to me.

So, it’s a couple of days to catch our breath, and then we get to go round the loop again with a couple more festivals. Let’s hope that karma takes stock of the credit that we’ve amassed over the past few days when determining how easy a ride that’ll be. But, when all’s said and done, I’ve got to tell you that the movie really does look and sound lovely. Sure, there’s still the odd green sock, and we have gallons of digital gore yet to throw about the place, but it doesn’t require a leap of imagination to see the finished film that’s hiding in the mist.

Hell – it’s not like we haven’t made it easy for them. Invisible.

Now you see it...

Now you don't...

The thin brown line

It’s all going down to the wire in Charmed Central.

It’s the end of the long wait, as Jake and I try to assemble all the first passes on everything that’s happening in Zombie Resurrection post-production into one place. It’s not going to look perfect. There’ll be CGI missing, green socks aplenty, and all our zombies will sound nothing like they’re going to in the finished film. But it’ll be enough. Enough, hopefully, to secure ourselves a spot in a couple of festivals.

All the best festival submissions happen in June and July. The global horror silly season appears to run from September to Halloween every year, and if you miss the boat there is a strong possibility that the US premiere of your movie is going to be in front of twenty people at an obscure festival organised in a church hall in Boise, Idaho. And there’s no way anybody’s going to let us out of a church alive after seeing the film.

So, it’s got to look nice. Not perfect, but nice enough that the programmers can see beyond the next few months of manic post-production activity at the finished movie lurking beneath the surface.

And, I guess more importantly, it’s got to be now.

Deadline one is at the end of this week. This is for the largest and most prestigious horror film festival in the US. Which probably then makes it the largest in the whole world. Within the extraordinarily vain world within which Jake and I operate, this would be a satisfactory place for the world premiere of Zombie Resurrection, and getting accepted can’t hurt when chatting to distributors and sales agents.

And being the conscientious programme managers that we are, we gave ourselves a week to allow us to bolt it all together. Everybody – can we have your homework in for Friday 6^th, please?

A week seems reasonable. There are going to be important pieces missing, and the inevitable mistakes. A week gives people time to fix any major problems, to dig out important elements that absolutely need to be in there, and for us to fill in the remaining gaps as best we can. And then enough time for us to upload an entire movie to the submission site over my woeful broadband.

So, you’d imagine that we’d be just about done piecing everything together by now. Er… not quite.

Stand up Dale-the-tunes. Charmed Apocalypse’s star performer. By Wednesday last week we not only had his first pass on the music for the entire film in all its 24-bit mastered finery, but we’d also had the opportunity to sit and watch the film with him, chat over a bunch of changes, and he’s already managed to address every single one in time.

The man is currently sat on a cruise-liner somewhere giving his brain a well-earned rest. Just as well he works so damn fast, as it wouldn’t be much of a holiday if he’d had to shlep his keyboard and computer with him, and then spend his shore leave sat in a Marrakech internet cafe.

And the sound is also looking pretty good. About ¾ of the dialogue has been tidied up, and we have plenty of the juicier foley elements – the rips, hits and splats. It’s incomplete, and filled with what I can best describe as temporary zombie noises. But what we have got in is fabulous quality. When it’s finished the film will sound genuinely splendid.

Bang in a couple of workarounds, appropriate some bonus foley from the internet, revisit a couple of moments from the native audio footage, and we’re in business. So far, so good.

But the graded footage and the CGI. This is causing us sleepless nights.

As of midday on Tuesday, we have nine minutes of graded footage in our timeline. We are roughly seventy minutes shy of a sensible viewing experience. And we are only about twenty shots into our CGI list of 88.

This is the problem at our end of the movie machine. The guys that are pulling all our visuals together are all proper VFX artists. They have day-jobs in the industry, and even though the CGI is the single largest cost in the Zombie Resurrection post-production budget the whole thing still only equates to about 2/3 of what they would charge James Cameron for a single shot. This wealth of craft and expertise shows itself in the superb quality of the work that they are producing; however, when JC needs something done quickly we find out just where the pecking order starts and stops. Money talks, bullshit walks.

Great for the finished film. An extraordinary stressor when we’re also working to a tight deadline.

And from where I am right now, it’s touch and go whether we’ll actually have something to upload in time. It’ll be a few days longer of leaping out of bed in the middle of the night to start something downloading that will then take fourteen hours to complete. It might just be doable if everything works first time, but this is not the best of project management principles.

So we wait, crossed fingers poised over the download icon. Anybody know a good steak-house in Boise, or can recommend the best US health insurance for trauma and burns injuries? Excommunicated.

Screamers

Across the country, a team of post-production elves are busy stitching shoes together from the threadbare rags that Jake and I have provided them.

The sensible movie-related activities have all flown the Charmed coop, and are now growing up with different parents until August. Every so often a new piece of music or some tidied dialogue appears in our in-box, like a postcard home to tell us that they’re all having a great time and not to worry.

But it’s just that it all feels so, well… out of our hands.

These guys really know what they’re doing, and it is wildly inappropriate to be micro-managing them. Jake and I spent some time a while back detailing exactly what we were after from the sound, music, titles and digital splatter, and now we’ve just got to let them get on with it. After a year and a bit of being intimately involved in the minutiae of the film, this bit of the process simply doesn’t need us anymore.

And with all this work going on, it just doesn’t feel right to be sat around twiddling my thumbs.

Distributors don’t want to hear from us again until the film is finished, and we shouldn’t be going back to Sales Agents until we’ve secured the UK distribution. Surely there must be something to do before August?

Ah, yes – horror film festivals. Time to plan our strategy for getting the movie out there.

For me at least, getting the film up on a big screen and in front of the genre faithful is the pay-off for the last eighteen months of hard work. In the most stressful moments on set during the shoot, it was the thought of being sat at the back of a cinema watching other people reacting to our movie that kept me going.

It’s like planning an enormous wedding. Time to organise the church, I think.

Horror film festivals are universally awesome places to hang out. It’s a widely accepted adage that horror fans are the nicest audiences out there. Most enthusiasts have a personal temperament completely at odds with the gore and carnage that they sit themselves through for entertainment. At FrightFest each year, after the last movie has screened, everybody with any energy left decamps to the same bar till the early hours – audience members, organisers, directors and stars. And it is a fabulously relaxed and collegiate atmosphere. This was the first time that I met Johannes Roberts. I’ve shared a cigarette with Adam Green, talked sex scenes with Tony 'Candyman' Todd and bullied movie recommendations out of Kim Newman.

And it’s a great audience. Every genre fan there has sat through hours of really, really bad movies as part of their horror education, and now they’re having to actually pay to watch the buggers they’re determined to enjoy themselves.

Every gory death gets a round of applause. No one checks their phone or walks out halfway through. And anybody with enough nerve has the opportunity to go and chat up Emily Booth.

So, this week Jake and I have been compiling a list of all the very coolest horror film festivals across the globe, from Texas to Lapland. When they run, and what’s the last date for submissions.

And, given that we’ll be all done with the movie in August, three particular festivals have emerged as contenders. But I’m obviously not going to tell you where they are in case they turn us down and we look like a couple of mugs. Just to say that the FrightFest biggie isn’t amongst them, as we’ve missed the submission deadline by some margin. But, if everything goes exactly to plan, October will see us tattooed, tanned and sat on a train to Glasgow with a stomach full of T-bone and polenta.

And in the process we get to manufacture a completely new deadline for our post-production posse, principally as a way of artificially involving Jake and me a little bit more in what’s going on. The festival screener deadline.

The screener is not necessarily the cut of the film that will play at the festival - it’s simply about securing a ticket for the big party. It doesn’t need to be technically perfect, but it does need to give someone on the organising committee a sufficiently warm glow that they’ll take it on faith that you’ll not be embarrassing them later in the year. Some remaining green socks are OK. Missing ADR should be fine. The light and chroma balancing of the technical grade doesn’t need to be perfect. Sometime between the screener going off and the final film being projected, we’ve got to tweak the edit, get in some people that know nothing about the film to watch it and tell us where it doesn’t work, tighten the score and colour it all in properly.

And the whole thing is contingent on us getting a sensible version of the movie together by the beginning of July. Three weeks back cracking the whip. Damn, does that feel good. Overbearing.

Last Tango in Cannes

Wow. Where to start?

So, that was Cannes, in all its carefully-marshalled insanity. Five days of meetings, trains, hasty sandwiches and biblically bad weather. A plastering of Rutger Hauer and Christian Slater movie posters, where every trip along the Croisette could be delayed by a crowd gathering around Alec Baldwin, Coldplay or just a man that wears live cats on his head. It was 24/7 game-face from the Charmed massive, an umbrella, DVD and business card always to hand.

And I loved every minute of it.

I really did – I genuinely loved it. I can’t think of five more enjoyable days over the course of the whole Zombie Resurrection production. It’s like an interactive movie Glastonbury, but one where you get to hang out backstage and help pick the bands.

OK – let’s get the housekeeping out of the way first. Mission number one was to sort out our UK distribution and get sales agent representation for the movie, with a bunch of meetings that Jake and I arranged ahead of time. And while no one was going to commit to buying the movie based only on a six-minute DVD, it’s safe to say that we now have a clear contender for both roles. When the finished screener is ready, we know exactly who to send them to. Mission accomplished.

Well, when I say that no one was going to commit to buying the movie based on the six-minute cut, that isn’t strictly true. We received an offer for the German distribution rights, based on a scan of the poster and around 45 seconds of the trailer that they watched on my phone.

Seriously. And it wasn’t even a bad offer.

It seems that this isn’t that uncommon. We heard of at least two zombie movies that were picked up for frankly ridiculous amounts of cash based on the poster and title alone. It seems we may have spent too much time trying to make a watchable film when a weekend course in Photoshop would have been enough.

So, we turned it down. There is nothing quite like passing up the promise of cold hard cash to make you feel like a player.

Which moves us onto mission number two – festivals.

This was quite a strange one actually, as through luck rather than judgement we ended up meeting a bucket-load of people intimately plugged into the horror festival world: FrightFest, Fantastic, Fantasia, Lund, Leeds. And nobody went home empty handed. It was an eight-sided pincer assault on the festival world with the movie that they’re going to be referring to as 'that one with the zombie Jesus'.

I love horror people. It’s a side of the industry that seems to be run exclusively by fans. No egos, no bullshit, and a sincere respect for the enormous number of genre enthusiasts there are out there. And we saw plenty of people that fall into the other camp. Fittingly, the French have an expression for it: 'péter plus haut que son cul' - literally 'to fart higher than ones arsehole'. Unsurprisingly, Cannes is a magnet for high-farters.

I digress.

And this is even before I start on the Champions’ League Final, or getting the seal of approval for our poster art and copy from the artist whose zombie DVD covers we originally set out to emulate (and how bizarre is it that we ended up sat around the same table with this guy anyway?) It was my very first and wholly ironic Royal with Cheese, punctuated with the inevitable internal GPS fails that saw us wandering around Nice completely lost at 5 AM, or walking up an emergency pavement on the side of a motorway the day afterwards. There were the early screenings of Cockneys vs. Zombies and Storage 24, and I could go on. I’ll pop some photos up in the next few days, or better still take Jake and me out for a couple of beers and we’ll tell you all about it.

So, it’s a much more formal thank-you to the lovely Amanda-in-Nice for putting us up (and up with us) for the duration. She was such an unfailingly good host that she even managed to procure a yacht-mattress for the occasion formerly slept on by Marlon Brando. I should stress that this was from anecdotal information and not because there was a Marlon-shaped dent visible in the over-stressed springs.

Just the kind of night’s sleep you need before someone makes you an offer you can’t refuse. Tangoed.