A tart amongst pies

Today Jake and I really started to put it about a bit.

It should come as no surprise to the repeat visitor to hear that we are currently fixating on the cash. Such is life at the choke point. So most of what we are doing now is planning inventive ways to secure that elusive introduction to prospective financiers. How to find people willing to listen to the pitch.

We need to get out there and network.

Bingo. My favourite word again. Although this is not so much like the networking I know and mistrust, this is more akin to aggressive kerb-crawling. Tonight Jake and I went to tart our wares in the company of local small-business people at Wired Wessex’s Secrets of Successful Entrepreneurs event, armed only with a pocket full of business cards and some really cheesy ice-breakers.

The event organiser thoughtfully picked a local pie magnate and the owner of a Hampshire micro-brewery to come and talk about the secrets to their success. At least this ensured a pint and a pie alongside the chat. No one likes to network sober.

And it seems that everybody has something to sell. From VoIP telephony, to geo-mapping solutions, to any number of local IT firms. And no one is there to invest. As I waxed lyrically about the best way to decapitate a zombie, all I could see were a mass of eyes glazing over in an ah-so-you’re-not-going-to-be-a-future-customer-after-all manner.

Still, it’s a learning experience, and we have plenty more meet-and-greets lined up. We are looking at one event in July where we will get given a booth large enough to hang a corpse in, and maybe even throw a bit of blood about too. Now that’s marketing. Sold.

We buy any carnage.com

A small amount of knackered goes a long way, it seems.

Following up on yesterday's contingency planning exercise, today was all about the question 'how do we make a normal building look like there's been an apocalypse?' If we follow yesterday's musings through to their natural conclusion, we may need to make a perfectly attractive school look like its been trodden on by the risen dead for fifteen months.

And the answer appears to be 'pretty easily'. Phew.

Today, Jake and I have been doing that thing that may look to other people like us watching zombie movies for shits and giggles, but which we term as research. Although we all know that what we're doing is mainly watching zombie movies for shits and giggles.

28 Days Later, Mutants and The Walking Dead TV series. Come sell us your vision of the end of the world.

We know it's bad in 28 Days Later from the off. After a couple of minutes of rage-infested monkeys going on a rampage, we fade to a blank card saying '28 days later' and then immediately to Cillian Murphy's opening eye. A full month of the zombie holocaust has passed, while Mr Murphy has slept through it in a locked room. Peering out into this desolate world for the first time through the window in his door, he spies the awful wreckage of an abandoned hospital, over-run by the powerful and highly-contagious infected of Westminster.

A gurney is lying on its side.

Honestly. Go watch the film again. That's all they've done to sell the after-party of four weeks of zombie carnage. No blood up the walls, or crackling wires hanging from the ceiling, or broken furniture in disarray. Just a spilled gurney. And we buy it.

So, what else have we learned?

1. Litter looks lovely. Especially pieces of paper strewn everywhere, for some reason. Add in a few ceiling tiles and discarded bags and you're home.
2. Nothing says terminal civil breakdown quite like a looted vending machine.
3. Sticking newspaper to every available window looks awesome, even if you can't logically figure out what purpose it serves. And it saves you from having to break every third one for effect.
4. For maximum apocalypse, put up an untended missing persons' board, and cover it in children's drawings.

Set dressing 101, and filming at night is also going to buy us some bonus latitude. Who knows – we may not even have to worry about the harder-to-clear-up carnage, like bloody hand-prints on the walls, or zombie-themed graffiti, or dust mites hanging in the air.

That said, throwing in the odd corpse can’t hurt, can it? Reassured.

School's cool

Today Jake and I have been musing over the possibilities that naturally arise when answering the question 'what happens if we don’t meet our investment targets?'

Contingency planning. Risk management. Call it what you will, but in essence we need to know what our bottom line is. This is not about figuring out the smallest amount of money required to make the film we want to make, this is the dividing line between 'a film' and 'no film'. A cruel and premature act of pessimism given that the taste of envelopes from letters to potential investors is still fresh on my tongue, but something we certainly should be considering.

And the first thing we need to look at is the location.

Oh marvellous, Phelps. You’re on about the location again. Just when I thought I’d been spared from any more Lost Jonny.

But, the location is where the money creeps in. Beautiful though it is, the hospital is based in faraway Essex, meaning that we have to billet around about 35 people in the environs. And because the place has no electricity or running water, we need to sort out toilets and a generator. And because the local pikeys are picking the place to pieces wing by wing, we will need additional security. All of this is in the budget.

Paying for a location? Johannes says 'no', and who are we to argue.

So, let’s pull this back to basics. What if we found a freebie broken psychiatric hospital in South Hampshire, with its own working toilets and electricity, and we were able to put some of the crew up ourselves?

Wow. Big savings.

OK. Then given that there isn’t a freebie broken psychiatric hospital in South Hampshire, what other buildings would work from a practical and a thematic perspective? It isn’t enough that there’s lots of space to get lost in and plenty of nooks and crannies, but it also has to look like the kind of place within which you’d find a mysterious zombie with the power to raise the undead back to life.

Er… how about a school?

Interesting. Shooting at night in a school. OK. We could make that work.

And then it hit us: if we do this we are going to need to film in the summer holidays. These coming summer holidays. It means pulling the shoot forward by six weeks. If we push this button we need to make sure we are ready to roll out, and roll out quickly.

Nothing like looking at a panic-button to coax out the voices of sweet rationality. And so it was just about now that we did something really stupid.

You need to understand that there are two primary constituents that underpin the entire Resurrection enterprise. The first is a particular brand of Earl Grey tea, and the other is our perennial quest for new and interesting ways to ingest chillies.

Today we hit a new low. Worse than the phalls and the shot-glass snifters of neat Encona, today we brewed up some chilli coffee.

A scoop and a half of Peruvian Java plus two finely diced Scotch Bonnets. Absolutely disgusting. I predict a diet of Gaviscon and stomach cramps for the foreseeable future. Gullible.

Star Wreck

With my teenage fascination recently re-awakened, last night I dipped my toes into the Caroline Munro back-catalogue. And I really, really wish that I hadn’t.

Starcrash. Italy’s 1979 answer to Star Wars, featuring Ms. Munro, a pre-Knight Rider David Hasselhoff and an embarrassed Christopher Plummer. I say 'answer to', but actually I mean 'direct rip-off' – when the hero pulls out a light-sabre half way through the movie I was so past counting the moments of über-homage that it didn’t even register as inappropriate.

Sometimes a film is genuinely so bad it’s good. I have to ‘fess up to being charmed all the way through Troll 2, although my son and girlfriend have slightly different memories of the experience. Future Force, House of the Dead, Maniac Cop… you all have thoroughly un-deserved places in my heart.

But sometimes a film is so bad that it just plain sucks.

From the opening shot of a disappointingly short space-craft passing slowly over the top of the camera, I knew that I was in for 94 minutes of stuff that I’d already seen somewhere else. Better.

And therein lies the difference between a guilty pleasure and a wasted couple of hours: ambition. If you try and show me something new, albeit in a way that offends every cinematically-sensitive neurone in my brain, I’m at least engaged. Show me something derivative, and I’m bored. Sadly, this is where a massive number of low-budget zombie movies land. Something to bear in mind if you’re planning to throw something new into a densely populated genre.

Anyway, I’ll leave it as an exercise for the attentive viewer to figure out why I had fond memories of this from my deepest darkest youth. For everyone else, I’ll just leave you with a nagging sense of 'yeah, but what has this got to do with Resurrection?'

Welcome to the problem with blogging. Some days something entertaining happens. Some days are spent working through the unbloggably-boring details. Edited.

Professional fowls

Late at night, when the only sound normally heard is an incessant tap-tap-tap from the blogging fairies, Jake has been busy playing in his PhotoShop.

For as long as we’ve been thinking about the movie, we’ve been talking about ideas for poster-art. For a low-budget horror movie it’s one of the most important marketing tools you have – get the front of the DVD box right and you’re almost home dry, regardless of the quality of the contents. It’s not like there’s a law or something that says that the artwork has to have anything remotely to do with what’s actually in the movie. It seems.

Mentioning no titles, but I have sat through an astonishing array of immaculately packaged turkeys recently. It's like being at a Norfolk beauty pageant.

Anyway, this is the latest. I really quite like this one.

And while the face has been shamelessly appropriated from Google instead of reusing some of our concept art, the sound-bite is 100% GhoulFool (not his real name, thankfully – think Alistair Campbell as a gothic fop). Bootiful!

Who will buy this wonderful mourning?

I gotta tell you – our investor pack looks awesome.

I mean, it should do given the inordinately large amount of time and energy it has taken to put together.

For some people this is going to be their initial contact with the project, their first impression of the disturbed Resurrection netherworld. Sure, it needs to be chock full of case studies, budget breakdowns, projected sales figures, tax relief details and investment safeguards. But it also has to convey our passion for the film, to translate the tone and spirit of what we’re trying to achieve. It needs to pass on our conviction to the reader.

And having the GhoulFool’s delicious concept art as punctuation doesn’t hurt.

So, the business case is solid, the plans for the film are realistic, and we’re bringing something new to a hackneyed genre. If we get a chance to pitch it to a prospective financier, I’m relaxed that we’d be able to give a good account of ourselves.

But there’s the rub. How to get ourselves into a position to be able to pitch the project.

Facilitating this introduction is, I think, the single largest challenge that we are going to face over the course of the movie. And to help with this, Jake and I have chosen the medium of 'enigmatic postcard'.

On the back is scrawled the message: We have taken refuge in the water tower. They are everywhere now. Send for help.

And that’s it. Apart from more dried blood, of course.

Well, not quite it. We'll follow it up with a letter a couple of days later, and include a clean self-addressed postcard. Want more info? Pop your details on the card, and stick it back in the post. Simple and efficient.

This is going to be an interesting couple of weeks. Fairy God-mothers, friends of Fairy God-mothers and personal trainers should make themselves known to the cabin crew now. Starving.

Bad habits

With the investment rods fully baited-up and cast into the stream, Jake and I can now move back to more creative arguments.

I’m sure I’ve mentioned this before, but when we wrote Resurrection last summer, we were hoping to off-load it onto somebody else to make. And although it was always conceived as a low-budget affair from the offing, we may have let certain bad habits creep in.

Bad habits, under the guise of them someday being 'someone else’s problem'.

And to the strains of a thousand pigeons suddenly coming home to roost, we now have to fix them ourselves. Such is our Friday.

I’ll give you an example. One of our characters (Beaumont) is a guy in his early forties, with a stalwart set of middle-class values that have been largely un-affected by the apocalypse. And we gave him two pre-teen kids, who he is chaperoning across the badlands.

Jake and I have always really liked the kids. They are written as two completely un-traumatised youngsters happily getting on with life after the end of the world. It allows us to poke fun at some of the more peculiar middle-class values in today’s society, like how a parent can be relaxed about exposing their kids to extraordinary levels of violence but get grumpy if someone swears within ear-shot. And having young kids in peril throws some completely unearned but welcome tension into the mix. We’ll take it wherever we can get it.

Then we put on our producer’s hat. The world looks very different from under here.

It’s clear to us now that wherever we set the film we’re most likely going to be forced to shoot at night to keep the surrounding noise levels manageable. And to get enough hours of darkness without it getting too chilly, we need to shoot during autumn term time.

Oh. Bugger.

Reading through the reams of regulations about using child actors is enough to fill an inexperienced producer with the creeping terrors. Maximum performance times? Rest breaks? Provision of tutors? And it all tightens up like a puckered sphincter when you move into night shoots. The Guerilla Film-Maker's Handbook is less equivocal: just don't write speaking roles for kids.

There is only one answer. They’ve got to go.

Like ripples on a pond, making a decision like that has implications that percolate through the whole screenplay, but now Resurrection has two fewer pre-teen kids and one replacement sixteen year-old (probably being played by a young-looking eighteen year-old actress). And taking recent advice on board, it’d probably help if she was cute with it. There was no larger debate between Jake and me. It had to happen, and that’s that.

But like the bitch I am, I know that if we’d have off-loaded the film onto another producer I’d have fought this change with a passion.

Happily for some, one of the knock-on effects is that we will be losing the 'Crass Blow-job' scene, with only the GhoulFool’s comic-book artwork surviving the cull. Unhappily, the line 'Boy - I’m gonna suck you like you’ve got the cure for death in there' will also be lost to future cinema-goers. Such is our Friday. Compromised.