Oh dear

Just saw the news that Uma Thurman's latest film, Motherhood, which was made for $3m and which also featured Minnie Driver, closed after only taking £88 on its opening weekend. No, that's not a typo - only eleven people went to see it. Ouch.

Goes to show that big names mean nothing in getting a film seen, and that filmmaking is incredibly financially dangerous, but then I think we all knew that.

Filming log: Home

I remember from my theatre days the exhausted thrill of production week: working from 9am til midnight, stumbling around school like a zombie*, normal eating habits obliterated and replaced with what could be found in Tescos. The level of obsession where you can recite not only your lines, but everyone else's as well. At double speed.

Well, Home has had a rather similar effect. 

This rather sums up the level my brain has been operating on:

Were it not for the generous intervention of my sister, I would have just eaten a meal of noodles and digestive biscuits several times.

Our first location was the Necropolis, and as a whole it went smoothly although there was conflict, and there was extreme cold, and there was a breeze which made our balloon behave exactly the opposite to what we wanted. Fiona, our actress, was perfectly lovely and up for all the crazy things we asked her to do. Also, her hair is amazing.

The less said about our seedy alleyway location the better. Suffice to say, it lived up to the adjective "seedy" and beyond.

We also filmed a little at mine, where we saw for ourselves that bringing lights into the equation makes everything take twice as long. Upon reflection, the Dedo kit we took out was insufficient to light my living room, which is very large. It's a shame, because we couldn't get the wide shot we wanted without it looking unbearably stagey so we did what we could and adjusted the framing.

Out in the park things went surprisingly smoothly! We had our obligatory run-ins with methadone spitting jaekies and the weather constantly threatened us with a downpour but it held out just long enough for us to get our shots. The wind frustrated us in our balloon-wrangling attempts and also threatened to send some throw cushions into orbit. Everyone in a high-vis jacket wanted to talk to us but Murray just flourished his email from Brian Scott and doors were miraculously opened.

In fact, Murray has quite a talent for opening doors. I thought for a while we was a magician of some kind, but it became clear that he must be a Jedi; he waves his hand and officials fall over themselves to give him free parking or access to remote locations. He says "jump" and they say "how high?".

Matt, our other actor, was a right laugh and he and Fiona hit it off well enough that getting them to kiss wasn't quite as excruciating as I was expecting it to be. I wasn't really looking forward to it, but it really wasn't so bad.

The only thing left to mention is the tragedy of the Dog Who Stole Lunch: for the sustenance of the cast and crew I cooked three pizzas the night before and brought them along for delicious cold pizza snacking; a pack of dogs decided to join in and after circling us and howling (probably auditioning for when we make a western) it dived in and swallowed a slice whole, slobbering all over what was left. Tragic.

Things I have learnt:

• the importance of everyone sitting down and thrashing out the details
• spending all of one's time wandering the west end of glasgow is tiring
• Murray's phone has some brilliant 90s tunes on it, and Ada and I will dance to them in the back seat of his car
• the Necropolis is surprisingly lovely
• if you choose to use a location beside the river, be prepared to turn up and find the police already there 
• I can survive on fried eggs and toast for a long time but it's a bad idea
• charm is essential
• never work with children, animals, or balloons
• tea and biscuits are always welcome
• you can make a lily open with a hair drier with a diffuser attached (thanks Ada's boyfriend's mum!) but that won't stop it from becoming so battered it's unusable
• thermal socks are a godsend
• nattily, you can import a spreadsheet of your timecodes into Final Cut making batch capture a whole tonne easier

Now I just want to see the footage and get on with the editing - it's going to be exciting!

So here's a goal: let's try and keep my life on track at the same time as making a film next time! That means: housework, cooking actual meals and seeing people not directly involved in the film. This may be the least achievable goal I've ever set.

*I have looked back on notes made during production weeks and had no memory of a topic ever being taught 

Filming log: Into The New, aka: the emperor's new clothes

So. Into The New.

I have to ask why we were there - most of the performances we filmed are untranslatable, powerful only when live. Even if not, they were so dark that they hardly registered. Any experience is good experience, but there's nothing overly creative about standing and following someone onstage (I know, that accounts for 90% of what I did at high school). We were more often than not treated like scum by the performers and the technical staff.

I will say that I have never de-rigged with such alacrity as after the symposium, nor had greater need for the free bar afterwards. And now I'll have wonderful stories to tell the next first years, of naked people interacting with sand/flowers/glitter/twigs, of people throwing up or cutting themselves, and of our provocative dress.

Things I have learnt:

• never respond to those emails asking to borrow something to be used in a performance
• symposium doesn't mean what it once did
• often, the sanest person in the room is the one with the facial tattoos
• don't take the tutors' word when they say everyone is "excited" for us to be there
• Scrummy Yummy pizza does what it says on the box
• it is an invaluable skill to be able to find out when there will be a journal launch where there will be free champagne and a buffet

The White African (2009)

The question this film asks is, "can you be white and African?" The answer is evidently yes, since how else would you describe Mike Campbell and Ben Freeth, the indefatigable farmers fighting for their land as Mugabe's men attempt to seize it.

Their bravery in the face of regular invasions, abductions and beatings is astounding, as is that of the filmmakers who risked their lives to film illegally. Mike barely blinks when he is told seven armed men are in the orchard and goes out to deal with them after he's finished his drink.

For me, it was one of the most affecting films I've seen - I haven't cried that much in a cinema since Up - not that there were many people there to witness it, since a total of four people went to see it, and that's not hyperbole. It will be shown on More4 in the near future though, so perhaps it could double it's audience!

This week, I've mostly been reading...

Voltaire!

Could I be more pretentious? Probably not.

However, he is one of my favourite writers, and while my French is woefully inadequate I have a very good translation by the Oxford World Classics people and they know their stuff.

All of Voltaire's stories follow the same basic principle: an innocent character goes out into the world and reveals various truths about it to the reader through their naitvety. The most famous example is Candide, whose motto was that this was "the best of all possible worlds" despite what happened to him. the same pattern is followed by Micromegas, The Ingenue and my favourite, Zadig. They're not high literature, but rather beautifully written parables on philosophical subjects.

Zadig is in part a spoof of the fashion for oriental literature, in part a celebration of empiricism and partly a mourning of the injustice of the world. He's also the prototype for every detective ever since - before there were your Dupins, your Sherlock Holmeses or your Horatio Canes, there was Zadig.

I also felt like I wanted to mention this because it's acceptable, or even fashionable, these adays to declare yourself "the enemy of the enlightenment". Well, you can hand back your antibiotics and your iPhones in that case.

The Bubble

This new Friday night comedy quiz show is a few weeks in, and I already think it's a good format. The premise is that you send three celebrities into complete isolation from all sources of news for a couple of days and then you bring them into a studio and quiz them about what might have been in the news. There's plenty of opportunity for jokes and outrageous headlines and all in all it's very entertaining, if not a laugh a minute.

One slight problem is that when the makers choose very obscure stories, the viewer is just as out of the loop as the contestants, and they no longer feel in on the joke, and by the nature of the programme you actually have to be reading the red tops to get them.

Also, they seem to be missing out on an opportunity for online content (see how I tied that in with our mobile content class?). Why not have a camera crew drop into the house where the quarantined celebs are living to get some no-doubt hilarious footage (or at the very least voyeuristic)? I had chat with Murray about this and he said that they didn't want it to be like Big Brother, which is fair enough, but then he also suggested that they could, each day, guess a news story which had occurred (playing it for laughs of course). Hire us now BBC!

More posting of cool things from YouTube...

But I promise this one is super cool:

Solomon Kane (2010)

Three figures loom large in Solomon Kane: Lucifer, Cain (with a 'C'), and Jesus.

The main antagonist is Satan, who wants to claim Solomon's soul for hell because of his debauchery and murder. But Solomon himself is a mirror image of the story of Lucifer, his first sin being that of disobeying and leaving his father; in the very first scene he says "I'm the only devil here".

Solomon's second sin is that of Cain, when he kills his brother. And no, I don't think the name is a coincidence.

And finally, well, he gets crucified.*

So of course, the fourth act is very clear: he has to reconcile with his father (he does), redeem his brother (he does, after a fashion), and, of course, be resurrected.

The fact that I was sat thinking about these parallels probably means I was engaged with the film to the utmost, and there was far too much ostentatious cloak swirling for me to take it seriously, but I like that the filmmakers made an effort to include some subtext and some metatext in what is essentially a story about a Puritan mercenary who loves to kill people.

They fluffed the ending, going for a show down with a CGI monster which they didn't have the budget to do really well, which was an especially strange decision given that there was a CGI monster with character from the beginning which they could have used. At least they decided it would be creepy to have him marry the 19 year old damsel in distress, and instead sent her off packing to America.

I enjoyed Solomon Kane very much, it's a jaffa cake on the food-as-a-metaphor-for-films scale: pleasurable, but not a full meal.

*Although would crucification really work in rainy, rainy Devon? After all, it's the dehydration which kills... ok, I should not be worrying about this.

Caprica (2010)

I love when you get a series which you absolutely adore, which compels you to watch it as soon as you can and which leaves you wishing there was more at the end of the episode. Caprica is just one of those series.

I know, it's such a me cliche, but it is brilliant.

You don't need to have watched the precursor, Battlestar Galactica, although it helps since it gives every event that extra ring of doom.

Caprica is a mixture of Corinth's excesses, modern-day Kabul and 1950s New York. The designers have created a complete universe with its own aesthetic and even musical styles to suit the cultures it invented (have you ever wanted to hear a Greek prayer fo the dead sung as a rap? Well now you can!).

It covers big themes like racism and technology, and even bigger ones like loss and family. It also offers a radical view of a society where same sex marriage is utterly normal, even if you're a badass gangster, as are group marriages. And this is on American TV?

Speaking of badass gangsters, one of the main character groups followed is the Adams family, aka the Adamas. This is all back story to the BSG series, which largely concerned the Adamas, but now there's whole other generations to love and despair of.

I could say more about how awesome Caprica is but you should just go off and watch it. It's not sci-fi, not really: it's just a superb drama which happens to have a robot who's also a teenage girl as a protagonist.

I'm Here (2010)

It's not in me to turn down the offer of a free film with free cocktails, so this weekend I found myself sipping Absolut vodka and espresso (it's dynamite by the way - a depressant and a stimulant all at once) in a basement and bearing witness to the most theatrical film screening I've ever seen.

The route in was paved with bubblewrap and the walls were decorated with a mixture of books, car doors and old fashioned office furniture. In front of a back-projected screen there was a carpet of AstroTurf with cardboard boxes dotting it; five minutes before the show they bloomed, revealing electric blow up mattresses to sit on while you enjoyed your drink.

All this was very impressive, and it made the experience that bit much more special.

The film itself was very Jonzey: earnest and occaisionally silly. The story concerns a robot in an American city where robots are second-class citizens. He meets and falls in love with a rebellious but accident prone girl robot and she brings excitement to his life, introducing him to all the fun a robot can have and bringing him out of his shell. Gradually, however, he loses more and more of himself to her.

I'm not sure what to make of that message, and that ambiguity could be because the short running time doesn't allow the theme to fully mature. But it's pretty bleak if what it means is that women will cut away at you until there's nothing left and give nothing back.

The whole was a very interesting look for me at alternative marketing. There is no traditional market for a thirty minute film, but this partnership with Absolut has brought it to a fairly large audience already, and the marketing it will be able to provide outstrips what an ordinary indie film could achieve by far. You could see it as selling one's artist soul, but there was no product placement in the film, just an association with a cool film, making them look cooler, and the opportunity to reach a market which may not normally buy their brand (because of it being so expensive!).

Everyone wins. Especially me.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPod touch