Filming log: The Root of Love

Let's start by saying what we all definitely, scarringly, learned:

• don't go out filming for ten hours in the scorching heat without factor 50 sun cream
• no seriously, don't

 That aside, day 1 of Root of Love went very well. We whizzed through the schedule, had excellent co-operation from the Glasgow Fort staff, who went as far as to turn off the music from the whole complex for us. There were a few crazies (a NED who barked like a dog to ruin a take, and someone who insistently asked to be an extra and who apparently knew a brilliant location nearby and would we like to take a look?) but not nearly so many as I expected.

My role was to take note of the timecode, and I'm glad I did because it made capturing so much easier. Day 2, when I wasn't there, is a different story.

I wanted to be as efficient as possible with my duties as editor, because I think that if I leave it for three months, the enthusiasm and the energy just won't be there. Besides, it's not too much to ask that I put in the hours now, when the pre-production team have been working so hard before.

Therefore, I didn't go on set on day 2, but came into the academy to capture and then organise everything to appease my OCD tendencies. It was all very straightforward, though it did give me the chance to try out the trick I learned from Murray, using an excel document to log the clips. Saved a lot of time, allowing me to put together a very rough edit of the rushes, enough to advise Meg on whether we needed more coverage.

And so, I've just been editing away, and I'm really happy with how it looks. There's one small problem of coverage, which I haven't been able to find a way to fix aside from cutting around it, but all in all that's not a bad result. The process has given me a horror of filming in shopping centres, because dear god they're noisy. I don't know any way to fix that unless we actually dubbed the whole thing.

Personal reflection: long case clocks and subway stops

While half the class has been busy polishing their producing teeth on our own films, I was doing the same on the second year film, Broken Bubbles, trying to avoid breaking the budget.

As assistant, my main job was getting stuff, and I'm not half bad at it: I sorted out a green screen which was cheaper, closer and more convenient than the one they had. Score: one to Flurry. I also got to help setting it up, which was a learning experience. For instance, I found out that after staring at a green screen for half an hour, everything takes on a magenta tinge.

I was also sent out to get props, which you'll know if you've read he script are many and very specific. The TPA people Murdo and Phil are working with are crazily talented and could build some amazing things, but me and Amélie had to pick up some of the slack.

By far my biggest job was trying to find a grandfather clock. My quest took me across Glasgow, into some of the rudest antique shops imaginable. Eventually, in a funny little enclave off Byers Road, a helpful gent gave me some obscure directions to a warehouse down at the riverside and off I went. Luckily no one was there to risk assess. Through sheer luck, I found the warehouse and it was a treasure trove of antique goodness, from Victoriana to 60s retro, with a dozen suitable clocks. None quite as suitable as the one in the props store, though, which while it was short cased, had the distinct advantage of being freely available and portable.

Amélie and I set out together to get a convincing chemistry kit from St Aloyius school, and they were astonishingly helpful. The receptionist was a little taken aback by our initial request but the staff couldn't have been more accommodating, lending us heaps of kit, the kind of which my old highschool didn't even have.

The main thing I learned from the experience was that to produce, you need perseverence and the balls to ask perfect strangers to give you stuff. Luckily, I've been doing that for years and student life has only honed my skills.

Audition and Valentine's Day (no, not those ones)

I've just finished the final touches on Audition, and it's uploading to Youtube as I type. It would already be up, but my internet connection faltered two minutes before completion and I had to start all over again. Woe.

I'm very pleased with this little film, it was a lovely concept and everyone really pulled together to make it as good as possible. Bay is a tremendous performer (the dance he does was improvised on the day, and he put up very well with our requirements for repetition. I especially like some of the lighting effects we got in the Ath with just a single redhead as a backlight - it isn't great as illumination, but you just get this outline of a dancer in a dark auditorium.

Cutting was a fairly straightforward process for most of it, choose the best shots for performance and framing, match on action etc. It's testament to Sam's direction that scenes like Bay leaping out of bed cut together so well. My biggest challenge was the dance sequence, which was shot from many angles, with the added excitement of slight variations in the routine. Very tricky. I ended up using six different video tracks before honing them down to a single one, trying to balance between using the best shots and cutting according to the music. I'm pleased with how it turned out, I think it looks very good.

The rest of it was fiddling with the sound (never underestimate the importance of good sound), colour balancing an exterior shot which was rather rushed and over exposed and adding titles. There was also the issue of the time, which had to be under 2 minutes and 20 seconds for the Virgin Shorts competition. Sam and I sat together at my monitor debating whether or not a shot could stand to lose two frames, or just a single frame. Several things were cut in the interests of timing (including one of our actors completely) but I think what we have now is a very sharp story. I used a bit of a tv trick with the titles, layering them over the final shot in  a way which intrusive, but which does keep out time down. The finished article came in at exactly 2 minutes, 19 seconds and 24 frames.

And here it is:



Also, long long overdue, here is the film Chris, Meg and I made back in February. Meg wrote, she and Chris also starred, I edited and we shared the camera responsibilities:

Inspiration

Over the year as a whole, but especially these past couple of weeks, we've been bombarded with what I think is supposed to inspire us, to make us want to be better filmmakers. Martin Scorcesse is talking about how his generation would just go out onto the street and make films (the whole world may be a sound stage, but you can definitely tell when the sound has been recorded away from one) and the stalwarts of British political drama are bemoaning the standard of modern television, where real people are never shown.

I'm glad the course covers this kind of thing, it's as close as you can get to teaching art and if it produces thirteen people who make a better kind of film then fantastic.

It's also good that we're taught something about the moral responsibility of programme-makers; I'm not a believer in the everything-must-be-suitable-for-children's-consumption doctrine, and I do think that people have a responsibility to take care of themselves, but there is a line to be drawn. The film we were shown yesterday made me hate reality tv with even more of a vengeance, and it opened all kinds of questions - put bluntly, some people shouldn't be trusted to say anything. The internet has allowed anyone and everyone to have their voices heard and what results is page upon page of drivel, much of it untrue.

Putting together the two strands, it seems that what you get is reality tv being the only respresentation of "real" people, while drama descends into more and more fantasy. I loved Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes but it ended up being a bizarre representation of some belief system I've never heard of, casting Gene Hunt in the role of Charon. Where is the BBC's The Wire? There needs to be reality outside of reality television, and I'm painfully aware that I'm writing this when my script submission deals with the question of dieting through the medium of sci-fi.

So, I have been inspired - to write and contribute to things which do have something to say. And, by the filmmakers of the 70s - to just go out and do it. They produced a lot of indulgent nonsense movies, but they also produced some of my favourite American films. I suspect that what they can't see is that the current democratisation of filmmaking, where anyone with a mobile phone can make a movie, will have a similar effect. There will be (and is) plenty of people falling down stairs, of pretentious hat wearers plonking together "meaningful" and "symbolic" images which you're just too sober to understand, but then one day someone will make All the President's Men, and it'll all be worth it.