Week Beginning 16/3

I have to cast my mind back a little to be able to recall this far back. Shooting two films back to back has been nothing short of exhausting.

Monday was a day of pre-production for Melissa's Mail. We worked out our various spheres of responsibility within the shoot and divided the production work between us all, overseen by Gavin. This certainly eased some of the pressure on pre-production. It was my job to essentially find everyone we needed cast-wise and also to get a make-up person.

We are very fortunate in the Academy to have top-class actors wandering all over the place, so casting three out of four roles from within RSAMD was very helpful. The fourth one was quite a nightmare to source, but we eventually found a gentleman called Tony who was perfect for the role. I also gained some experience of working with a casting agency from the point of view of a director, as opposed to as a background artist.

Tuesday was a lecture on the Golden age of Hollywood, followed by our final Screenwriting class, where we presented a further selection of premises and got our assignment over Easter. One three-minute script, ten seven-minute premises, three of which are developed into three paragraph outlines.

Wednesday was a PAT tutorial, followed by a Program Meeting and a screening of Cathy Come Home. Undeniably a powerful piece of TV drama, which I had heard of but never seen. It interested me that it was quite unafraid to proclaim it's message very loudly. It did not try to follow the "I'm just asking questions?" or even "It's whatever you make of it" approach that seems to be somewhat in vogue at the moment. It was verging strongly towards what might be termed "preachy" today, and although this is usually seen as a defect, it did not seem like that to me in this piece. I wonder how well something like this would be received today, when it seems mandatory to prefix every conclusion, even in a documentary, with the word "Perhaps".

Thursday was a Technical class, where we looked at various aspects of a shoot in a somewhat random fashion as words of wisdom queued themselves up inside Ray's head. Some of this I found useful, some less so, but it was good to have a time to ask any questions about the technical side of the project.

Friday was an open day (AKA intense pre-production day), and at 1630 we got the kit out for filming Lord of the Rings in 60 Seconds. I was filming this on Friday evening and Monday daytime and went immediately into Melissa's Mail on Tuesday and Wednesday. This, of course, was not good for the nerves, but Lord of the Rings had been well into pre-production long before the two course-led films had been selected and the dates of filming revealed.

So what have I learnt from the experience?

Lord of the Rings

• The Props department are truly amazing (Elven shears, the Eye of Sauron, a sword, etc)
• The Costume folk likewise (hobbit costumes, a gown, a cloak)
• If you want something done, don't ask a Designer.
• Risk Assessments are a minor nuisance, but they make you very safety conscious throughout.
• A reflector board, being waved around in a light beam, produces a lovely flickering effect.
• Lighting a set takes ages compared to setting up for another camera angle within a lit set.

We only had four DFTV students involved in Lord of the Rings while we were shooting. Phil was directing, I was 1st AD and also helping out with the lights, Luke was on camera and Graeme on sound. However we had about 8 TPA students involved over the two days, doing everything from Set Dressing to being an improvised Dolly Grip or Focus Puller. (In the absence of a dolly, we borrowed a small platform on wheels which was found lying discarded at the back of an emapty room, and set the camera up on that. I was particularly pleased with that shot, where one person was on camera, two were moving the dolly, and a fourth was pulling the focus while a fifth cable bashed!) I found this initial collaboratio to be very promising in terms of what TPA and DFTV can deliver when they work together and look forward to our next collaboration next term.


Melissa's Mail

• Once a white room is lit with a general even wash, it becomes much easier to light it in future. The problems are with trying to avoid seeing lights in wideshots and trying to find a little bit of highlight in tighter shots. A pepper is very useful for this.
• Don't wrap people too early just because you feel sorry for them getting bored!
• Have plenty water on set for cast and crew.
• Don’t leave complex shots to the end of the day. You will be too tired to care.
• It’s best to be able to pay extras. Two out of four never showed, though the two that turned up were brilliant and very professional.
• Having an extra couple of folk standing by on set is very useful if anything unforeseen should occur.

Overall, having not seen the footage, I am still very pleased the way Melissa’s Mail turned out. The shot list was terrifying, with close to sixty set-ups. However, with an even light, with a schedule cleverly designed by Gavin and with a continual eye on the clock we managed to get through the marathon and had cleared the office building by half five on the dot.

Week Beginning 9/3

This week has been a little hectic with continued pre-production for "Lord of the Rings in 60 Seconds" as well as pitching my TPA/DFTV collaboration proposals to Ros and Adam on Wednesday. Over and above that we had classes.

Monday was our pitches to Barbara for a programme for the 8pm Sunday evening slot on BBC or ITV. Galina, Charlotte and myself pitched a drama set in a theatre called the Millennium Hope. I have to say I did quite like the idea, and if we have time it would be nice to look at developing it further after we had the notes back from Barbara.

Tuesday was a Gaelic class in the morning. Grand. Then a Screenwriting class in the afternoon where we did some work deconstructing Shawshank Redemption in discussion. This shows me just how far the classical structure can be twisted into something more unique

Wednesday was a PAT tutorial followed by a Programme Meeting and a class on TV, where we watched both Hancock and Steptoe. I had never seen Steptoe before and found it to be more of a comedic drama than a true comedy. Perhaps the later episodes had a different tone, but certainly the one we watched was only intermittantly comical. I can't imagine that these rag and bone men were any more representational of the people of their time than the Larkins (or whatever they were) who had come previously. Perhaps, however, there was something in the aspirational character of these individuals that struck a chord with the nation.

Thursday was a packed day with a morning class with Abigail looking at contracts for writers in quite significant detail. This is all quite useful as general background information for the TV/film industry, but given that Abigail is convinced we will be lucky, when we graduate, to be employed as runners, it all seems a little academic.
At lunch I was helping Phil with auditions for Lord of the Rings, then quickly nipping along to the second half of a screening of Apparitions by Tony Wood. Graeme and myself were supposed to be filming this Masterclass, but as we had no time to adjust the camera before he began talking, as the backfocus was significantly out of kilter and the only microphone we had was a cumbersome boom mike, the whole affair was less than professional. The talk itself was very engaging. I like that fact that Tony was rebelling against the PC culture within broadcasting.
On Thursday night I was ushering a play at the Citizens done by Langside College. It was entitled the Pillowman, and I was blown away by it. In terms of quality, it stands up against anything that has been performed at the Citz in the last two years. I won't go into much detail in terms of the plot or the characters, but the theme is quite clear. The pen, it is said, is mightier than the sword. But that does not mean it is better than the sword. (I suppose I had always taken it that way.) The pen (words, ideas, stories) simply has greater power than the sword (violence, government, death). Power for building up or for pulling down. Lives can be wrecked by the pen just as by the sword, and they can even be wrecked accidentally. The play is a plea for all of us who are writers or who aspire to be writers to take our work seriously and not to underestimate the ability we have to change society, or to change a persons life for good or for bad. We cannot be careless or thoughtless when we write, anymore than we should be careless or thoughtless when handling an AK-47.

Friday was a screening and discussion of Sea of Souls, which was enjoyable to watch for one episode, but which looked as though it could quickly become formulaic if the characters were not allowed to develop. The afternoon was a screening of Casablanca, which was an even better watch the second time round! Wonderful stuff.

A quick note about reading

Since Andy mentioned he was looking for stuff we have been reading, I thought I'd breifly mention a couple of things that have passed through my fingers recently.

In the last few weeks I'd been really struggling to find anything worth reading. I was meandering through "First King of Shannara" by Terry Brooks, a truly awful novel. I cannot imagine how Terry Brooks has come to have such a huge fanbase when the novels he writes are as poor as this. The plot was predictable and sluggish, the characters paper-thin caricatures of Dungeons and Dragons proportions, the writing style was flat and unexciting. Altogether dreadful, and I was only reading it as I had nothing else small enough to fit in my pocket.

I then moved onto a book called Thraxas Under Siege, which interestingly combines a fantasy world with a film-noir private detective type. The film-noir effect is acheived by writing in present tense singular, which I found very off-putting at the beginning, but to which I gradually adapted myself. A strong comic vein ran throughout this novel, and the centre character was always more interested in getting a drink of the Abbot's Darkest Ale than in solving the mystery or fighting off the hordes of marauding orcs. The book ended on a cliffhanger, with Thraxas rushing towards the shore, hotly pursued by a dragon. All in all a very unusual book, but I loved the combination of detective genre with fantasy.

Continuing with the fantasy theme, I am reading a dark fantasy called Heathen, where a widow sets off to uncover the mystery surrounding her husbands death and insteead finds Satanists of witches or a gang of lunatics of some description. (I haven't got to that point in the book yet, and I'm not desperate to find out either.) The book is very depressing in its tone and tells you every little detail of the persons life, including what they have for breakfast each day.

I am also reading "Candide" by Voltaire, in a modern English translation. I am finding it quite gripping and I love the piercing satire with which Voltaire takes the established philosophies, constructed in ivory towers, and confronts them with the terrible realities of war and earthquake. One striking example is Jacques, the noble-hearted Anabaptist, too afraid of failure as a Christian, to ever let himself be baptised. Now, in the middle of a terrible storm at sea, he pulls a sailor back from certain death. When the next wave hits the ship, Jacques is thrown overboard and the sailor doesn't give him a second thought. Jacques drowns in the sea: a permanant and involuntary baptism. The whole incident is related starkly in about five lines, and the rest of the book is like it. The writing is prosaic and tongue in cheek, which contrasts most effectively with the terrible events told in page after page. I'm loving it, so far.

Finally I'm also reading the massive Calvin's Institutes (a couple of pages a week!) Its a very insightful look at the Bible, looking in depth at issues such as Who is God? What is the nature of man? Can the Bible be trusted? Are we free? What is the importance of Jesus Christ? I think the one main thing it says is that Christianity is most certainly not blind faith (regardless of how it is frequently portrayed in the media). It is rational, thoughtful, intelligent. It is not a faith which goes against reason, but a faith which leads on from reason.

On a more general note, the books which really stand out to me which I have read over the last year would be the Lucifer series by Neil Gaiman, Scar Night by Allen Campbell and the Children of the Serpent Gate trilogy by Sarah Ash. These are all very original and thought provoking and the last one especially would be wonderful as a high budget TV drama.

And a weblink to http://www.petting-zoo.org/TinyStories.html where I have found some inspiring stories for adaptation into short films.

Week Beginning 2/3

Monday was a late start: not in till the afternoon for a class with Barbara, looking at the use of the family unit in TV drama. This is not necessarily a literal family, but is a nucleus of individuals with a conscious or subconscious leader and depute. Within this "family" there can be conflict, but when push comes to shove, they are essentially a team. We were set the task of devising in groups a TV drama that would be suitable for families to watch in the Sunday 8pm slot of BBC1 or ITV. It has taken us a good deal of thought to come up with something, but we think we eventually have the seed of an idea for it.

Tuesday was an early start, with a technical assessment at 8.45. Despite over-running and a couple of momentary mind blanks, I passed and wrote up a 500 word evaulation of the assessment.

Tuesday afternoon was Screenwriting. Richard was absent, so instead we had a screening of The Shawshank Redemption and made notes about it for discussion next week. It's going to be a mammoth class on Tuesday coming, with notes on Shawshank, feedback on the redrafts of 7 scripts, and not forgetting the 72 premises we have been told to come up with in total.

Wednesday at 1pm was our TPA/DFTV Production Meeting. There were less than ten TPA folk in the room, and almost everyone from DFTV1/3. Although I know a lot of the TPA students were working at the time, I think it shows the mixed feelings the TPA dept has for working with DFTV. Having said that, I am still bringing together a team of DFTV and TPA students to pitch a collaborative film to the two departments by next week, and certain individuals within TPA are almost scarily keen to work with film.
Wednesday afternoon was a continued look at commercials on TV, particularly with regard to representation. I find it very interesting to see adverts from the past, and see how little has changed after the initial "finding their feet" period. In particular, I found that some of the old adverts kept me just an interested as modern day ones.

Thursday started with a lecture on Cinema. In particular, we looked at cinema attendences during the Golden Age of Hollywood and how the Great Depression put, initially, an upwards pressure on the audience figures, before pulling them down again. I wonder if a similar thing will happen in the recession. I doubt it. While the cheap form of entertainment in the Depression may have been the cinema, now the cheapest form of entertainment (beyond meeting your pals for a blether!) is watching TV or renting a movie. Those watching their pennies (such as myself) rarely go to the cinema (though recently it has been more of an issue of time (the management and justified use thereof) than finance).
Thursday afternoon was Mobile/Web tecnhology. I have to confess I find this whole area somewhat bewildering. For someone like myself, who is still blinking my way gingerly into the 21st century, the concept of watching TV on a mobile seems faintly bizarre. Surely the cost of the internet connection long enough to download whatever it was you were watching, and the microscopic nature of the screen would combine to make this a most unappetising prospect. Further, the lack of a good business model leading to a lack of production values means that most stuff created for the web or for mobile (without a TV series or feature film to front it) is rather poor quality.
I think its something to do with my mindset. (I would far rather read a book a few pages at a time, or watch a feature film in five minute bursts that read a magazine or watch a short film.) But anyway, I have yet to get round to watching the links that we have been given.

Friday was a Screening of Stagecoach, followed by a Screening of Double Indemnity. In the gap between the two, we had a production meeting for Lord of the Rings in 60 Seconds. Things are beginning to get moving on this one and hopefully we will soon see it getting properly off the ground.