British Society of Cinematographers (the people who put BSC after their names in the feature film credits) had a screening of Fate & Fortune at Pinewood Studios yesterday evening. Really cool to see the 35mm print projected up on a big screen. And Preview Theatre 7 is a huge screen. The sound is so much better than on video too. You can hear all the reverb and weird echo effects.

Pete’s girlfriend Kerrie was looking around at the assortment of high-powered old duffers and attractive young women. She turns to us and asks, “So… Who are all these people?” Pete, glances round, takes it in and replies. “Muggles.” Then they ran the films.

Q&A session afterwards. They wondered why I’d remortgaged my house instead of asking for more freebees. This is the film where the first sound editor missed out a load of effects, the original re-recording mixer took a year to do a stereo mix and one of the main actors died waiting for it to be finished. By then, I just wanted it done.

Great audience to screen for at the BSC as I consider F&F to be a filmmaker’s film. Andy the DP joined me for the Q&A, while Neil the focus puller kept spotting imperfections in things that looked perfect to me. Denise, the lead actress, brought a friend and they sneaked out when these high-profile camera types got into a lengthy talk about the merits or otherwise of shooting on video.

Twenty five people took a postcard away. No idea who but will check the latest hits on the website. Met Geoff Glover, who shot Last Train. He called me the next day to say he’d enjoyed it. Dennis Lawson (actor) had shot the other film of the evening with Ewan McGregor, Solid Geometry, which was produced on DigiBeta (and it showed). He said good things to me afterwards too.

Beers afterwards at a pub in the middle of nowhere. Lock-ins but they stopped serving. Got a ride in my friend Mario’s new BMW Z4. Chalk him up a few points for not living in the real world. Nice car, though.

Dateline: London, October 6th 2003. No matter what anyone may say, chocolate fondue *is* a proper meal. I mean, take a look at me. Am I not the epitome of health? No, take a proper look.

I’d never been to Harrods before, partly due to the association with the Phony Pharaoh but mainly due to the fact that I didn’t really know where it was. When Laura suggested we go, it seemed like a fine plan. And it was, as Laura plans so often are. It really is worth a look, especially the place where they serve chocolate for dinner and the food courts where I wasted too much time staring at things. This resulted in us getting back to the hotel slightly behind schedule. My fault.

We raced to get ready. For some reason Laura wanted to leave her passport safe in the hotel room. Not in the room safe because I’d already broken that on the first night. How was I to know that it only wanted the credit card one way up? And not the normal way up? So we took out the passport and left it with the other bags, in a pocket. We also changed the chip on Laura’s camera for a fresh one. There were photo opportunities approaching. This shuffling of essentials turned out to be almost prescient.

By now, I was fretting that we’d be late for my own screening evening for The Car and farewell to the UK party. I’d scheduled everything so tightly between 4 and 6 that I wasn’t sure I could squeeze it all in if people were late, so I was worried. I made us run, well walk very briskly, to the train. Never a good idea because it makes you all hot and bothered, a bit too flustered, which makes it harder to relax. We arrived at Soho House in good time, slightly breathless.

Our projectionist for the evening, Paul, took us up to the tiny preview theatre which was through a maze of doors like a series of airlocks. We spoke of sound and ships and sealing wax (delete where not applicable) and he ran through the tape. It looked good. A little private screening just for two of us. Nice. Perks of the job. Then I went to greet guests. They were nearly all late. Or early. Or not there, where they were supposed to be at the time and place I’d set for them in my head.

I spent the first three hours of the evening saying, “Hello,” to people, worrying about where the missing ones were and trying to circulate. Must speak to everyone if you’ve invited them. Must also get them in and out of the tightly scheduled screenings. And introduce the films with some kind of shpiel. I didn’t even get to sit in again and gauge the audience reaction. I spent the next hour doing a combination of “Hello” and “Oh, are you off already?”. Then the last three hours saying, “Goodbye!”

In short, it felt like I never really got to talk to anybody. A lot of speaking, very little talking. Hello. Goodbye. Thank you for coming. It’s good to see you. There were some really good people turned up and I think I had a chat with most but I kept moving before the conversations developed properly. Always someone else coming or going. It’s hard being the host. Sixty two people, at the final tally, came. And went. I hope everyone had a good evening and enjoyed the films. The feedback has been very positive, so fingers crossed for a good response from festivals.

Our evening ended with Laura somehow losing her bag with digital camera and other personal effects. We think it got left in the taxi. Dark, gloomy places, those black cab interiors. Full of other people’s misplaced property until a nasty tea leaf gets in and no Sherlock Holmes to be seen for miles. To say the least, this was a bit of a downer but survivable with travel insurance–especially as we’d done the chip changing thing. Pure fluke. We still have all our pictures of a wonderful weekend’s holiday break in London, another fine plan in which everyone should indulge themselves.

I tried the London Transport Lost Property Office several times after, but alas, the poor bag was never seen again. There is a rumour, however, that London’s walking guides are planning a tour to commemorate it in years to come… Fog swirls in from the Thames. A boat with raucous guide calls out the landmarks. “This is one of the most important bridges on the river,” he shouts, “it stops the trains falling in.” Lights speed past our cab in a blur and I hold my most precious treasure next to me. Shops. Museums. Castles. They come and go. My love remains, as sure as day follows night.

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This coming Tuesday is a screening of Fate & Fortune hosted by the British Society of Cinematographers at Pinewood Studios. Very exciting. Especially as I don’t have to be the host.

Couple of weeks back I added Fate & Fortune and Last Train to the Internet Movie DataBase. Apparently it takes seven days to three weeks to build the entry when you add a new film. They need links to external sites like festivals for verification and that takes time. Also mine had lots of new people who weren’t on the imdb already so I’m guessing that slows it all down a lot.

It’s interesting clicking the link every few days and seeing what new bits have been added. It’s kind of like seeing a small seed sprout a shoot then put out leaves as they build information incrementally. It started with just the film name. Then the people already on imdb were added, like Simon Cozens and Simon Ricketts.

Lately the synopsis for F&F (I didn’t do one for LT) has appeared and somewhere along the line, links to the official site were added. Latest update is some more tech specs. I guess another reason for it being such a ponderous process is because imdb is one huge set of interlinking pages and someone has to manually check each one as they go up.

As I say, it’s like seeing a plant grow. Fascinating. Eventually it will flower. You know: fame, fortune, bright lights, the ever-elusive barrel of monkeys and tons of addictive substances to control the voices. In the meantime, I’ve got your opening grosses–right here in my pants.

Sound mix is done. Still needs grading and conforming.

One reason celluloid has survived so long is that it’s a universal standard. You can show a 35mm print running at 24 frames per second in any country around the world. It’s simple and straightforward. Essentially you just hold it up to a light source. Put the same movie on a disc and you end up with a coaster. The same can be said of any other file too. Digits are a means to an analog end.

Yesterday should have been the sound mix for The Car. I got to Mosaic about ten minutes late but Peter was working on something else anyway so I had to wait. No worries. I opened up the PowerBook and played around with the credits. It had only occured to me the day before that I’d have to give Dolby a credit, a condition for doing a Dolby encoded surround mix.

So, new credit added, although it looks like a digital freak in amongst the other credits which were cunningly crafted by printing them on sheets of paper and sticking them in front of a clockwork camera. Hey, I bet you didn’t know a clockwork camera only runs for 19 seconds, by the way. No, neither did I. I do now. The other thing I didn’t know was the benefit of putting through 100 feet of film as a test roll at the lab. Test rolls are free. I paid the minimum charge of £100. Drat.

I tool around and eventually Peter’s other project reaches its conclusion. The happy-go-movie fee-paying types leave the studio and we get everything copied over to a Jaz drive. Then we go round the corner to another company, Lipsync, where we’re doing the Dolby mix. They’re busy, we wait. Peter mentions something about a 48 hour film making project which happened last weekend. I make a mental note when he says both he and his son own DV cameras–you never know when you’ll need a camera–and meanwhile I rubberneck the premises.

Lipsync is a truly tasty facility house. They have pictures up on the wall showing some of the fantastic graphics sequences they’ve created. They have glass windows looking into some booths boasting a cornucopia of gadgets. And they keep their reception area stocked with glossy film mags and professional jailbait. No less than three Emma Bunton lookalikes giggle past before a runner appears with tea. In china mugs. Soho swirls soundlessly outside. We’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto. The runner returns shortly after to take us to Theatre One where we meet up with Mike the mixer.

Now here’s a thing–a strange thing. I’ve noticed that the more high spec, high tech a facility house gets, the more carpet they seem to have. Peter’s new studio at Mosaic has floor covering which goes half way up the walls, so we know it must be good. But it’s not enough. Lipsync’s carpet goes right to the ceiling. There’s no pulling the rug out from under these guys. It’s all leather sofas, halogen spots and tasteful wood niches which serve to both baffle sound and store manuals. One wall alone stands bare. Actually, it’s not bare at all. It’s completely covered by a projector screen. Directly opposite, across a floor space as big as my lounge, is a huge sound desk and, behind, a raised dias for producers to sit in swivel chairs while fretting over their budgets.

Mike is affable, paunchy and radiates the confidence of a man who knows exactly what he’s about. He has more jailbait on hand to help him. Carol loads Peter’s Jaz disk up on the Mac. She pulls the file across into ProTools. And it doesn’t load. Peter uses a different software and ProTools 6 doesn’t like it. They try another file. They try AudioFile, the software which is in the sound desk. Yes, the desk is another computer. Another assistant appears, this one apparently even younger than Carol, to try converting the file. Heads are scratched. Mike remarks that he’s been working since 7.30. It’s now 5pm. Rebooting the Mac into OS9 doesn’t help. Peter goes off to make more files.

When Peter returns, Carol and Mike manage to get all the audio files loaded into the desk. But not the timeline. This means the computer has a lot of sound clips but it doesn’t know what order to put them in. I dangle. Different people come in to help. I sit quietly in one of the leather chairs, silently fretting and idly wondering why the arms on the chairs don’t have frustrated gouge marks in from clenched nails. After forty minutes of this fun and games, we call it a day.

I should have guessed it would be a nightmare when I saw the sound desk. It looks exactly like the freakish automated monster Michelle used on Fate & Fortune. The nightmare one with all the programmable faders and gizmos. The one which looks impressive when it worked but crashed all the time. I put that jolly thought out of my mind. This isn’t the same studio, the same mixer or the same desk and Mike reschedules time for us on Friday afternoon. We’ll get the mix done, regardless of incompatible, incomprehensible computer files. Yes, as I said at the beginning, that’s why film exhibition keeps on rocking and a’rollin’. Analog rules. Well, for some things at least.

During a lull in file swopping, Mike says, “I miss sprocket holes. There was none of this incompatibility, no way you couldn’t play something back because it happened to be the wrong format.” “Yes,” remarks Peter, “someone came in last week with a project which had a lot of material with an old original soundtrack. You could hear every pop, crackle and drop-out.” Mike winces. “Ah, don’t. I was almost nostalgic for a moment.”

On the way out, we pass the obligatory trophy cabinet. It’s full of certificates and several small golden statuettes of faceless figures. You know the ones. Yes, those ones. The guy doing the mix has his name up there. Which is nice. “We love short film makers,” he says, “They come back later with great professional projects.” We love this attitude. Mike rocks. I don’t think he’ll be too worried that I can’t add any more credits to The Car. Well, we already have an award-winning writer on board. Heh.

Sound mix is on Wednesday at a place called Lipsync. They’d like a credit. That could be a leetle treekie since I’ve already shot the credits and don’t have any money left for more. Not impossible, mind, but treekie.

After that, the film needs grading and conforming–ie. someone with a high-end edit system needs to make all the film footage match up with the cuts, disolves and other stuff on my Mac.

Then I can have a screening.

Composer phoned today. The CD is in the post, on its way.

This week has seen the following progress (or lack thereof):

Firstly, and most importantly, the past few weeks have led me to the amazing discovery of Wuthering Heights. This is thanks to a serialisation of the book on Radio Four. I can’t believe I haven’t read this. It’s everything I’ve been wanting to explore and more. The heart-rending beautiful hauntedness of the Yorkshire Moors is so clear, so poignant. So now I have a mission: read this book.

Secondly, I’ve finished reading Ben Elton’s book, Dead Famous. Elton has captured the zeitgeist perfectly. This is exactly how reality television and society both function and feed from the same plate. Is it mutual parasitism or symbiosis? Everyone “deserves” their 15 minutes of Warhol. Yeah. Wicked. Biggup yourself.

Okay.

Third, I’ve taken on a new project. My friend Ronni from work has another friend Susan who is in this band called Stimulator. So Susan has a load of rushes and a very cool video and Ronni has put her in touch with me in the hopes that I can edit an electronic press kit (EPK) for this group.

So I’ve now got 60 gigabytes of video material and have spent two days converting it all to the same format (NTSC, 29.97fps, audio at 48kHz blah blah). And today I’ve been logging. They’re pretty good. Hope to have a rough cut for them by Wednesday. Visit their site here and checkout the video and say if you think it’s cool.

Fourth, The Car. What progress on your film, I hear you ask? I hear you because I’m pressed up against your wall with a beer glass. Yes. Scary huh? Okay, not really. So, what progress?

Well, the other week I borrowed a clockwork Bolex (camera) from a friend of a friend who happens to be working on Harry Potter down the road at Leavesden Studios. The studios are locked down tight so I didn’t see anything except the back of Harry’s house and the street on the back lot (an old airfield).

Shot the closing credits with the new music person’s name and other omissions included in Pete the photographer’s garden. Strange thing about a clockwork camera is that it only runs for 19 seconds and then you have to wind it up again. Which isn’t so handy for credits where you really need to keep the camera still. Anyway, got it done.

Last week I managed to get this material on to my Mac and have now edited the credits on to the end of the film. Now I need a sound mix and grading. Sound mix is being held up because I want to redo one of the music tracks but the composer has gone on holiday. Grading is being held up because I can’t figure out how to do it properly in Final Cut Pro so I was thinking I ought to really get a real pro to do it for me.

Quote for grading came in today at £200/hour. Ulp. Although doable. Just. Still no sign of the musician.

That’s it for now.

I need inspiration…

It was as easy as using three fairly static establishing shots. And it was as difficult as remembering I didn’t actually shoot any. Doh. Yoda: “Unlearn you must.” However, there comes a point where too much ‘unlearning’ is a bad thing. Managed to cobble together some shots from what I had. Just.

Note to self: shoot static cutaways, hold on the end of action, etc etc etc.

Audio post productions starts on Thursday.

Friday comes. And goes. Simon has his answerphone on. Both times. One message. No return call. No final cut from him, then. No. It’s Saturday. Hell, I have an edit suite. I’ll finish cutting it myself. And I do. By Sunday morning, I have a cut I’m almost happy with. Almost. Lots of Simon’s sequences are in there, intact. Others I’ve cut tighter (oo, suits you, ma’am) to match. Just can’t get it to start.

I need inspiration. Editing inspiration. Need a good yet simple film to get a clue from. Maybe just need sound to carry an introspective long opening shot. Need something. Something. What? Don’t know. Just need. Where on earth do you get ‘editing inspiration’? Atom Films? I’ll look later. Maybe I should just go back to my original opening shot and ignore Simon’s changes.

For now, I colour the whole opening sepia and fade into colour over the title. Okay, it works but it seems forced. Want, need something more natural. I cut it up four shots in a load of one-second images and run them quickly in a five second, six second, eight second sequence. Flash flash flash flash flash. Headlamp / Charlie / Wheel / Charlie / Headlamp / Charlie etc. Nope. No good.

Call Simon again. Answering machine still on. He’s probably looked at the pick up shots and thrown up his hands in despair at my not providing a decent opening shot. Well who cares. It’s my film anyway. Mine all mine. Got. To. Finish. It. An ‘aha!’ moment comes: editing inspiration equals MTV. Got. To. Tune. In. And drop out. I love my MTV. Ridley Scott goes there, I seem to recall.

Nicholas Nickleby preview on Wednesday with Q&A by the DOP. Maybe that will help some.