Because it’s there!

Okay, the real deal is why do I bother putting myself through the completely ridiculous trauma that is short film making? Let me tell you about getting my rushes transferred to a firewire drive for editing. [No, shut up!] Oh, please! [Okay then. But this had better be funny.] It isn’t.

Simon (editor) says he wants to edit using Final Cut Pro on his Apple Mac. He will therefore need the rushes on DV tape. Various confusion because there are different flavours of DV tape including miniDV and DVCAM. Some of these have timecode (which we need) and some don’t. I ask around. I find Perry.

Perry can transfer the rushes straight on to a portable firewire drive. I look into all this technology. It sounds cool. Way cool. I buy it. I order an Apple PowerBook with FCP and various other gubbins including a portable drive. I pick up the PowerBook from the States in January. The drive is delivered three hours after I leave.

So I’m back in the UK. With my PowerBook. Learning Final Cut Pro. It’s sweet. I call up Peter (the sound guy) who has sync’d up the picture and sound rushes (aka. raw footage) and they are ready to be transferred to the portable drive (which I don’t have). I pick up the sync’d up rushes and call Perry (the man with the plan).

While some of this is going on I set up a LAN from my divan over my WAN. It nearly melts my brain, although that doesn’t scan. Although that does. Ish.

Perry emails back. He’s very busy. Doing a project. Doesn’t know if he’ll have time. I call him up and speak to him because Simon is going to be free for a week before he gets stuck into the current feature he’s working on. There’s a window of opportunity and I want to seize it. Okay, says Perry. Come on down.

I drive down to Perry’s house in Farnham at 3pm on Saturday. Except I don’t drive to Perry’s house. I take the wrong exit off the M25 and wind up heading into London. Funny, I think. There’s no exit for Farnham. Thirty miles in I wise up to my mistake, turn around and go back the other way. My car is running on deisel fumes at this point so I have to stop and fill up the tank. It’s getting dark but I’m optimistic.

Eventually I get to Perry’s house at about 5.30 and his wife gives me a cup of tea (nice lady). We chat for a bit and Perry takes the tapes. He’ll let me know if I can pick them up on Monday.

=====

Monday comes. Perry emails. Nope. The sound lead fell out while the tapes were dubbing overnight so he’ll have to do them again. Tuesday. Simon now has access to Avid so he wants to edit on that. I’ll still get a DV copy on hard drive so I can play with FCP. Simon lets me know of a contact of his in Notting Hill where I can drop off the tapes. One David Stewart, no less, but not the Eurythmics one.

Tuesday. Tuesday there are no Central Line trains running in London because of a derailment last week. Also the firefighters are on a 48 hour national strike. I go down to Battersea to pick up the portable drive (which Perry is lending me) and to get the rushes tapes for Simon. After an hour and a quarter of messing around on the tubes, I finally arrive in Battersea where Perry is working. Success.

No, dear reader, not at all. Perry hasn’t brought the tapes, just the drive. So I take it and another two and a half hours later I’m back home phoning Simon. Tomorrow. Tomorrow Perry will take the tapes in with him. That evening I look at the sync’d rushes for the first time with sound. It is damned funny. This is going to be a lovely little film. I’m so pleased that I call Michael, the lead actor.

“Michael, this is damned funny stuff,” I tell him. “That’s great. Hope it’s ready soon.” We chat for a bit and it all looks like it could be within reach.

=====

Wednesday and you already know what’s coming. I have a day off. I call Perry at one o’clock and he tells me about his clutch blowing up in his automatic gearbox and no car and I sympathise and of course there are no tapes today. Call him tonight after 10pm but does Simon really need the tapes, he asks? Could he use the firewire drive? I don’t know. I phone Simon who thinks he can. This seems to be a result. I’ll leave it with the non-Eurythmic guy tomorrow.

Thursday. I’m on a course. Well, a workshop actually. ‘Dealing With Change’. Yes, we have those here. They’ve already given out copies of that literary classic ‘Who Moved My Cheese’ to help us. And help it did! I sold mine ‘as new – unwanted gift’ on Amazon this week and made £3. But now we have to go through with the dullness of a day’s pseudo psychology. And starting at 9am–the worst possible time to get into London because it’s rush hour. And there’s no Central Line. And the fireman’s strike means various tube stations are shut. Needless to say, all the car park tickets are gone for the day so I’m going to have to use public transport.

Thursday I get up at 6.30 so I can leave at 7am for this dullness and I make it to work at 8.50 having paid £17.20 for the privelege rather than the usual £9 because I’m travelling before nine o’clock and that’s peak time isn’t it so they can charge more. Standing all the way. Joy.

The course is everything I imagined and more but it’s irrelevant to the rushes tale. Except we got a free lunch which offset the travel costs a bit so that’s nice. Nothing I could sell this time but, oh happy day, we finished early at 4.15! The next 15 minutes were spent printing out a map showing me how to get to the non-Eurythmic DS’s workplace and at 4.45 I was on the tube, on my way.

Of course, now would be the perfect time for it to snow.

Five o’clock this afternoon I’m holding a soggy piece of paper which used to be a map and am lost and fed up trudging through slush in Notting Hill and fighting to keep my umbrella up. And then somehow I’ve walked to Bayswater, so I double back. Half the roads don’t seem to have street names up. Eventually, at about 5.40 I turn up at the place where David Stewart is supposed to work. “Is David Stewart here?” I ask the receptionist of this uber-trendoid converted warehouse media establishment. “I have to drop something off for him.”

Wait for it…

“Oh, David’s gone for the day. You can leave it here if you like, though. He’s on a shoot tomorrow so he won’t be in again until Monday.”

Nice.

“Erm, I think I might as well keep it with me in that case,” I say stoicly. “I’ll probably see the person it’s for before he does.” And off I head, into the snow again to Royal Oak Station to squeeze into an already jam-packed underground train heading for King’s Cross and home…

“King’s Cross Station is closed due to overcrowding,” announces the driver. “This train will not be stopping at King’s Cross.”

I stay on until Farringdon and join the commuter lemmings on the platform there. Five minutes later a train for St Albans grinds into the platform and once again we all squeeze ourselves into the already full carriages. Today has been so appalling in terms of getting the rushes sorted out that I promise myself that I won’t walk home in the snow. That would be bad. I deserve a taxi. Or at the very least, a bus ride.

=====

There are no taxis at St Albans City Station when I get there just before 7pm. Cars are barely moving and the snow is now a couple of inches deep. It’s strangely quiet as the soft white icing on the cake absorbs so much of the sound. A surreally silent traffic jam. At last a bus arrives for Hatfield, which isn’t where I’m going but at least it’s a bus. “This will be the last bus today,” announces the driver. “No more buses after this one!”

I set off walking across the roads through the silent slow-motion traffic and try to keep my footing on pavements turning to ice already. Police and rescue service sirens come from all around, echoing over the houses eerily, the only sound in this tranquil winter wonderland. Some twenty minutes later, I’m home. I breath a sigh of relief and reach of my keys… And the lock on my front door is frozen. Do I weep now? No, never say die. I breath heavily into the lock, melting the tiny blob of ice that’s somehow got in there. I’m in. I’m home. It’s twenty to eight.

Simon’s answerphone is switched on so I leave the message. Sausages and mash and a glass of wine are all that remain as this week’s window of opportunity slides by.

Why? Because…

Fate & Fortune is due to appear in the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Michigan, as part of the Cinema Slam showcase in March.

Last Train will be getting a screening, also in Ann Arbor, thanks to Cinema Slam at the Michigan Theatre in April. I must try to arrange a crew screening at a London preview theatre before I ship it. Most of the people who helped make it have never seen it on the big screen. Andy, the composer, is particularly miffed about that. In fact, I don’t think he’s talking to me. Sigh.

The Car rushes are back in my hands again and I hope to get them transferred on to a portable fire-wire drive this weekend. I’m now the proud owner of a non-linear edit system which can apparently work in full broadcast resolution. I want post-production on this to be completed by the end of February.

That’s about it for now. Too much time has been wasted this week trying to get the PowerBook to talk to my PC’s printer over the wireless network I’ve set up. Still no joy after a week and I’ve started getting sidetracked into reading about UNIX. Reading up about OS X and the Rendezvous communication software, I keep thinking there must be a way of doing this without buying third-party applications.

Also, I keep telling myself I need a good protective case for the new PowerBook and then decide I really mustn’t spend any more money. I did the same thing with the first guitar I bought years ago–a really great secondhand Yamaha folk guitar with a beautiful tone. I carried it around in a soft bag until someone fell on it in a drunken stupor and broke the neck…

No. No more spending money. No. Definitely absolutely no. Uh uh. No way. Okay. Well. Maybe… a leetle bit…

Pictures and sound have now been sync’d up. I call Simon again to find out what DV format he wants tapes in for acquisition to his laptop edit suite, Final Cut Pro. He isn’t sure. He’ll call me back. I call Stanley Productions to get a price for transferring rushes to DV. It’s £105 plus VAT. Will this include timecode? Opinions differ.

Frustrated, I speak to a friend named Richard who has been building edit suites in his spare room in St Albans for the past few years. Richard tells me timecode on DV is hit and miss. MiniDV, he is pretty certain, doesn’t include it. DVCAM, on the other hand (Panasonic’s rival tape format), *does* include this necessary digital editing component.

DVCAM it is then. I call Simon back with this news and chat to his answerphone for a while. This happens a few times. I buy a computer magazine and consider buying my own edit suite. The dream machine seems to be a top of the range Apple PowerBook with a DVD-R and Final Cut Pro installed. However, PC’s are considerably cheaper. I read around the subject and immerse myself in the conflicting opinions.

Somewhere along the line, I call up Perry Mitchell, a video consulted who posts regularly to the Shooting People filmmakers forum and the Guild Of Television Cameramen mailing list. Perry has set himself up with solutions for people just like me. He can transfer my rushes from DigiBeta on to a portable hard drive for editing. He’ll then rent this out on a daily basis while the edit takes place.

Nice. Even nicer is that, a few days later, once the ten minute film is complete, you dump it down on to Perry’s portable drive, take it back to him and he uses it to conform the DigiBeta in what’s known as an online edit. Conforming means he creates a new DigiBeta from the master, matching each edit, cut for cut, as produced by Final Cut Pro (FCP).

Simon, meanwhile appears to have vanished. I hum. I hah. I talk about my usual editing delay frustrations to a few friends. I go and look at Richard’s Adobe Premiere suite and see what it can do. It’s easy-peasy lemon squeezy. Just drag and drop clips on to the timeline, trim them up and play them in sequence, in real time. Hard to believe this kind of functioning was restricted solely to high end system like Avid only a few years ago.

Like a word processor, desktop editing makes cutting video possible for anyone. Also just as a WP package doesn’t automatically make someone a writer–they replace the painfully tedious processes of hot metal and offset litho paste-up–FCP or Premiere replace the tedium of physical splicing on a Steenbeck but won’t make someone an editor on their own. Nevertheless, I’m fairly confident in my editing skills and know I can polish them. Hey, if Markux can get into desktop editing, I really should bite the bullet. So I do.

Chomp.

My new one gig PowerMac should be in my hands early January, complete with FCP, Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects, Dreamweaver, Shockwave Flash, MS Office and various other goodies. My mortgage will probably go up by a few thousand in the next few weeks accordingly but this is a serious investment in my future. So, if anyone wants any showreels cutting or DVD authoring done early next year, please get in touch. Reasonable rates.

Actually, thinking aloud, I can even use it as back up to run some training in sound and lighting craft for the BBC Film Club next year. Mmmm. Nice.

Friday morning: Simon hasn’t started editing The Car yet and doesn’t look likely to before January. Tapes need to be transferred to another format for editing. Time cost blah blah blah. Audio will need sync’ing to pictures before this transfer takes place. Time cost bleugh. Hold up after hold up. A pattern re-emerges. The hold ups take me to…

Friday lunchtime: drive to work. Except, don’t. Spend thirty minutes trying to get to the motorway (five miles away). Every road is blocked because some idiot has driven into something bigger and harder than their car and caused part of the motorway to be closed. Listen to the radio where there’s a play on about two newlyweds who have themselves sealed into glass coffins for thirty days as a fairground attraction to win the price of a house back in the nineteen thirties. Sealed in a glass coffin for a month? I wonder how much of our lives are spent driving to offices.

Friday afternoon: email from Laura to say LA Shorts Fest don’t appear to have shipped Fate & Fortune to Florida yet. Email arrives from Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival. They’ve received postcards but where’s the film? The organiser loved it! It was due on Wednesday. Err… I’m stuck at work and can’t make international calls. Luckily, help is at hand across the planet. Laura contacts Joseph who, in true hero fashion, goes down to the cinema in LA to find out what’s going on and sort things out.

Friday early evening: last minute tape deliveries nearly screw up things up as I’m directing live on air. One item arrives just two minutes before Tx and there’s barely time to check the beginning, which almost results in a countdown clock being transmitted. Nice. Somehow I avoid this and managed to look more than competent at my job. One of my colleagues sends me some crap emails discussing poor preparation and late tape deliveries which drag me back to mundanity.

Friday mid evening: Complete Automation Failure. No vision mixer to control which source is going out. No system for automatically playing short items. This is bad. Really bad. I should be spitting and fuming and stuff but actually I’m very calm because secretly I love this. I actually get to show how absolutely shit-hot I am. Calmly, I swing into action. I cue everything to be played in manually and direct programmes using the emergency cut panel. Woo-hoo!

Friday later: the automation is fixed and I can get some slacking off time under my belt. I check the email again and someone rejoicing in the name of Myriam has emailed to say Fate & Fortune is en route to Fort Lauderdale to arrive Friday 24th. The fact that she doesn’t know what day it is doesn’t bode well. I forward this to Laura who writes back to say Joseph is already at the cinema.

Friday late evening: fresh email arrives to say Joseph has not only visited the LA Shorts Fest people but has found they hadn’t shipped the tape so he took the reel down to the Fed Ex dispatch center himself. Myriam emails again to say F&F will be available for collection on Sunday afternoon. Thankfully, it’s too late for her muppetry because jps is hero of the day. Fate & Fortune is a Cinderella story which shall go to the ball and I am full of gratitude for yet more people helping me out.

Friday midnight: driving home in the drizzling rain, autumn leaves whip and dance across the road and in the verges. Arthur Miller is on the radio now discussing witch hunts, the McCarthy era, suspensions of justice and similar themes in relation to The Crucible. I listen until it ends and becomes the shipping forecast. I let that stay on too until it becomes BBC Radio Four closedown time. They play the national anthem and I pull into my drive as the BBC World Service takes over at midnight, GMT.

Home again:sit down and watch the middle part of The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, this week’s acquisition on DVD. Reflect on the stunning visuals–absolutely the right photographic treatment. Why is the sound in mono and poorly dubbed? I’ll have to look it up on the net some time. Some time when there’s more time. Is there ever more time? Perhaps tomorrow. I pour a glass of wine and reflect on the good things which have happened today–friends coming to the rescue, the strange radio play, dynamic directing, positive praise from Fort Lauderdale…

Lauderdale leads me to thinking about Travis McGee and Bahia Mar. Ahh, that would have been good. Well, maybe next year I’ll get to see it. Wasn’t it only a year ago I was writing things here about Travis and various other musings, some inspired by those books? No doubt. Now I’m re-reading the Dune series and thinking about that. Reflections in the water of life. The film plays on and the second glass of wine makes me a little fuzzy. Mmmm. Where does the energy come from for all this? Who knows. Life is good. Crazy, but good.

The rushes and soundtrack are now with Simon, the editor. Simon is working on a film for HBO, which means all his equipment is in the USA TV standard (NTSC). The Car is, of course, now in the UK TV standard (PAL). So Simon was going to try getting another edit deck so he could digitise my rushes into Avid (the computer edit system).

With me so far? Good. Well it’s been a week so I call Simon and play the answermachine game which we all know and love. What news? Simon calls back later (thereby changing the rules of the game from the one we’ve played with other people). And… he’s been evicted. No really. Okay, the production company have been kicked out of the premises they were using because the owners went bust last week.

Therefore, the news this week is, no rough cut. Or sync’ed up rushes. Or indeed anything to note on The Car except for wrap drinks up in town this Friday with the cast and crew. Oh, and I’ve designed publicity postcards and sent them off to be printed. Once Simon’s settled into new premises and got a PAL deck, he thinks he should have something for me to look at next week (another one we know and love–the old “call me next week” game).

Meanwhile, I’ve had three emails personally addressed to me requesting viewing copies of Last Train and Fate & Fortune for possible screenings in London and also a film festival in Japan. I’ve stuck 150 labels on 150 postcards publicising where and when F&F is on in Florida at the end of the month. And I’ve updated the website, which now seems to be getting a fair few number of hits.

While all that’s going on, Melanie–one of the actresses who appeared in F&F–emails to say she’s been working on a horror movie–A Vampyre’s Kiss–and they can’t find anyone to edit for them for free. The only person who springs to mind is working in a shed in someone’s back garden down the road. I’ll put them in touch.

Reminder: this weekend Fate & Fortune is being shown at the 6th Los Angeles International Short Film Festival in glorious 35mm with the full surround soundtrack (I’m assuming) which took all that time to do. For anyone in the area, it’s on Saturday (October 19th) at ArcLight, Theater 1, 6360 W Sunset Blvd, Hollywood, as part of program 37.

ps. For anyone wondering, I lied about a dog eating my rushes. Sorry. But it made a good title.

Rushes and DATs are now with Simon, the editor, together with logging forms and marked up script. Now I just have to wait for him to get hold of a PAL (European TV standard) Betacam machine to put everything on to the Avid. He’s working on something called My Umbrian Home for HBO at the moment and it’s all on NTSC (USA TV standard).

Picked up the VHS with the rushes this evening. Wonder of wonders, nothing is completely overexposed or underexposed, nearly everything is in focus, most of it is reasonably framed. I won’t say well framed because I was looking through a 16×9 frame and taking a guess, then discovered that the format only comes out as 4×3. Still, it’s not a bad guess. The action is there and the acting is there, which is what counts, and the lighting is fine.

The advice I received to shoot everything one stop overexposed seems to be slightly exagerrated. Looking at the rushes, they look bright to me. However, all the tones are there and when it’s graded it can be pulled down–made darker–which will make all the colours much more saturated and improve the contrast. At the moment it looks like something from the 1970s–which, funnily enough, is what the writers wanted. But we can do better than that.

There are a few faults. The close ups of the lead actor in the police station have lens flare in all of them. Parts are okay, but mainly they’re unusable. I kick myself for not noticing that. There’s also lens flare in the two shot (the only take) of the lost woman talking to Sgt Cobbett on the police station steps. It’s still funny and might be usuable but it’s not clever.

Then there’s the opening shot. This long shot tracking the car as it winds into view then stops, the driver gets out and we jib down to the film title. The film title is far too small in the shot. Well, it’s okay for cinema, just too small for TV. We could do with re-shooting it. Apart from the that, the only other (major) problem I spotted was the crew appearing in three shots. One is inexplicable and looks like the viewfinder can’t have been on properly. The other is a shadow and Simon (the editor) will freak.

Continuity: the old lady exits frame left in a wide shot and hides behind the phone box in a close up. Other than that, I didn’t spot anything which couldn’t be fixed with the coverage I got, which is all good. Some of my tripod work could be better, but considering I haven’t operated a moving picture camera for six years, I don’t think it’s too bad.

Today has been spent designing postcards. Now I know I actually have something that will cut together, I’ll be sending the artwork off to the printers in the morning. More pix (and links to all the film stills) are now up on the website, which has a new frontpage.

Okay, game over. That was three really great days and if it’s all worked, we (the cast, crew and I) have got some fantastic material in the can. If it hasn’t all worked, I’ve still had three really great days. Today started at 4am heading off to do a timelapse sequence in Pinner and finished around 8.30pm with putting batteries on the charger.

I now have a stack of thank you’s to write, equipment to return, negative to get processed and various bits of kit in various people’s possession which needs returning to its rightful owners. The last feels kind of like swapping your Christmas presents around when your parents aren’t looking.

And now it’s time to fall into bed. (Then the PC crashed so this didn’t get posted until now).

More than two thirds in the can now. Filming interiors on location at Verulam School, St Albans. Really good. Long time setting up and messing with lights, as expected, then plenty of time spent getting master shots and close-up coverage. Great crew, great cast. Seem to be spending more than planned on food for people but not excessively. No hassles, no worries. No idea if any of it has come out but if it has, it should be fantastic.

Tomorrow: time-lapse photography in Pinner starting at 5am which means leaving home at 4 o’clock. I’ve just spent an hour reading up on the subject and am pretty confident I’ll get something. But not quite sure what. Still glad I’m both directing and doing my own cinematography. Very glad.

Onwards and upwards.

One third of the script is in the can. One actor has wrapped completely. One village–Sarratt–has a major kcuffing attitude problem.

Within thirty mintues the self-important parish clerk had arrived to tell us we needed the permission of the parish council to film on the village green–a piece of open public grassland–because “it belongs to the parish council” and they “charge the BBC £500 to film”. What a wally. Simon, my AD, took him to one side and talked to him and he went off, although not quite satisfied.

As the day went on, we watched in amusement as regulars to the village shop pulled up next to our crew cars thereby completely blocking the road. Literally, they parked so that the road was impassable while they went in for ten minutes to buy a paper. This was rather than park in the empty spaces–several hundred yards worth–that were next to where we were and on the same side of the road.

Honestly, the number of cars in this tiny place was unbelievable. As well as the obligatory SUV’s and Landrovers there were two other sports cars parked outside the shop, then a BMW Z3 and then a red Ferrari. We also had a coach trying to get past the double parked idiots, a tractor, fifty parents collecting kids from school, four delivery vans, a post office van (which drive on the pavement into the shot!) and a milk float.

Oh, and down the road is even more bizarre. Another village, Chipperfield, has three shops–a newsagent and general store, a butcher’s (closed), and a Landrover dealership. Yes. You can no longer buy meat and produce in Chipperfield but you *can* buy a vehicle which does practically no miles to the gallon in order to get from your house to Sarratt Village Shoppe™.

About half way through the day, his pomposity, the Chairman of the Parish Council appeared (sans heavenly host) to tell us he wanted to see our public liability insurance cover and inform us once more that they charge people to use the village green. Despite us only have a tripod set up on this huge open space and all the dog walkers, it was too much for the parish councillors who clearly had nothing better to do with their leisure time than get up in arms because people were doing something creative and enjoying it.

“What are you getting paid?” the nosy shopkeeper asked one of my crew. “Nothing,” she replied. “Well, somebody *must* be getting paid,” the woman insisted. “No, it’s an amateur production. We do it for nothing. In fact, it actually costs us money.” The whole moronic village was totally baffled by the concept that people might actually make something because they enjoy it. How can you buy a £2m property in a place half a mile across and drive to the local shop four times a day if you don’t get paid? Mind you, how do these people afford to live there?

Sarratt was redeemed by the kindly filling station owners who let us get our last shot on their forecourt and were more than happy for us to film. Throughout the day my heroes were Michael, the actor, who was a real star and my camera assistant, Kate, who was fantastic and sorted everything out to do with the camera. All I had to do was take light readings, choose lenses, frame shots and roll the stock. Piece of cake.

In fact, all the cast and the whole crew were superb. It was a really good friendly fun atmosphere and I’m looking forward to working with them again tomorrow. Why can’t I do this for a living?

More film info here