Seeing, Touching, Tasting

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Several months later…
…The actress who was at the directing workshop I did with Herbie Wise writes back to me. She’s been working solidly and has finally read her emails and found the script for Strawberries and she liked it. Did I make it? I write back: no, I made The Car. Strawberries still sits there, a personal project. I’ve something to say, personally, with it. Things to explore. I think it needs more humour, more comedy, more levity and joy to function the way I want it to function. It sits. It waits.

****

Several months later…
…After my friend Jelena said I must decorate my kitchen and after my helpful buddies, Lucy and Pete, picked at the wall tiles which then fell off and after I stuck them back on with white camera tape. I bit the bullet and sucked on some lead which addled my brain. No, not really. Really I pulled off the old tiles and bought small white mosaic blocks. I replaced all the worktops (sic) and I painted the walls, pale grey. I’m repainting the gloss white woodwork, retiling the floor and putting up a splashback around all the work surfaces.

Now… the cooker which is old and falling apart looks out of place. It’s shades of brown and must be a health hazard. I need a cooker hood with an extractor so the room doesn’t get gunked with a thin layer of oil when I fry. These are good excuses to buy a new cooker and a hood, aren’t they? I think so.

****

Several months later…
…Since I had the soles of my boots replaced and they started falling off again, I went into a real cowboy boot store in the Mid West and bought a pair of good boots. Not all fancy big cowboy boots, mind, but good soft leather with some tread on the soles. The owner had pictures of him on the wall hanging out with his rodeo buddies, guys who ride bulls. He told me my size by looking at my feet and then handed me my boots. “These are what you want.” They fit, they look good, they’re hardwearing. No bull. I didn’t tell him that they were actually cheaper than my old boots.

Now… I probably can’t afford a new cooker, let alone an extractor. So it would be best if I didn’t fry stuff for a while. But I can walk around a lot with no worries so that’s okay.

****

Next… There were a whole bunch of thoughts hanging almost within grasp that I wanted to pluck out of the air and write about. Thoughts about politics and grass roots involvement and how democracy would be a whole lot better if the people involved weren’t career politicians or affiliated to a party. Thoughts about how money plays too big a role in electioneering and how some kind of random selection process, like jury service, might make a better system.

And that leads me to or flows from thoughts about how representation needs to mean what it says and how politics ends up trying to get re-involved in the minutae of people’s lives–where it has no place–because the so-called representatives weren’t really involved with the public in the first place. Or something like that.

Tomorrow. Perhaps. Or maybe that was it, just there, and tomorrow would be a good day to discuss the typographical joy of the Victor logo on mousetraps, where the inside of the red V is made to look like a small rodent’s head. Not so much fun when you’re chucking out the carcasses though. Like painting a cute name on the side of a bomb.

Who Knew?

Fire and Light

Years ago when the Wright brothers were trying launch their first flying pram do you think they even dreamed of what air travel would become? To me, it’s still a miracle that a hunk of steel leaves the ground, literally sucked up into the air by simply going very very fast and thus driving air over the curved surface of a wing. I love looking out the window, marvelling at the whole process. But how many other people think that as they squeeze into their thirty centimetres of allocated leg room in baggage class, praying that, again this time, please God, don’t let me drop dead from DVT?

One of the last times I sat on a jet was Gatwick Airport, just south of London. The rain was coming down incessantly, making fast moving vertical streaks down the window and leaving trails of perfect transparent hemispheres. I found myself morbidly wondering what would happen if we took off with the wings all covered in water. Wouldn’t it all freeze up once we got above the clouds and cause the control surfaces to seize up? Did Frank Whittle think about the effect so much water would have when it went through one of his jet engines?

On reflection, he must have done because, of course, planes fly through clouds so they’re going to encounter a lot of water. But does it harm the jet to try burning water vapour like that? Okay, I wasn’t really looking for serious answers. I was simply wondering about stuff because we were sitting on the tarmac while a catering truck meandered its way over to stock up the plane and wasted half an hour of my time in the process. “The catering people were unable to get past some baggage trucks,” the captain told us. What would the Wright bros have thought of that?

Eventually, we taxied out to the runway and joined the queue waiting to take off. Our turn comes and the jets grow louder, blasting water back off the ground and turning the rain into steam. The vertical streaks on the window start moving at more of an angle as we thunder along. Forty five degrees, thirty degrees, twenty. Eventually the rain is moving horizontally across and then… it stops altogether. As we lift off the ground, water is blasted off the aircraft by the sheer force of air pressure and in a few minutes we’re up where the sun always shines. It’s minus 70 degrees Fahrenheit out there but it’s heaven.

So rain water doesn’t hang around on a jet aircraft’s control surfaces long enough to become a control hazard. The plane simply moves too fast. There’s the answer but really, who knew?

Sweet Tooth

It's life, Jim...

Wandering around the corridors of televisual power this morning, I found a tabloid newspaper–the Daily Mirror–from October 31st. Being mildly interested in who was allegedly giving it to whom and which drugs they were allegedly taking at the time, I picked it up. Scandal, scandal, woe, misery, fear and crime fill the first dozen pages. Speculation, pessimism, coke and sex.

Then we get to the first full colour advert in the paper–this for cheap beer–and on to more crucial matters of what the media dahlings are wearing this week (big yawn) followed by a spectacular NASA image of the plume of smoke from Mount Etna drifting 350 miles across the Mediterranean. That’s a lot of poison soot going up. Surely more devastating to the ozone layer than all the SUV’s in Italy.

Next, two pages of computer adverts tell me I could have a laptop for the price my PC originally cost me over four years ago and it will be nearly six times faster. Then there’s some more starving/sex/death/crime plus a few entrepreneurial success stories sprinkled in like a spoonful of sugar.

‘Car Crime Rises’, ‘Free DVD’ and ‘Teacher Put My Girl’s Face On A Sexy Model’ all clamour for my attention but I ignore this nonsense, turn the pages, blackening my hands in the process, skipping the partially- informed editorials and opinion pieces until I arrive at the features. Today’s topic: teeth.

Soft and dental ‘At last! A painless dental treatment that uses a whiff of ozone to beat tooth decay and banish fear of the dentist’s chair’ promises the headline. I hate getting fillings and want an everlasting mouth full of gleaming white enamel–bleam bleam–so I read. And it’s generating ozone–that stuff we’re always destroying–so it must be good.

The idea appears to be that squirting in high pressure ozone–which is actually highly toxic–can kill off bacteria. A rubber cap fits tightly around each tooth and the gas penetrates decaying tissue, killing 99 percent of bacteria. After treatment, mineral mouthwash and saliva remineralise the tooth and it repairs itself. £300 for a full mouth treatment, £35 for a single tooth. Sign me up right away!

Of course, it’s too good to be true. Never mind the fact that, of course, this won’t regenerate the Earth’s ozone layer, the process is still experimental and a caveat on the next page reads ‘But ozone gas is not without its risks’. Dr Julian Holmes, pioneer of the treatment, warns that breathing too much ozone can tear your lungs and the British Dental Association is calling for more research. Plus you can’t get into tight gaps between the teeth.

Bah. Oh, well. It will come. One day the next generation will look back on us getting dental treatment involving drillings and fillings and think we were living through some kind of dark ages. “They injected you with a needle? How positively medieval!” Until then, I guess we’ll have to wait or take part in an experimental trial.

Now, just a few pages on, the Mirror proclaims ‘Chocolate As Health Food’. Not only does it contain the same chemicals that make you feel good after sex, it can protect your heart, thin the blood, lower your cholesterol and blood pressure–oh, the list is endless… Got me again, I expect, but I’ve seen Chocolat and I’m already a convert.

Now here’s the website you didn’t know you really needed. Okay, so it’s a website operated by Mars Incorporated, a very large candy bar manufacturer, but those people who fill us up with sugar are seriously interested in our health, aren’t they? Really? Please! Too late, I hear it calling… Mmmm… Chocolate.

On to the funny pages…

Long Stories Short

Film making

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.

Dog Ate My Rushes

Film making

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.

To Edit

Film making

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).

I Have A Film

Film making

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.

Passing Out

Film making

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).

Day Two

Film making

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.

Day One: 8.55pm

Film making

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