Thursday, November 10, 2011

Nearly finished my first assembly edit.

Well here we are, two more scenes to edit (one of them consisting of just one shot) and I'm coming in at a whopping 22'30" Now considering I had to cut my 20 page script down to 10 pages in order to be approved for the Inovation Shorts Fund, I'd say that's not bad going!

So what does The Infectious Imagination Of Henry Bramble look like? Is it going to be an award winning classic short? Will it get me some children's televisioon work? Will it attract David Heyman and Warner Bros to give me some decent development money for a feature length version? Will I finally be on the road to blockbuster success? The answer I'm afraid is that I haven't got as clue. I'm currently suffering from editor's syndrome, a condition where you have been exposed to the material for so long you can't judge it any longer. I need a few weeks off while the VFX boys get busy creating the wire frame Voydarkatron, then maybe I'll have fresher eyes for the picture lock. I am screening it to the producers Charlotte and Annabel on Monday so it will be interesting to see their reactions and hear their thoughts on the matter.

What I can tell you however, is that surprisingly, there are not that many problems with it considering the limited time we had. Overall the interior scenes work exceptionally well and Paul Copley's performance is a real pleasure to watch and is probably the main reason the films running time is so long. He delivers so many 'telling' expressions, it's hard to cut anything out. There's less usable material for Henry and Raygo, though that's mostly because we only had a couple of takes to work with due to the speed at which we had to get through the exterior scenes. There are also a few times when Archie would get tired and struggle to completely focus (a problem I also faced with The Happiness Thief, which is why there are such strict working patterns for child actors) and where Maxwell struggled with the creation of my tounge twisting words like Voydarkatron and Minoitaniga.

Overall, at this early stage, I am not thinking we have a dudd, so that's got to be worth something. Even though i signed off the final design for the Voydarkatron, I still can't imagine it there in the flesh, blended into the footage we shot. I'm hoping it'll look incredible, but we'll have to just wait and see!

Wednesday, November 02, 2011

...and that's a wrap!

Director Derek Boyes demonstrating how to use a VFX prop of the Voydarkatron's trunk so that Archie, the actor playing Henry Bramble has something real to push away. Michael, the 1st AD stands-in for Archie.
From left to right: Producer Annabel Bates, Executive Producer for Screen South, Jo Nolan and Producer for Hopscotch Films, Charlotte Wontner.

...Okay so I'm over a week late. We wrapped about 5:50pm on Sunday 23rd October having run out of daylight. Overall the shoot went well in that the cast and crew worked extremely hard to get what we needed in just three days while maintaining the highest quality in performance, cinematography, art direction and sound.


The cew set up for the first exterior shot of the day. This is one of the first scenes of the film where Henry Bramble unexpectedly arrives at his Great Uncle Geoffrey's house.
Unfortunately our biggest problem was always time. Realistically we needed four days or even five to comfotably finish. We were constantly fighting time, slipping behind schedule by a couple of hours each day, as a result I was forced to drop a lot of shots including a large chunk of the action at the end. I also didn't get the coverage I needed often running out of time to shoot the reverses or only getting one or two takes before moving on.


Archie Lyndhurst and Paul Copley keep their imagination alive as they play fight between takes.
The day after I felt very depressed and frustrated. If only Screen South had let us have that extra £10,000 we could have shot for a fourth day, if only our DOP hadn't got stuck in traffic on the prep day we could have rigged the lights the night before gaining 1.5 hours before we even started, or if the owners of the location could have given us a little more flexibility when and where we shot. There were so many 'if only's' it hurt. I felt deep down that I didn't get the film that I wanted and feared the lack of coverage would leave obvious holes in the film that would be unfixable and therefore not worth screening. My hopes of success were ruined!


Archie Lyndhurst (Henry Bramble) and his Mother help Maxwell Laird (Raygo Rattlegum) learn his lines.
....a few days later however I began to feel a little more optimistic and my curiosity thankfully took the better of me. I started browsing the footage and working out in my head if things would cut together okay. Soon I was ready to take on the challenge of fixing this film. I'm currently editing a couple of hours a day working through the film scene-by-scene while the other 22 hours the computer is hard at work converting the huge RED rushes files into a more managable HD format. So far the problems would propbably go unoticed to the average audience, but then I haven't got to scene 15 yet, Gulp!