Voydarkatron Update

Just had a great Skype meeting with Adam Thomson (the vfx animation director at VERL) to get an update on the VFX progress with the cgi Voydarkatron. When you see his desktop you quickly comprehend why it takes so long to create these fantastic monsters.

Adam showed me some rough modelled stances that could be used in the film, one being a collapsed and dying Voydarkatron. He looks scary from every angle and despite his bulk, is much more versatile in his movements than I expected. He can tower over you like King Kong protecting his territory or stoop low in a hunting/feeding poise that is reminiscent of walking bats or scavenging birds of prey. I can't wait to see it all fully rendered.

In the next few days I should be getting sent through some crude animated models that I can drop into the edit which will be extremely helpful to myself in fine tuning the editing in these scenes and for the sound designer as he will be able to get a real sense of the danger, weight and movement of the creature.

Houston we have a problem!

When my fiance shouted down the stairs that Whitney Houston was dead, I was perplexed why there was no sudden reaction in me. I was a big fan growing up, spending many hours pining over girls at school, lying on my bed with my walkman on, letting Whitney increase the pain in my heart with that incredible voice of hers.

My fondest memories of her however, was in the film The Bodyguard. I was studying in Harrogate at the time, working at the local ODEON in the evenings and as a result watched the film many times. I'm not embarrassed to say it is a favourite of mine. This is not as surprising as it first sounds. My two favourite films of all time are Raiders Of The Lost Ark and The Empire Strikes Back, both were written by The Bodyguard screenwriting legend Lawrence Kasdan. My favourite songs from this film soundtrack are 'I Have Nothing' and 'Run To You'. She sounds so sincere and vulnerable in them and it often makes me wonder how similar her real life was to her character in the film.

I never really followed the gossip about her troubled marriage and addictions and so I was shocked when I saw her appear on the X-Factor recently. I didn't recognise her. At that moment it seemed clear to me that the Whitney I loved and respected had died a long time ago. I imagine this is the reason why I felt little emotion on hearing the tragic news. However, as the days have passed, I have had time to reflect on her music and the impact she had on me growing up and I now feel genuine sadness for her. I will always remember Whitney Houston as the beautiful, talented singer who starred in the The Bodyguard.

Film poster design ideas for Henry Bramble

This is my photoshop version of the sketch below. I'm pretty happy with the layout  and text positioning I just hope I can come up with a more exciting and creative montage for the imaginary top half.

This was my favorite of four rough sketches I did to help me focus on my ideas for the film poster. It is based on a combination of a Son Of Rambow quad poster design that was never used, the Sugarland Express quad poster and the international one sheet of The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus.

Cut 3 - The Cannes friendly version

Henry is left alone in a cold dusty attic room.

Okay so just when I thought I could cut no more out of the film without destroying the emotional impact of the story, I managed to get Henry Bramble down to an incredible 14 minutes and 40 seconds, leaving 20 seconds to fit all the credits in.

Why so precise I hear you say, well Cannes and many other film festivals won't except short films over 15 minutes. I had a meeting a few weeks back with my producers and agreed to try and get the 18 minute film down to 15. I insisted on being brutal about it, but was still convinced I'd never get close to 15 minutes.

To my surprise much of the process was simply removing time wasted by characters travelling from A to B. Often it worked better as a jump cut instead. There was very little cut out that I missed. Some cuts I worry are a fraction too fast for a fresh audience to keep up with, so I may extend these by a second or two, but I'm going to test screen it to a few kids and close critical film friends and see what the results are.

Whatever happens I think we will have a film that will be short enough for Cannes. The only question is whether the VFX boys up at Dundee can deliver everything in time.

Raygo Rattlegum helps Henry Bramble hunt for a Voydarkatron.

Was David Cameron's advice to the British film industry naive?

There's definately some pretentious art-house films out there that take themselves too seriously that should not be publicly funded (Rat Catcher, Hunger, Bronson) as well as some deplorable 'genre' films (Creep, The Cottage, Hush). I'm not sure what David Cameron meant by his comments this week, but I think the term 'commercial' is often misinterpreted.

A commercial film can be art-house, experimental, drama, documentary, animation, genre or any combination of these. It should be regarded as commercially successful not by how much money it makes, but simply by weather or not it makes its money back (this includes all production, marketing and distribution costs). If it doesn;t have an audience big enough to pay for itself then it should not be financed through public money.

The UK doesn't and will never have the financial infrastructure like Hollywood and therefore can't finance films like Avatar or even 'British' qualifying films like  Harry Potter or Bond. So its commitment to supporting all types of film is actually limited up to a certain level of budget. At the other end of the scale I agree with Julian Fellows that the government should not be financing self-indulgent filmmakers whose films have no chance of making their money back. Despite popular believe, this does not include filmmakers like Mike Leigh, Ken Loach or Anrdrea Arnold who are in fact by the above definition 'commercial filmmakers'.

This out-of-date attitude towards the UK film industry as being only capable of making fluffy period drama, gritty social realism, middle class romantic comedy or east-end gangster films has to change. We need to put more energy into educating British film audiences, by giving them access to the huge variety of wonderful high quality International and British films out there that don't make it to the multiplex. How we do this successfully is any ones guess and is probably just as hard to answer as "What makes a commercially successful film?"

Star Wars -Trench Run

The only arcade game I truly enjoyed over and over again was the early 1980's Star Wars vector graphics 'sit-in' trench run game. It was a simple shoot and dodge game that just got harder and harder rather than moving on to multiple and varied scenarios. For years I hoped they would re-release the game with photo realistic graphics. It often appeared as one level in a more complex game but not as a singular game itself ...until now!

I recently discovered an i-Phone app called Trench Run. It is everything I ever dreamed of and even better I can play it anywhere. If you purchase the add-on you can also play it on a huge HD tv connected to your computer and use your i-Phone purely as a controller. How cool is that!? Try it out yourself at StarWars.com or view the trailer below.

What is a director?

Directors UK have just relaunched themselves and apart from now having to pay a yearly subscription, it is a much more exciting organisation, being more than just a collection agency. Unfortunately apart from a BBC short film I was comissioned to direct, that I doubt will ever get repeated, none of my other directing work has been televised or been released at the cinema, therfore they have nothing to collect for me yet. Until they do, I think I'll opt out of the subscription, but here's a quick reminder of what a director does.

Final Design for the Voydarkatron

What an incredible beast. It's a huge bulk of a monster and I can't believe he was created from just three living creatures on this planet - a slug, a rhino and an elephant. The concept artist James Law, has done an incredible job and I'm now officially his number one fan. So much so that I have asked him to help me design the film poster for when we head to Cannes. Can't wait to see the results.

The Voydarkatron - A seven foot beast that roams the forests of Minoitaniga and feeds on imagination.

2nd cut completed.

Henry's curiosity gets the better of him.

We had a screening of the first cut for Jo Nolan, the Executive Producer at Screen South. It was at my house so I had to tidy up a bit, get rid of the baby parafanalia, brew a nice pot of tea and purchase some posh biscuits. I should have presented the film on a state of the art 52 inch plasma widescreen TV, but all I had was a 13 inch Macbook Pro laptop placed on the dining room table, still it did the job.

I think she was pleased with what she saw, though it's difficult to tell as I was sitting behind her at the bottom of the stairs. The main feedback I got back was basically to speed up the uncle's world once Henry had invaded. It was actually the best kind of feedback you can get, which is feedback that you actually understand and agree with.

The film without rolling end credits was coming in at 22:36, but most short film festivals prefer films to be under 20 minutes. So using little pockets of spare time between working and family commitments, I managed to cut out over 4 minutes in just a few days and I have to say, most of it is looking better for it. I'm pretty confident what is going to be in the final cut now, but I have to wait for the VFX team to build and animate the Voydarkatron before I continue.

Henry attempts to make friends with Raygo Rattlegum.

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!