Category: Filmmaking

Cancer Hair wins Best Fiction Short AND Best of the Fest at Isle of Man

16/9/2014

So, an utterly mental thing happened at the Isle of Man Film Festival this weekend.

We only bloody won it! Cancer Hair won Best Fiction Short and Best of the Fest.

Film Critic Mark Kermode gave out the awards and I'm still buzzing about the whole thing.

Before I collapse in a heap and start breathing into a paper bag I wanted to acknowledge This would not have been possible had it not been for the hard work and dedication of the cast and the crew of Cancer Hair.

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Spelling aside...

18/4/2014

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One of those career affirming weeks...

1/4/2014

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One of those career affirming weeks

…had the cast and crew screening of Cancer Hair last night which went well. Everyone said lovely things. Thank you very much for the support guys.

…we’re screening 50 Kisses at Bafta on Friday to coincide with a very special announcement.

…got the concept art in for Invisible Girl and it looks great – onwards to the next one!

…great feedback on Project O concept/treatment

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Spare Change

8/3/2014

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Spare Change (2013) from Andrew Carslaw on Vimeo.

Spare Change, directed by Andy Carslaw, is a short I wrote and produced at the tail end of 2013. We were looking for a 2//3 page short that was relatively easy to film in a couple of nights. This sure as heck gave us a taste of night shoots *shudder* not something that I would run back to with any great gusto soon! Total budget under £500.

And here is the result - a morality tale of a business man who shuns a homeless man asking for change, only to have the tables turned on him

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So here's my plan for the future

7/3/2014

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The Power of Editing

9/2/2014

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I have to confess that before I made my film, to me, the post-production process was a dark art carried out in dark rooms. As such, the whole thing filled me with dread. Having worked with Simon Reglar on the post-production for 50 Kisses, I went to ask him - once Cancer Hair had wrapped - what the devil I do next.

I’m very clear to me that my weakness as a director is my technical knowledge – ask me something about frame rates, ratio or format and I’ll turn to Isabelle my producer for a) understanding and b) reassurance that I’m choosing the right one. I know this is limiting some of my creative choices because I have to understand it first before understanding it what it means through the prism of the project.

Simon put me in touch with Dean Harding, whom he was editing Atlantis with. Dean and I met for a coffee and I am happy to say he reassured me of the process and dark art ahead. Within a week, an assembly edit had found its way into my inbox.

Assembly edits are strange beasts. They essentially take verbatim the script film and put it on screen. As a writer/director, I had to deliberately divorce the writer part of myself to keep the director part happy. Why? Honesty – heaven forefend but some of it just didn’t work.

Bottom line - You construct the final story out of the rushes you’ve got, you get the rushes by relying on the script. One thing that became very clear to us after watching that assembly edit was that the “heat” of the story was in the romance. Now the script and indeed the project had, in my writer/director mind, been geared towards female friendship and solidarity but up on the big screen it just didn’t quite work.

A deep breath taken, the cuts began

Over the process of about four weeks, we got the film from close to 11 minutes to just over 9 – which was roughly what I thought it was going to be.

This was after “locking” the film – then sending it to Chris Jones for his opinion and reopening the damn thing after a his fresh eyes found other ways to make it tighter. Arse ache though that was, the film is ultimately better for it.

Chris is great at giving straight between the eyes advice and although I didn’t take it all, the words left ringing in my ears were “Fix it now while it’s a small problem to unlock the film, rather that fixing it 6 months down the line when it’s not getting into festivals”. Ouch!

Where are we now? Well we’ve completed. We’ve locked. We have delivered. The film is now being submitted to film festivals and I am gingerly showing a few relatives and friends why I have been absent for the last year. It seems to be going down well – but the true test comes in getting entry to the festival we are applying to.

What I found in Dean during the editing process was that he was able to reassure me on the technical aspects of things without making me feel like an idiot for not knowing it. Also, he had a natural understanding of what worked and what didn’t, seeing things that I didn’t and correcting them. This in my book is a big plus.

I’m going to be working with Dean on the next short, and from an earlier point in the process too which again I think will help tighten up some of the technical quicksand in my mind.

And here’s a recommendation for all you filmmakers out there, if you are looking for a smart up and coming editor you could do a lot worse than hooking up with Dean Harding.

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The Green Door - Top 10% in Blue Cat

2/2/2014

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Thrilled to find out today that The Green Door is in the top 10% of the Blue Cat Screenplay contest.

Pretty damn good. I've had some great traction with The Green Door, I know it needs another redraft but so far

1) It was staged and won the Women's Work festival in Chicago
2) It was a finalist in the 1 in 10 screenplay contest
3) It narrowly missed Nicholls Quarter Finalists (of 7000 entries - of which the top 300 go through, it was in the 300-400 bracket)
4) It got me into the Edinburgh Film Festival Talent Lab

Not bad for a Spec - the Quarter Finalist are announced on 15th Feb, so fingers crossed until then.

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Cancer Hair Completed

27/1/2014

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I am delighted to say that Cancer Hair is now complete and delivered. I picked up the HD Cam and Master DVD in my hot little hands today!

Amazing - and quick too! We shot in October, and here we are in January with a complete film ready to go to festivals.

So, what's next - well precisely that. Submitting to film festivals, organising a cast and crew screening and finishing off all the marketing materials and press packs that surround the film.

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Why I unfollow people on Twitter

30/12/2013

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I’ve recently gone through a spate of unfollowing people on Twitter. This is partly to do with the fact that I have been at home over Christmas and therefore using Twitter more, but it’s also something I’ve been meaning to do for a while.

Bottom line - my feed was getting choked up with information I didn’t care about.

Why is that important? Well, we’re in the age of attention now. The age of information is well and truly past. If anything it’s the age of information overload. People’s online habits have changed and instead of waiting for information to come to them, they are actively searching it out and filtering it as they go.

Twitter is a great place for that information. For many people, it is a place where you can stick to one subject – in my case screenwriting and indie filmmaking – and consume a lot of information quickly. From here, you can filter out what is important/relevant/interesting for later and also “meet” other interested in the subject.

I use twitter as a source of information almost exclusively for these subjects – with the occasional foray into “Strictly Come Dancing” or “X Factor” if I am feeling so inclined.

What I noticed in my recent unfollowing spate was a pattern around why I unfollowed people. Now, I don’t want to make these people wrong for doing the below – hey, it’s your twitter, knock yourself out – but I just wonder how many of the below reasons have made other people unfollow them too or at the very least stop engaging with them.

1)      Constant promotion of an e-book – This is just plain lazy. Marketing 101 is - sell to your audience and if you don’t have an audience, then build it. Marketing books to other authors or writers – come on. They followed you to talk to you about writing, not for you to constantly bombard them with badly worded sales messages about your latest fiction ebook. Now, if the book was about screenwriting or filmmaking – I’m there, I really am. Other than that forget it. It’s spam. Unfollow.

2)      Constant “fund my project” tweets – Same as above. Why are you hitting up other broke writers and filmmakers to fund your project? They are too damn busy trying to fund their own project without you bombarding them with “fund my film” tweets. There are a few crowdfunding campaigns that do have perks directly for the filmmaking community – great, market away! Look, I’m not saying don’t ever promote your film or crowdfunder to film or writing people - believe it or not they are probably interested in the final product and the journey you had getting it out there - what I am saying is - like the promotion of an ebook – you need to promote these things to the audience you are trying to sell your end film to. If you can’t understand the concept of audience on a low budget short film crowdfunder then I worry for you – how the hell are you going to explain it when in a room at Paramount trying to pitch for actual cash? Unfollow.

3)      Repeated retweeting – There is nothing more frustrating to me than seeing someone retweet 5-10 posts they were mentioned in in a row, and clogging up my feed with them, their name and whatever the heck they were mentioned in. I go to Twitter to find useful information - this is not useful information, this is you standing in a playground yelling “Look at me, look at me”. Unfollow.

4)      Never talking about the subject I’m interested in – Twitter is a great place to talk to specific people about specific subjects. I followed you because on your profile it says filmmaker or screenwriter. But when it comes to the tweets you are making they are nothing to do with these subjects and it makes me wonder why I am bothering following you. I’m not talking about the odd tweet about your family, the football, the rugby or that kind of thing but constantly talk about everything but the subject you profess to love is distracting. Unfollow.

5)      Those goddamn “X people followed me Y people unfollowed me” auto tweets – Do you know how sad that makes you look? It’s saying – Y people have already left my party because I’m so deadly dull and boring that I can’t keep followers! There was a nasty strain of autotweet a few months ago that was similar to this that basically said “@scriptpunk has unfollowed me” What-the-actual-fuck? You are tweeting this, naming and shaming people who unfollow you…and new followers are suppose to be impressed by this? Come on, grow up. This is your public image we are talking about. Unfollow.

Social Media is not about how many followers you have. It’s really not. What are we, five years old? You can have 100 followers all hyper engaged or 1000 followers who have just followed you because you follow them. What is your preference?

If it really is "I want 1000’s of followers" then knock yourself out, there are several follower adding pieces of software out there that will make you feel really important.

If it is that you want to engage with people who talk your talk and are interested in the subjects you are in, then do yourself a favour and go for the 100 engaged followers.

And my last point, before I get off my soap box and go make another cup of coffee, if you have a specific project/book/film to promote, then do us all a favour and create a separate twitter account and build the audience up for the project there. Yes, it's hard work - but so is making films and just like the work you put into films, the work you put into building your audience will pay off...if you have the where-with-all to do it in the first place.

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Pipelining Projects

24/12/2013

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Ah Christmas Holidays - that time of year when you get to catch your breathe between one year and the next, even if it is only for a few days.

For me, I have just finished one short term contract and I'm about to get head long into another one. So the Christmas break has been a brilliant time to consider what I've achieved this year and what projects I want to line up for next year.

Being an old sales hand, I call it pipelining. The industry calls it having a slate. It's the same thing, and serves the same end purpose of having a number of projects in various stages of development ready to go when the money should appear.

So I have three shorts on slate as writer/director. Cancer Hair is almost finished and I'm looking to follow it up with at least another film next year.

I have a 20/25 minute hard hitting drama, another 10 minute shades of light and dark comedy drama and a historical adaptation of something that I CAN'T FUCKING BELIEVE has not been adapted. All shorts.

Feature wise I have a couple of ideas I need to sit down and actually fucking storyline. I know there are big schemes like ifeatures and Microwave coming up and I want to have something ready to go out to them.

But, and here is the rub - all this planning is great but the shorts need money, and the features need producers standing over me yelling at me...on top of all of this, I need to go out and earn money to pay the bills.

The life of an independent filmmaker - eh? Half the time your head is in the clouds, half the time your feet are firmly anchored to the ground - no wonder you feel a little stretched.

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<<Previous

Cancer Hair wins Best Fiction Short AND Best of the Fest at Isle of Man

Spelling aside...

One of those career affirming weeks...

Spare Change

So here's my plan for the future

The Power of Editing

The Green Door - Top 10% in Blue Cat

Cancer Hair Completed

Why I unfollow people on Twitter

Pipelining Projects

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