48 Hour Sci-Fi Film
So, all the way back in April, Saturday the 14th to Monday the 16th, to be precise, I took part in the Sci-Fi London 48 hour short film competition, and I promised you a post. This is that post.
Having failed to manage to take part before, I corralled my troops early and managed to book the day the competition finished on off, in a feat of organisation. Sadly, it turned out that this weekend was also the only weekend we could run an overnight gaming event (promised for a long while beforehand) for my Explorer Scout troop, which resulted in me staying up until 4am on the Friday night watching the Explorers play a game that simulated the bridge of a starship, blearily waking up around 9am and then trudging back home, arriving at 11am in order to be there when my teammates started arriving. I do not recommend this as a warm-up for making a short film in 2 days.
Around midday, the text with the details of the film we were making arrived, all of which had to be used, apart from the optional piece of science.
Title: Serious Amusements
Line: "It really is a big world, with lots of people? "
Prop: "Photo Frame: We see a character take a photo frame, open it, take the photo out and replace it with a new one, reassembling it and putting back in original position"
Optional Science: What if people could reproduce asexually?
We started throwing ideas round, starting off around involving cloning experiments in the basement. We made a slight detour via "I wanted to create a clone machine, but instead I created a clown machine!" - a horror movie involving seemingly unlimited clowns. That was quickly dropped, in favour of the actual plot inspiration, which was then built on using the prop (the scene and title both flowed into the main concept).
This seems like an appropriate point to link the video so you can watch it and I can then talk about it without spoiling anything. See if you can guess what philosophical concept inspired it.
http://vimeo.com/40430630
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Hello again! In case you were wondering, the film was inspired by Plato's Cave. Are we seeing the real world, or is everything we're seeing just shadows on the wall of a cave, while the real world goes by unseen? I'm not sure how well it came across in the short film, but the girl with the computer screen was unaware of the real world, solely existing in that room (I would have loved a shot where food was delivered), and believe she was playing some sort of complicated game. Or maybe she knew she was manipulating a real world of some description, just not one she was part of. I'll leave it up to you if you prefer either of those, or your own interpretation.
We managed to put together a vague plot and worked out which scenes we wanted to film by about 3.30pm on the Saturday, and spent the rest of the afternoon and early evening filming nearly every outside shot, plus the cafe shots. We suffered from a lack of suitable locations, but with a bit on ingenuity and a sign made by my housemate, we managed to turn a car park into Seelie Industries. Of course, we then had an almost constant flow of cars and pedestrians getting in the way of our shots. We eventually managed to get a shot with everything we wanted though. When we moved to a pedestrianised street we just swapped the cars for extra pedestrians, but again got what we wanted eventually. Clown's Cafe was wonderful at letting us take up two tables and film what we wanted. And we got our "finale" shots without much of an issue. I was actually really pleased with the angles here, I thought they made the end of the film suitably dramatic. There was a guy on top of Castle Mound taking some time-lapse photography, so some of the sound had bonus camera shutter noises, but he was very nice about us being up there in the first place.
Speaking of the sound, we decided in the planning stage to go for the mostly silent in order to add to the separation of the real world and the cell with the computer in it. This had the wonderful side effect that we basically didn't have to worry about sound when we were outside, which made the whole thing much easier. I'll talk about the music later.
On Saturday evening our wonderful editor, Malc, put together the footage which would appear on the computer screen (adding my frankly appalling layout, but at least it contained the Seelie logo created by my housemate, which added hints as to what was going on by its appearances on the security camera footage and the wall of the not-a-car-park-honest). This made it much easier to deal with later on, as we didn't have to do lots of post-production to get the images on the screen, even though it took a few takes to sync the images with the swiping and poking of the screen, and one person had to control the videos from outside the shot, hunched up on the floor.
On Sunday we shot all of the internal shots, which required some ingenuity. There was nowhere other than the garage of my house that looked suitably cell-like, but there wasn't any way we could film through the actual doors in there to make it seem like a cell. Instead, we held an unattached door up (you can see it wobble, although I think only if you look for it) for shooting into the cell, and the shots into the corridor from the cell are actually shot from inside my bedroom, with the cameraman balancing on my bed. I think we covered that up pretty well though.
We also shot a couple of outdoor shots. Shooting by the cash machine made me worry we'd look dodgy, but actually no-one seemed to mind it at all. The shot down by the river was a race against time as the rain started to come down, so we only really got one proper shot at it before packing the equipment away and hurrying homewards for the indoor shots. We really should have done it the day before, but we ran out of light. We were very lucky to have so much time for outdoor shooting, given our lack of access to indoor locations.
Come Sunday evening, the editing had to happen. Malc was once more amazing, and stayed up far too late making the film as awesome as it came out. However, finding reasonable music was a pain, and not something you want to be doing late on a Sunday night after having spent far too much time awake over the weekend. So much of the creative commons music we found was hugely overblown, and it seemed nothing was suitable for the effect we wanted, despite lots of it supposedly being "film score". Seems people are more likely to produce music that would fit a summer action blockbuster or a Lord of the Rings film than the atmospheric music we wanted. I got really frustrated around this time, and just wanted to go to bed. In fact, I left Malc up still editing when I went to bed.
On Monday morning I showed the film to a few people as a trial, and suggested final changes to Malc based on that. He took these on board (once he woke up), finished the edit and sent the film off. Somehow we'd done it! Over the next few days we watched it rack up over 200 views, as well as a few likes (including one from the composer of some of the music we'd used!) Sadly we didn't make the top 20 videos, but we enjoyed making it (most of the time) and got a film out of it, so I think it was worth it.
Even just after the end of the competition there were changes we wish we'd made. Closer-up shots of the computer screen and the hands of its user in order to make it clearer how she was making changes would have been useful. I'd also have liked to focus on her reactions more, hopefully making it clearer how she noticed that the logo on the computer screen matched the logo on the wall on the screen, leading to her making it rain in order to get the characters to go into that building so she could work out what it was. Also if we'd have been able to find a suitable corridor we'd have followed them into the building and made it clearer how they accidentally stumbled on the cell (which at least didn't have a handle on the inside, thanks to some work with a screwdriver and duct tape over the resulting gap. This did leave the door not actually staying closed without being held but again I think we covered up well.) I'm sure the other people involved have their own changes they wish we'd had time to make too.
I was really surprised by how everyone got into the project. Apparently several of the people involved originally planned to not spend the entire weekend doing it, but really got into the project and stuck around for the entire time. I was really pleased with the size of cast/crew that we had, and once again extra thanks has to go to Malc, who went above and beyond with providing not just filming equipment but ridiculous amounts of his own time especially overnight in order to get the thing edited.
So what did I learn? Firstly that I have awesome friends who are still willing to go along with my crazy ideas and throw themselves into it. Secondly, filming seemingly trivial things takes forever because there's always something you could do better, and sometimes you have to just go with "good enough" because otherwise you'll be there until doomsday. Try and book permissions for locations further in advance - many props can be made on the day, but permissions can't be found. Filming locations won't ever match what you have in your head, but with ingenuity you can get them closer. And probably finally is that it's not a mistake being reasonably ambitious, as that means you can create awesome things and make a lot of enjoyment for people around you.
Wow, that turned out to be a much longer post than I expected. Please, please comment on both the post and your impressions of the film. I'll try to remember if there's anything else I wanted to mention, but sadly my memories have diminished slightly over the six and a half weeks since the film, which will hopefully teach me to blog about these things in a more timely fashion in the future. I'll hopefully be back with another post and replying to comments at the weekend!