Factory Filmed

Monsters is released in cinemas across the UK from Friday. I'm looking forward to it - watch this space for the review. The movie has received a lot of positive advance press, mostly focussing on the low-budget and atypical production model: this article from the Guardian is typical. Two actors and a tiny crew took a road trip across Mexico seeking out atmospheric locations and shooting scenes along the way, a lot of the dialogue was improvised, and director Gareth Edwards then edited and post-produced the film, tentacles and all, in After Effects on his laptop. More or less.

Gareth Edwards entered Sci-Fi London's 48 Hour Film Challenge three years ago, seeing it as an opportunity to test out a depth-of-field adaptor he'd just built for his camera. The result was the 2008 winning entry Factory Farmed - which surely must have helped when Gareth was pitching the Monsters concept. Inspired by the 2008 entries including Gareth's, I had a lot of fun making films for this competition in 2009 and 2010 and plan to enter again in future.

Factory Farmed: winner of SFL48 2008

For the benefit of all the journalists who are enthused about Monsters: while I share your excitement about this particular release, indie and low-budget films are not new, and Danny Boyle is not the only respected director who started out using guerilla filmmaking techniques. Also it has always been possible to spend a massive Hollywood budget and end up with a box-office flop. It is true that post production and effects tools have become more accessible - including many freeware applications such as my preferred tool Blender - but it's not really about the tools: a good script, good direction (both theatrical and artistic) good character performances and good editing are as key as ever.

Low budget filmmaking is different though. For example, in a more traditional studio there is a tension between the director and the producer, whose role is basically to persuade the director that he can still achieve his artistic vision with only three elephants instead of six. If the director has always come from the angle of what he or she can achieve without spending anything, then this tension is not needed in the first place and there might not be a need to separate the director/producer roles in the same, rigid way. I suspect the ideal arrangement is for two people with a fairly close relationship of some sort to hold both roles but play to their own individual strengths, and this might be why there are so many successful brother-brother partnerships in cinema.

Guerillas In The Mist [Review: Urban Ghost Story]

Urban Ghost Story is directed by Genevieve Jolliffe and produced by Chris Jones, authors of the Guerilla Film-Maker's guidebooks. Nine years before Paranormal Activity, this film brought the ghost story into a downbeat setting: Glasgow, a block of flats, complete with poverty, loan sharks, drug use and teenage pregnancies, and it brought the paranormal together with real-life menace to create a tense, creepy atmosphere.

The ghost story element is intelligent and non-patronizing - possible explanations for the entity are presented by characters we don't quite trust so there is no glib solution to the mystery, and in any case it's really a film about trauma. The heroine, Lizzie, has survived a car crash in which her best friend died, but is traumatized over and over again by the crash itself, the mysterious happenings that follow it, and then by the various responses from the police and social services, the spiritualists who terrorize her and the para-scientists who tie her to her bed for one more experiment.

This is an awesome film which I would recommend to anyone, with a great story and a lot to say about trauma. It has a strong cast, headed by child actress Heather Ann Foster who plays Lizzie perfectly, and has a memorable look: it's filmed in drab blues and greens that perfectly convey the mood of despair and fear, offset by the bright colours of the goldfish, a symbol of Lizzie's dilemma that appears throughout the film.

Filmmaking In Three Acts: Act I [Review: Guerilla Filmmaker's Movie Blueprint]

The way to learn filmmaking is to make a film. However when I'm planning a film or stuck at any part of the process I tend to turn to a small number of moviemaker bibles: this article is the first of three book reviews. The first bible is The Guerilla Filmmaker’s Movie Blueprint byChris Jones. This large book covers each role on a film crew, e.g. scriptwriter, producer, director, caterer, lights, sound, editor etc. It’s written for filmmakers at three different low-budget levels each with a different sized crew and covers the whole process from concept and script to mastering and distribution. It’s more broad than deep, but as it is so comprehensive it’s an excellent reference, and really helped me to grasp the basics.

Author Chris Jones worked on the feature Urban Ghost Story with director Genevieve Jolliffe. I'm waiting to receive my copy of this film which was generally well received.

Production Values

I honestly believe that the presence or absence of Hollywood production values is not what decides the overall quality of a film. It's partly a trade-off - with a big budget you get undoubtedly more realistic and more demanding sfx throughout a film, better technical stuff generally, more famous actors etc. but you also get the problems - you have to keep all your investors happy and get the widest possible audience so you have to dumb down the film to the lowest common denominator, or change the ending to please the test audience (that means you, Little Shop of Horrors) or include characters to sell merchandise or computer games; also I think too many films rest on CGI at the expense of plot, dialogue and other character-driven stuff. Let's leave the sequels issue for now.

Indie films meanwhile are a very mixed bunch - lower budgets and production values sometimes compromise the vision but other times force the film-makers to innovate. It might be easier to stay true to your own ideas - or you might be even more dependent on your limited sources of money.

On a related subject I was thinking about the reasons people (like, say, the Asylum) might make derivative rather than original films - it's easy to be cynical about this. Here's a link to an interview with Sandy Collora who previously made a Batman fanfic short but is now working on a more original project. He talks quite frankly about getting more attention for his earlier work because it featured a known character - on the other hand by making it he developed skills and proved he could see a project through to completion, which must have helped when he was looking for support for his new feature.

http://io9.com/5091379/first-look-at-fan-auteur-sandy-colloras-hunter-prey

So far, so good

The shoot yesterday was long, surreal and (amazingly) successful - we managed to shoot every required live scene in the script in just seven hours, including setting up and dismantling lighting in three different locations. Early review of our footage suggests the sci-fi concepts actually look OK, no people animals or furniture harmed and no equipment deposits lost. Also we only had to break into one location Ed Wood-style. Our cast of volunteers were superb and very willing to go along with what must have seemed very eccentric directions. I've also learned a great deal about the difficulties, particularly around lighting, camerawork and continuity - if we do this again it will be faster and better (although probably not cheaper).

I don't want to say anything specific about the content of this 5-minute sci-fi epic yet. The submission deadline for the competition is next week and there's still the CGI animation and the editing job to do. There's still time for things to go wrong but I'm cautiously optimistic. I'll post some teaser stills during the week and a YouTube link as soon as we've submitted.

In the past few weeks I've been watching some very low budget film and TV, partly with an eye to this project, and reading up on guerilla film-making. Now I know what it feels like to shoot for a 5-minute project, I have the greatest respect for anyone who completes an amateur, indie or low-budget feature-length film.