Machine Time

something 'bout this crazy world you didn't know before
everyone's a third rate metaphor

The Guardian YouTube challenge shortlist is out. It's an excellent shortlist with several gems and lots of sci-fi influence. The competition was to make a 5 minute film inspired by a short story in the paper.

The final shortlist:

THE BIG IDEA - delightfully silly
DREAMDOG - arty but a bit slow
DRIVE - scenes from the short story set to a cool song
EASY CHAIR - eerie furniture-based ghost story
FAMILY CHRISTMAS - weirder than Easy Chair. Warning: includes sofa giving birth
LAURA FINAL MOVIE - well-made drama about footballs
MACHINE TIME - surreal video montage
MEGA SAVINGS - another piece of silliness
MOTHER - dark and atmospheric drama about televisions
OLD SCHOOL PEOPLE - VIDEO DIARY - film about making a film - how meta
SICK MEANING WICKED - narrative with symbolic video montage, unusual and interesting
SOFA SO GOOD - a mini Twilight Zone episode with references to The Fly.

Sadly our entry Human Touch didn't make the cut.

I enjoyed the music of Drive and the sci-fi touches of Mother and Sofa So Good (I want a big jar of Science!) However my favourite was Machine Time, a clever juxtaposition of H.G.Wells description of accelerating forwards through time with a history of the Internet complete with fake YouTube clips.

Entries closed

The deadline for the Guardian competition has now passed with Human Touch up against a small number of other films - many far more surreal than amything we came up with. There won't be a judges' result until some time in the next month or so.



I had a great deal of fun making Human Touch, and also learned a lot about film-making, apart from the general truism about how much hard work goes into it. A few of these lessons were sadly learned too late for this production.

-save money on lighting
-never save money on microphones
-if your camcorder actually has lower resolution than your stills camera, don't use the camcorder
-never work with children, animals or furniture
-Windows Movie Maker is the most useless piece of software ever written
-Windows Movie Maker is the most fantastic piece of software ever written
-spotlights gradually slip downwards if you leave them
-keep all your locations near each other

I also learned that musicians are incredibly generous - I was very grateful for the music from the University of Illinois which was released under Open Audio/Creative Commons licensing, and for the kind offer from another musician Mary Mei to allow me to use one of her beautiful harp recordings - if only we'd had the time to use this it would have been perfect for the film.

Will I do this again? I hope so. There are some animation/CGI projects I'd like to see through next. I'm also still thinking about whether to enter the Sci-Fi-London 48 hour competition, and my co-collaborator has some projects I might help out on. Watch this space...

Human Touch

Several late nights and one system crash later, finished post-production so here's the film.

This will be an entry in the Guardian YouTube competition, based on a short story by Mark Ravenhill.

Human Touch is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic License.

Preview frame

Still working on the 5-minute film. Here's a frame from the opening sequence. The CGI sequences aren't going to be too much trouble - it's editing the live ones that is keeping me up...

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.