Drop the camera and run - again

A creature attacks the metropolis, survivors go on the run shooting everything on camcorder as they go. Sounds familiar? Monster, made by The Asylum and distributed by Lighthouse, is as close to a rip-off of a certain other monster movie as it is possible to get (even though it was released first!) and it set me wondering about why people make derivative films. Cloverfield itself actually has very high production values - this film clearly cannot afford the same values so this is a cheap attempt to mimic an expensive attempt to look cheap.

Having started with a negative point, I have to say I really enjoyed this film, although more in the way you might enjoy an amateur or fringe theatre production. There's a lot to learn here about how to make films on a budget - clever use of sound and camera angles to convey panicking crowds without actually showing any people, etc. I might try some of this if I make any more short films. Most of the film seems to have been made by a handful of people - actually I was surprised by how many names were on the credits!

The two stars are Sarah Lieving and Erin Sullivan. Sarah is apparently a regular at Asylum, Erin has only a few credits including "Transmorphers" (I wonder what that one's about...) They're both endearing and reasonable actresses - this film gets a lot of criticism at least on imdb but this is mainly because it's derivative. It's also fair to say that unlike a film with a larger budget, the pair pretty much have to carry the whole film - clearly there was only a budget for a few minutes of film with other actors, plus the brief action climax at the end, plus a few extra dollars for special effects, so most scenes just feature the two girls, and a lot of the action can't be shown so they have to rely on their acting skills to convey it. The whole shoot must have been hard work.

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.

My definition is this...

What is sci-fi? Two answers:

a - it's a genre and is therefore defined in a circular way as being the books that are enjoyed by sci-fi fans, or written by sci-fi authors, or found in the sci-fi section of your local bookstore. The idea of what makes something sci-fi can change over time, and of course there is the possibility of disagreement or different perspectives.

b - John W. Campbell had this idea that a true science-fiction story could only have one difference from the real world - this could be a divergence from history (a Jonbar point) a change to the laws of physics, or some other invention or postulate; the story should explore the consequences of this one change. This makes science-fiction similar to the idea of gedanken-experiment (thought-experiment).

I prefer b personally: this excludes anything in the Star Wars / Star Trek area (fun though they are) and relegates them to fantasy, while confirming the status of Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo as classic science-fiction.

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.

Answers to Star Wars quiz.

I'm sure you got them all:

1: A New Hope
2: Empire Strikes Back
3: Revenge of the Sith
4: Attack of the Clones
5: Return of the Jedi
6: The Ewok Adventure

Sorted.

Back down to earth

I'm now back online but have had to re-activate my old computer until my new Vista-compatible router arrives. Why is Vista so much less powerful than XP? It reminded me of the film Robocop 2. This was a disappointment after the sharp satire and effective horror of the first film but was worth watching for the highly symbolic face-off between Robocop (running on MS-DOS) and Robocop 2 (Windows 3.1) - I often think that if Robocop had won in real life things would look very different now.

One of the reasons I started writing this blog was to try and get myself back into a more creative frame of mind in general, as I'm often guilty of coming up with ideas but not seeing them through. Currently trying to get things together for filming a sci-fi short this Sunday - spent last night trying to build a greenscreen and arrange lighting hire.