Its out, its online, its spiraling through cyberspace like the monkeys bone in 2001:A Space Odyssey…
This is the first short film I have made out of studies, and I made it with my best friend, Jakob Belbin. Originally we were planning to make the film 3 minutes, we were going to enter the Reed Film Competition with no view of winning but some recognition and the outside chance of being shortlisted would have been fantastic. Anyway we did not need to worry because the more we wrote about the backstory the longer the story grew until we realised it would be well over 3 minutes, we weren’t too concerned about this and felt like the film would make sense to be the standard length for a short film; roughly 10 minutes.
The subject we started with was “The Boss”; since that was the theme for the competition. When starting to think about a film, I usually start with the location. I really try to imagine a good setting to place a character within. We chose the location (our house) and we had to do basically no setting up of the main location; Jakes art room, to get it ready for production. We knew we needed to make the film completely in one house so we could rattle through the shots and just get it made. Also we chose the majority of our shots to be inside because we had a negative experience on our first on-location shoot. Although we halted the filming, I still have the screenplay to possibly regurgitate at a later date. This location which caused so much frustration was outside our house. We needed some shots of our protagonist walking down the road, seems easy, turned out a nightmare. We headed out onto the road at 11pm, it was busy, there were too many earth destroyers speeding round with their windows low, pumping out some of the latest banging shite. We went in doors and caffeine loaded, we went back out to film at 12.30am. Evertytime we could only just hear the last of Vengaboys Boom Boom Boom from the local ratty chavs clio in our condenser microphone, another car would head towards us. We gave up. I think deciding to film the little one in completly one place (apart from the last shot) made sure we got the shots we needed without too much interference.
Choosing the actors, since we were so determined to get started on a film, we realised the easiest way would be for either myself or Jake to act in the film. We were both happy to do either but realised if we were basing the film on an artist it made sense to be Jake, and since I have picked up a camera a few more times than Jake, the roles made sense. We did very little pre production and felt starting filming chronologically made the most sense (I shall stick with this way like Ken Loach has in all his years of filming, believing he gets the most out of the actors because they develop with their roles as the narrative advances). The problem that arose after the very first shoot was technical, at the time of forking out on all the equipment (camera, microphone, computer to edit on) I did not have the desire to buy Final Cut Pro X, so i tried using iMovie…
END OF PART 1
Keep your eyes out for my new post in the next few days carrying on the process of filming the little one
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Heres the film, don’t forget to change the quality up to 720p in the settings cog:
Thanks for reading
§leopold§
Leopold West 