Glad you like the look of it, poster photo was taken by yours truly
How: it's a long story but i've just finished my last exam and i've got the time so here goes...
March last year I get moved to top set maths (I was in yr 11 at this point), I was made to sit by a guy I hardly knew & whom i percieved to be arrogant & cocky from our limited encounters; however we start talking and found we had two things in common: an extreme dislike for maths and a love of film... a few lessons went by and I mentioned that I was inerested in writing screenplays... then he revealed that he'd already written most of one and just needed to finish it off. Over the next few weeks we talked about screen writing, I showed him my few pages of script, he showed me some of his "project" and after a while he mentioned he'd like to make his screenplay and asked me to come onboard as producer whilst he directs and another friend of his does the camerawork.
Obviously I agreed and so we set about doing the pre-production:
Rewrites
Casting sessions - advertised in local drama clubs/classes, we had about 20 people audition and we cast from those.
Printed 12, 72 page scripts from my home printer - that was one hell of a day I can tell you.
Held a table reading for all the cast to rehurse lines/ get to know each other.
Production sceduling - taking into account everyone's holidays (absolute nightmare)
Then we had a photo shoot for a montage wall that the stalker has in his bedroom. - as my first love is stills photography that was my job - you can see the shots on the group page + this day was pretty hilarious to be honest - we had all had a huge end-of-GCSEs party the previous night and most of us turned up still drunk - I didn't trust myself to ride my bike so I did the 1hr trek :S .
Then we commenced filming mid-July - we used pretty low budget equipment: a canon HD handheld model, RODE video mic - which we bought an adapter for so that it could be mounted onto a painters pole instead of paying £200 for the boom pole that does the exact same thing, some 500w worklights, a nice crutch-leg tripod off ebay, a homemade go-cart dolly, some step ladders, a white sheet on a portable clothes rail as and some shiny car windshield sun covers as reflecters, a HD monitor and a mac book pro with final cut on. - oh and a smoke machine we borrowed off a mate for a night shoot.
After many ups and downs and some nightmare production challanges - e.g. late night calls from cast members "I'm on holiday so I can't film this week, sorry I forgot" things like that, we finally wrapped mid-september and now we are well into editing and hope to be finished around March ish
So in the end: A in maths, feature almost made... but the director's still cocky and arrogant
J/K
...Phew - I realise I may have waffled on somewhat there... but I suppose that must have answered your question?
Liked your short by the way - nicely filmed & good example of ellipsis used to hook the viewer (and fustrate them to hell) - what was it? - I really want to know, although I expect you don't actually have an answer to that?
+ next weekend will be my first short but hire company has just pulled out of letting us use the camera so now we're using a mini-dv JVC which is no where near as good, but it should be okay - seen as it's a 2minute short... somthing always goes wrong.
Hows the inspiration for the short coming along?
SMITH
