The making of the making of

When one is making a movie about the making of a movie, all seen through the cameras of a 'The Making Of' camera crew, things can become confusing. When shooting footage to be the making of the making of, it gets more confusing still.

Perhaps this video will make it clearer. Or perhaps not.

New Website for '43 pounds'

The following post was copied from our new movie website at www.43pounds.com


Friday 15th January marked two landmark events for Hive Films: the long-awaited premier of the movie ‘Zombie Undead’, and the beginning of filming the movie ‘43 pounds’. The full story of how and why the two came on the same evening will be unravelled through this blog over the coming months.

But first a word about Zombie Undead. Two of the four screenings so far have been sell-outs, with the others well on their way to being full. We’ve been fortunate to have good coverage in the media and enthusiastic responses from audiences.

The premier should surely have given us enough organisational challenges. Why then start filming ‘43 pounds’ on the same day? There were two reasons for that. The first is emotional rather than logical. It is the pleasing sense that the end of one journey is also the beginning of another, both for us and for the many people who have been following our work and the emergence of film making in Leicester.

The second reason is practical. The movie ‘43 pounds’ opens at the premier of a zombie movie. We had the main screen at Phoenix Square. We had a sell-out audience, who we hoped and guessed would be keen to volunteer as extras.

Zombie Undead was screened. The audience applauded and cheered. The production team did a Q& A session on the stage. And then we sprung the surprise. “We’re about to film the first scene of our next movie, right here, right now. If you’d like to be part of it, stay in your seats. If you don’t want to be, we’ll see you later in the bar.”

They could have all walked out at that point. Happily they all stayed.

You can see a short podcast from the premier here, including a glimpse of the director in action.

But why does the first scene of ‘43 pounds’ need to be at the premier of a zombie movie? The answer to that will have to wait for another post.

Writing lines for actors

The process of writing for '43 pounds' is significantly different from the work I usually do. There are two reasons for this:

1) We are going to be relying heavily on the excellent improvisational skills of our cast. This should give us more of a documentary feel - less like scripted lines. So the lines I am actually writing will probably never be spoken. They are there to guide the actors rather than constrain them.

2) I already know some of the cast and have started workshopping with them. This has given me the seeds of several ideas. And when I type the words in, I can already hear the voices of the actors saying them.


Hearing voices may sound more like a mental illness than a writing technique. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that when I read the lines that I have written, I hear them in my head with the tone, accent and delivery of those individuals.

Getting the voices is one of the important milestones for me in writing any work of fiction. With this it has been given to me from the start.

Zombie Undead premier - podcast

'Forty three Pounds' the movie

Writing and Improvisation

Aren't all writers improvisers, really? I mean, we sit at our writing desk or our computer or whatever, and we don't have the whole thing mapped out already finished in our heads. There may be an overall plan, but the detail has to be foggy.

Then we write. And the words spill out on the page.

Yesterday I was standing in a large, disused commercial kitchen, pretending to be a boom operator. Rhys Davies, the real life director, was playing the part of the camera man. In front of us were three actors - two playing the parts of actors who had turned up for an audition at this unlikely location and the third playing the part of a director with no budget who was interviewing them.

(Sorry about the confusion - actors playing actors etc. Unfortunately there is going to be much of this as the story of the new movie project is revealed. More of that later.)

The experience was fascinating. Some of the material the actors came out with, I could have written down there and then as polished dialogue. Other parts needed editing, so to speak. To be honest, some moments were so funny that I had to bite down on my lip to stop myself laughing out loud and spoiling the moment. And yes, funny was waht we were aiming for.

Today I am sitting at the laptop, experimenting with scenes for the same movie project. I'm typing dialogue that those same actors might potentially end up saying. The process seems very similar to what we went through yesterday. The lines come to my head and I type them without thinking. OK - I can go back and edit later, but the process feels as if it has that same spontaneity. I'm being the characters, just as the actors were.

The process of writing has a tension between these two tendencies - spontaneity and self-awareness. The creative genius and the critical editor. Both have to co-exist in the mind of the writer. Getting the balance right - that is the trick. As for the actor - is there room for the critic in her/his mind? At least I have the luxury of separating the process of creation from the process of editing.

I suspect that if I understood more of the actor's craft, I would find more parallels.