Six things you should never do... if you are in a movie

1. If there has been a murder recently, trust the police to look into it rather than starting an investigation of your own. Follow this instruction even if you knew the victim.

2. Just because a building is creepy it doesn’t mean you have any right to break into it on a whim.

3. Just because the front door opens when you push it, doesn’t mean it is a good idea to step inside and look around. Consider the possibility that the opposite may be true.

4. On finding an old book or box in the house, don’t take a deep breath and blow the dust off the top. A slightly damp cloth will do the job far better without giving you or your fellow searchers an asthma attack.

5. However much time you feel it will save you in your search, never say, “let’s split up.”

6. On tripping over body in the dark, immediately call the police (see point 1). They may remind you of points 2 and 3, but will realise you are more likely to be a stupid person than a killer.

Four Plot Problems

There comes a time when the novel or screenplay gets pitched. That's when the product of our imagination and perspiration gets boiled down to a few short lines of prose - the story in a nutshell.

With all the gorgeous imagery stripped away, with all the texture, twists, turns and sub-plots gone, the producer, agent or publisher see our stories laid bare. It is an unforgiving moment - one in which any fundamental plot problems will probably be exposed. These are issues I try to anticipate BEFORE getting to the end of the writing process.

Here are four classic plot problems that should be clear by the time 25% of the story has been written.

• We don’t identify with the protagonist. She/he may be in danger, in love or in pain but ultimately we don’t care.

• The trigger is not big enough to make us believe the protagonist will do the things she/he will need to do in the story.

• The trigger is reversible, so we do not believe the protagonist will stay the course when things get really tough. She/he should simply turn around and go back home to live a quiet life.

• The protagonist is too passive – events happen and the protagonist reacts. The protagonist has become a character drifting down a river rather than actively swimming, someone that events happen to rather than a person who initiates change.
  

Strangeness in Stories

I'm putting together a workshop on storycraft for inclusion in a filmmaking course later in the year. Preparing the worksheets has set me thinking about the question of 'strangeness' in stories.

When people describe the archetypal patterns found in traditional stories they sometimes talk about the 'ordinary world' and the 'strange world'. The ordinary world is the home life of the protagonist before he/she starts the quest. The strange world is the unfamiliar landscape the protagonist will pass through before reaching the goal, whatever that may be.

This transition from ordinary to strange isn't confined to traditional hero epics. It comes up again and again in modern movies and novels.

The ordinary world may not be ordinary to us, the audience. But it is ordinary to the protagonist. If the protagonist is a racing driver, 'ordinary' means hurtling around the track at 150mph.

In a similar way, the strange world may not be strange to us, the audience, but will definitely be strange to the protagonist. One of the most important qualities of the strange world is that the rules the protagonist used to live by no longer hold good.

2D Cinema vs 3D

The 2D vs 3D cinema debate rumbles on, though the studios seem committed to the new technology.

In the old days of cinema, before polarising glasses, I never used to sit irritated in the dark thinking - this is far too flat for me. Why? Because through the art of the cinematographer, the image projected onto the 2D screen had 3D depth.

It is a trick of the mind and the eye so subtle that I was never even aware of it until I started to make films myself. The subject - the thing on the screen which the film maker wanted to direct my eye to - was in perfect focus. Other things, closer to the camera or further away, were softened. The slightest of out-of-focus blur.

This so closely maps onto the way we experience depth of field in everyday life that in watching a 2D movie, the mind tells us some things are further away and other things closer. A flat screen becomes 3D.

But in the old days those three dimensions were trapped behind the screen. Modern 3D extends out into the space between the screen and the audience. It offers that spooky moment when the Cheshire Cat hovers in the air just in front of you and speaks in Stephen Fry's voice.


For that moment of magic however, a payment is required. A thirty percent loss in colour. The hassle of having a pair of uncomfortable glasses pressing down on your nose - over your own glasses if you are short sighted like me. And a substantially more expensive cinema ticket.

There is also a strange mismatch between the old and the new systems of indicating depth. The subject is still in focus, the background and foreground are out of focus. But now some of those out of focus things are floating around in the air just in front of you. I find my eye is no longer pulled only to the thing I should be looking at, but jumps between things at different depths. They remain out of focus, which my brain finds hard to accept. The experience is disorientating and mildly unpleasant.

Perhaps we are in an age similar to the end of the silent era, when cinematographers were experimenting with the new technology and hadn't quite got it right. Or perhaps this is an unneeded technology. Time will tell. But for now, given the option, I'll be going for 2D screenings.

And here, for your enjoyment, is Mark Kermode and Simon Miller's revolutionary invention - glasses that allow you to see 3D screenings in spectacular, immersive 2D.

The difference between Story and Reality

What is the difference between story and reality? According to Mark Twain: "Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't."

Tom Clancy made a similar observation: "The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense." However, he also commented on the overlap between the two: "I've made up stuff that's turned out to be real, that's the spooky part."

In his superb filmmaking masterclass last month, Chris Jones said: "The brain cannot tell the difference between a story and reality." That is why we cry watching a sad movie and scream watching horror. He also said: "Stories are about communicating truths not facts."

My take on it is this: Reality is a tangled knot made from an infinite number of threads. The full blinding complexity and intensity of it is available for us to experience in the 'now'. But as soon as events have past and we look back on what has happened, we start to order our memories into a narrative. From the tangle, we extract a single thread. That becomes the reality of our past.

As storytellers we do the same thing - extracting one thread from the mass of possibilities, cutting it to make a beginning and cutting it again to make an end. Then we present that to our audience.

The Poster Test

I'm still digesting all the information from Chris Jones's amazing film making masterclass. When I wrote about it a few days ago, I promised to write more regarding lessons that novelists could take from the class.

One of the things in Chris's course that struck me most forcefully was a test he used in deciding whether/how to proceed with a film making project based on the title, strapline and poster image.

Does the title alone tell the potential audience what sort of story to expect? Or does it mislead? Does it imply a story or not? What about the strapline - does that help? And the same question goes for the poster image. Unless you have a HUGE advertising budget, your potential audience will make their decision to part with money or not based on this information alone: title, strapline and poster image.

How about these for movie titles that imply a story:

Home Alone
Snakes on a Plane
Star Wars

And for a perfect strapline:

Alien - in space no one can hear you scream

And a poster that tells the audience all they need to know about the kind of film to expect:

Chris described how he had designed three posters for one film project but couldn't get any of them quite right. Thus the film remains unmade. The poster test was revealing a flaw that would have come back to bite him at the point of trying to sell the movie - an ambiguity in genre and audience.

Perhaps novelists think they are above such base commercialism. But it seems to me that we have a lot to learn from filmakers. Even if money doesn't matter to you as a writer, surely having readers matters hugely. And in this game, one equates to the other.

So how about it? Before getting stuck into a long writing project, choose a title, a strapline and a cover image. Who is going to buy that book? Where will it be sold? And if you are really happy with your answers to those questions - why not write the back-blurb? Fifty words of hard sell. Do a mock-up of the book cover. Ask twenty friends what they think of it. Better still, ask twenty strangers.

Even if we don't like to think of our work in these terms, be sure that editors and agents have to.

Marantz PMD661 field recorder

Excitement yesterday as a parcel containing my new Marantz PMD661 field recorder arrived at the door. Having a new toy does tend to throw my day out of equilibrium. Instead of writing two thousand words of novel, I unpacked the box and started to explore a new world of high quality sound recording.


My choice of the Marantz over other field recorders came from an extensive survey of reviews on the Internet - reviews penned by people who know more about sound recording than I ever will. Without getting too technical here, I'll say that I needed a recorder that would take an external microphone input via balanced XLR connectors. I wanted it to record onto memory cards, have reasonable battery life and as good a quality preamplifier as I could afford.

Of all the review sites, the most helpful was the one at Wingfield Audio - with its superb table of sound samples from different machines. And I eventually found the best UK price at Pink Noise Systems, who were so helpful that I will certainly be checking their website if I need more audio kit in future.

So - now it is out of the box and I've had 24 hours to play with it, I have to report that I love everything about the Marantz PMD661. The look and feel of the machine are very satisfying. Plugging in a good microphone and a set of reasonable headphones is like having bionic hearing. I don't know where to take it that is quiet enough to find out how good the preamp really is - but so far so good. Yesterday I thought I detected a slight hum - but then realised I was hearing the fan in my laptop some distance away.

If I can figure out how to embed audio into this blog, I'll share some recordings in the near future.

Guerilla Filmmakers Masterclass

The Guerilla Filmmakers Masterclass by Chris Jones is a huge journey crammed into 2 intense days. It is film making from story conception through screenwriting, production, post-production and premier all the way to film sales and beyond to the development of your career in film.

Thanks to the work of Hive Films, Creative Leicestershire, Phoenix Square and of course Chris Jones himself, this workshop was brought to Leicester. And thus for the last two days I have been sitting, absorbing what felt like gigabytes of information. Some of it I knew before. Much of it was new to me. It was by stages uplifting, fascinating and frankly terrifying. In short, it was reality.

All the information I might have been able to dig up from books and the Internet. But nowhere could I have had the whole package served in one go. The effect of this was quite startling. Going through the journey of the filmmaker in two days from start to finish gives a sense of perspective. It lets you see the whole thing - every stage in its place.

And having seen the big picture, I can now go and learn more about the individual parts of the process and understand where they fit into the whole. Short of having done it - having made a feature film and taken it to market - short of that I can't imagine a better way to get perspective on the process.

If you are thinking of making your first feature film I strongly advise you to attend this excellent course. It'll be the best money you spend on your project.

I'll write more about one or two specifics in a later post - particularly some lessons that I will be taking from this into my novel writing.

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.

Duck Speaks To Chicken

When I was learning Mandarin Chinese several years ago, I found particular joy in some of the four word sayings that I was being taught. Among these were 'Horse Horse Tiger Tiger' - meaning neither good nor bad. 'Chicken Egg Crack Stone' - meaning a thing is impossible. And my absolute favourite 'Duck Speaks to Chicken' - a phrase describing the situation where two people talk but, coming from vastly different starting points, completely fail to understand each other.

Well, Duck Speaks to Chicken is the perfect phrase to describe an argument (debate seems to imply too much reason) presently raging between the communications union BECTU and individuals desiring to protect the new wave of low-to-no budget independent film making.

On the side of the union are people who believe it is wrong for anyone to offer their work or free. On the side of the independent film makers are people who believe that any form of regulation is an unjustified imposition. And lying heavily between these two groups is the Minimum Wage.

The argument is a fire which has generated lots of smoke but little light. Though I have followed it carefully for a week or so, I still feel unable to offer a summary, such are the claims and counter claims flying about.

The tragedy, of course, is that there are good, well-meaning people on both sides, who do not seem to be able or willing to understand each other's passion. Duck speaks to chicken.

There is undoubtedly exploitation going on, which needs to be stamped down on. But there is also the terrible possibility that whatever quasi-legal framework emerges from this debate it will unintentionally result in the stifling of a new creative movement.

I love the idea that an individual can shoot a film on a cheap camera, edit it on her/his own laptop, broadcast it for free on YouTube or Vimeo, have it viewed by millions and potentially even generate an income from it - without ever having to go to film school or become another brick in the huge edifice of a monolithic studio. It would be a deeply ironic tragic if a well-meaning union inadvertently turned film-making back into the special preserve of the very wealthy.

Have a look at the debate on Chris Jones's website. Or look at the BECTU article on this, entitled 'High on Creativity Low on Ethics? Indi-Film Making in the Frame'

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

Zombie Undead

A couple of years ago I was showing my film 'Pixacillus' at a bar screening alongside a number of other shorts. In the intermission a very tall man with a goatee beard pushed through the crowd to introduce himself. This was my first meeting with Rhys Davis.

A few months later, I bumped into him again at a zombie makeup workshop at the old Phoenix in Leicester. I learned that he and writer Kris Tearse were working on a full-length zombie movie. Would I like to be a zombie in the movie? he asked. Yes, I said. Of course.

But when the call came, it wasn't to be a zombie. They were looking for someone to play a doctor. A speaking rather than a groaning part.

A word here about timescales. Movies are usually shot in a month or two. You get everyone together, plan your schedule carefully and you work day after day until it is done. Rhys and Kris had devised a different approach.

By writing the movie so the bulk of it takes place inside an evacuation centre, and by securing weekend use of some large buildings at De Montfort University, they made it possible to shoot on odd days through the year - without worrying about the massive continuity problems that would have arisen through trees losing their leaves etc had they been shooting outside.

Thus Zombie Undead was shot on occasional weekend days over a 2 year period. On that basis, cast and crew volunteered their time. I don't know what the eventual budget was, but we must be talking less than Avatar spent on paperclips.

Tonight it premiers at Phoenix Square.

Huge congratulations to Kris and Rhys. It is a massive achievement.

'Forty three Pounds' the movie

Are movies Speciating?

Speciation is the process whereby one species of animal or plant becomes two. It can happen, for example, when a physical barrier such as a mountain range or an ocean separates two populations and they start to evolve along different tracks. After a time they become so different from each other that they can no longer inter-breed.

Comparing ultra high budget movies such as Avatar to very low budget movie such as White Angel or Zombie Undead, we still find enough of an overlap to suggest that they have not speciated yet. But is that the direction they are travelling?

The barrier that separates them is money.

A low budget movie will struggle to even get a cinematic release. Avatar just made a billion dollars from the box office in 17 days. Low returns push low budget directors to very low budget and very low budget to 'zero' budget. Immense returns push the mega movie producers to ever bigger spectacle.

How many planets can we blow up this time?

The challenge, it seems to me, is for the makers of very low budget movies to find ways of generating an income stream. Otherwise they will become dependent on public arts funding, will become self-indulgent and will lose the creative edge that they potentially have at present.

That is the power of the low budget movie. The creative edge that comes from being able to take risks - risks you couldn't afford if your movie cost as much as Avatar.

3D vs 2D cinema

I haven't come to a conclusion on 3D vs 2D, but following a trip to see Avatar 3D, I do have some thoughts:

1) Wasn't cinema 3D already? I never sat there looking at the screen aware that I was seeing something one dimension short of reality.

2) I hate having to wear the glasses over my own glasses. Perhaps a real myopic 3D lover would get a prescription set made up.

3) Cinema images tell us what to look at by putting some things into focus and some things out of focus. While watching this in 3D, I found my eye jumping around to things at different depths and being confused that they were out of focus. Perhaps I need to learn how to watch a 3D movie.

4) As Rhys Davies pointed out to me yesterday, 2D cinema has depth behind the screen. 3D cinema has depth in front of the screen. These are quite different from each other.

5)Whilst awareness of the glasses does take me out of the film from time to time, there is something intensely immersive about the 3D experience. I suspect I was pulled deeper into the 'reality' of the world I was seeing in Avatar because of it.

6) It is a long time since I have felt a lurch of vertigo at the cinema. But I most certainly did with the 3D of Avatar. That was a really good experience. The weightless scene at the beginning was also particularly effective.

7) There were moments in Avatar where the 3D was breathtakingly beautiful. Particularly the floating, luminous seeds in the forest.

8) I can't help feeling that 3D is being pushed by the studios as a means of fighting back against piracy rather than it being motivated by a desire to expand the scope of the art form. But perhaps it can expand the art form anyway. I am undecided.

9) Silent movies were extended by the introduction of sound. Black and white was extended by the introduction of colour. But it seems to me that in each case it took time for artists to understand how to use the new capacity. Why should it be different in this case?

10) Perhaps when we start getting low budget, indi-produced 3D movies, we will start to see people being brave enough with this new dimension to discover its true capacities.

I'm undecided and with a lot to learn. Your thoughts and comments would be particularly welcome on this.

UPDATE - new article on 2D vs 3D cinema here.

Avatar Review

I hated the Avatar trailer, which projected a corny plot and unbelievable, blue CGI creatures. I might not have gone to see the film at all if James Cameron hadn't been the director. But he was. So I did. I mean, the man created Aliens and Terminator 2 - both formative movie experiences for me. So I had to go.

That's the problem with trailers. There is no time to get immersed in the world of the film. Image and story are reduced to a few seconds. And these days the most likely place to see those images will be a small rectangle on the screen of your laptop.

But in a finely crafted film - as Avatar most certainly is - the film makers have the time and the tools. It is a testament to their skill that watching the movie itself, the strangeness of the imagery never burst the bubble of my belief. Even the flying mountains.

In Avatar James Cameron takes the European genocide of native American peoples and re-writes it, placing it on an alien planet and thus giving himself the space to re-cast the ending. The humans (European-American colonists) want the planet because of its mineral content. The indigenous blue tinted humanoids (native Americans) just want to live in harmony with the ecosystem.



But the humans have a trick that is going to get them into native culture and discover its weaknesses. A human mind can be made to temporarily inhabit a lab-grown alien body. And thus our paralysed hero gets to walk again - as a tall, blue skinned native. And of course, there is love interest along the way. Who was it who called this film 'Smurfahontas'?

Cameron cleverly uses imagery evocative of the destruction of the World Trade Centre to help us feel the obscenity of the destruction of native peoples. (I'm not saying there is any kind of moral equivalence between the two. But that is the power of metaphor - taking feelings that were attached to one event and juxtaposing them with another, without ever having to define logical equations of meaning.)

The film is not carried on the strength of the sci-fi story. The major act climaxes were obvious some 45 minutes before they arrived. This is Hollywood. We know where we're heading. The film is carried by its imagery, movement, immersion and, yes, emotion. It caught me up. I was enthralled. And, unexpectedly, I found myself weeping with emotional release at one particular moment near the end.

It is not, in my opinion, as perfect a film as Aliens or Terminator 2. But is is excellent none-the-less. Don't wait for it to come out on DVD. This is one for the big screen. As for 3D or 2D - perhaps that can wait for another blog posting.

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.

Whirlwind of writing and organising

Some people had suggested that I might have been biting off more than I could chew to be writing TWO screenplays at the same time. However I felt happy enough with that situation, as they were completely different from each other. Thus there was no muddling up of the two plots in my mind.

What they are going to say when I let slip that I am now working on THREE films, I am unsure.

Last week I sat down with Rhys Davies to work on the Memorabilia screenplay and before we started, I shared a couple of movie ideas - things I had been kicking about in my head for a years or so. When I mentioned one of them, his eyes lit up.

We talked more. He threw in some concepts. I came up with new concepts in return. And I know this is going to sound flaky - but we dropped everything and are now rushing towards a fixed date in mid-January for the beginning of the shoot.

For various reasons, I can't tell you the date. Not yet. The date would give the game away.

The start date is implicit in the film idea - as is a funding model and the beginning of a publicity campaign. When an idea like this comes along, you have to make a choice. Let it pass and trust that another will come along at some stage, or go for it. And that, it seems, is what we are doing.