What’s been happening?

Okay it’s official. I’m crap at blogging. Really crap at it. I said to myself I’ll put some time aside once a week and do a really good blog. Well I didn’t, and no matter what I say now, I probably won’t get any better. So what about one big update now and again? Surely that’ll be alright. So here’s what’s been happening.

CANNES

For those of you who followed our progress on Twitter/Facebook you’ll already know that we had a very productive time over there. We managed to shove the Harold promo in front of nearly thirty sales agents and they were lapping it up. We’ve already had a few follow up communications from agents who are keen to see more. We also got to go to our first party in our three years of attendance, for the bad dad dancing I can only point you to the video evidence in our Cannes film http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=10150194828140137

EDITING

It’s been slow. After returning from Cannes one thing became very clear, I was skint. So I had to dive into a few months of work in order to keep the cart on the tracks. This sadly took me away from editing on Harold and has put us back a bit. Me and Richard sat down for three days and watched all of the rushes, taking detailed notes and laughing a lot. We’ve definately got a great film in the making. We’re hoping to get a first cut done by the end of August and then shoot the extra bits we need. Our music man Tom Kane is already on board and working a few ideas up for the score. Normally this gets left until the last minute, but I’m keen to build the music into the edit process as early as possible.

FUNDING AND COMPETITIONS

We’ve been trying to raise awareness of the film in a variety of ways and everyones been very helpful in spreading the word. The first major thing is an attempt to get funding to help us finish the film. To do the final film justice we need the talents of a great audio mixer and a colourist (make the image pretty). So I have put out an appeal on indieGoGo here http://www.indiegogo.com/stiffmovie in the hope of raising some finishing funds. Please, please, please spread the word on this and help us get there. The second thing is the International Trailer Festival. We’ve put the Harold trailer on there and it’s open for voting. Please again go and vote and try to get anyone else to, it might mean that we can get some money this way to help us finish. You can go here and look for the Harold’s Going Stiff trailer http://www.internationalmovietrailerfestival.com/?p=trailers (currently we only have 76 votes, that’s poor, c’mon)

VIDEO UPDATES

We’ve had a few more video updates posted, including the Meat-a-rino ad with Eleanor James featured which is fun. We’ve had some amazing feedback from the Canon 7D film, it had over seven hundred hits in less than a week. You can see all the video updates here http://www.stiffmovie.com (click on video)

More soon.

Keith.

Wrightblogger.com becomes keithwrightstuff.com - Why?

Wrightblogger now becomes Keith Wright Stuff because of the rather boring issue of search engine optimisation (SEO to it’s friends) Basically it’s better to include your full name in the URL (so I’m informed) for search engine results. Dull, I know, but necessary.

I’m also going to be including a video dungeon section of films from my teenage years, that is, once I’ve managed to dust of the old VHS tapes. Be prepared, be very prepared…

K.

Harold’s Going Stiff - A piece of cake (as long as it’s Battenberg)

Okay, so I was rubbish at doing regular updates like I said I would, in fact I was hoping to do a couple of video blogs during the shoot of Harold’s Going Stiff, but in reality that was never going to happen, especially when you consider that on one day during the shoot I went to bed at 4am and had to be up again at 6.30am to start shooting.       

So did we manage to shoot it in five days? The simple answer is no, it actually took us about seven days in the end, but if we hadn’t had a few little niggles along the way I suspect we may have brought it in at five and half days. Luckily we’d planned for going over a couple of days anyway and the cast and crew were already expecting a seven-day week from the outset.

Our production base was a beautifully renovated Edwardian house called The Parsonage just on the outskirts of Penistone, Sheffield, teetering just on the edge of the beautiful Peak District National Park. With several bedrooms, a large dinning room, kitchen, two lounges, one of which we converted into a production office (well, we just put a computer in it) not only was The Parsonage a place for us to eat, meet and sleep, it was also to provide us with locations for some of the films key scenes. This decision to put the main cast and crew in one big house turned out to be a massive advantage in terms of speed of production. In the evenings we could plan the next day together, we could get up early and start shooting, and when we set off to locations we all went together as a convoy, eliminating the usual problems of people getting lost or just not turning up on time.

We had a small crew of about eight people includingmyself and that was broken down into, producer, sound recordist, two make-up artists, production assistant, runner/stills and catering. This level of people worked out really well for us in the end, all of the key bases were covered in terms of getting the key stuff on the screen (great sound and make-up) and keeping people happy behind the scenes (great food and transportation) We never seemed to be struggling with people-power on set, in fact I suspect that if we’d had more people it may have just slowed us down.

The Sunday before the first days shoot I was a bag of nerves for a number of reasons. The first was my concerns with the script, which was really only a first draft, it was full of holes, spelling mistakes and only sixty pages long (most feature scripts are 90-120 pages) In writing the script I’d planned to leave out any dialogue so as to encourage an improvised and more naturalistic style during the shoot, but actually it turned out to be almost impossible to write scenes without dialogue, mainly because without it you have no real measure of character or the interactions between them. As it turned out I needed not worry, my incessant chants of “please don’t learn the script” did seem to pay off in the end and most of the dialogue was improvised around a set of ideas and key points.

All of the cast turned out to be brilliant, especially our two leads, Stan Rowe and Sarah Spencer, who both went through an emotional rollercoaster during the shoot. Sarah certainly threw herself into the dramatic climax with gusto, and you know that stuff is working when some of the crew begin to get emotional during takes. Lee, Andy and Richard as the vigilante zombie killers turned out to be a fantastic combination together, and it’s almost annoying that Lee had some of the best lines in the film, none of which were written by me, “Times up crusty cock” is a personal favourite.

A number of people have been asking me how we shot so fast, and really it boils down to a number of factors. Firstly we shot everything hand-held, documentary style and with as much available light as possible. I’ve never been a massive fan of tripods anyway, I much prefer to ‘feel’ around a scene rather than have a rigid lock-off. Secondly, because I was effectively director/camera operator it removed the need for me to communicate my visual ideas to another person, I was already plugged into what I needed next to make the edit work, a bit like editing in camera. The third factor really was down to having a small and excellent crew who were always one step ahead of me.

Harold’s Going Stiff has happened very quickly indeed, in fact if we complete by the end of August as I hope we will, the whole thing from inception, scriptwriting, shoot and post will have taken about eight months in total, which compared to my last feature, Take me to Your Leader, is an absolute breeze (Leader took nearly 4 years due to the improvised style and editing)

So what’s the plan now? Well Cannes is nearly upon us and so we have to move quickly to deliver a top-notch trailer/promo that we hope will secure interest from distributors. Originally we did have plans to take a first cut of the film, but that seems like a foolish proposition now. Besides, when we did the rounds last year with distributors (with our planned feature Murmur) they barely had time to look at a two minute promo, never mind a feature. But this year we have one major advantage that I hope will help prick up the ears of distributors… we’ve already shot it.

I’ve been incredibly lucky to work with some great talent on this project, and as I sit here now waiting for more of the rushes to encode into the edit suite I can already see that we might just have something a bit special on our hands. The aim from the outset with Harold’s Going Stiff was clear – To make a commercially appealing film with some emotional depth. So, a zombie film yes, but a zombie film, I hope, with heart and soul.

http://www.stiffmovie.com

Final week of prep…

Well a lot has happened since I last did an update… we’ve shot our prologue, we’ve shot a fake ad for a meat product and we’ve been casting and scripting like crazy.. Curently we are scheduling for our shoot that starts next Monday in Sheffield/Barnsley.

You know what they say about making no-budget movies, keep it small, small cast, one or two locations, well so far I’ve managed to ignore all of that and I’m pushing everything to the the limit. We have a cast of about thirty (some are little parts though) and about 30 exterior scenes set on the unpredictable rolling hills of the Peak District, including a cave/zombie scene.

Casting in Pensitone was great fun and we found some brilliant characters, in truth we got far more people than we had ever anticipated. We are almost fully cast now, which is a relief. We also got a mention in the local paper and we made Penistone FM. Brill.

The prologue is looking good for a rough cut and we’ll have it up soon enough. But the script has changed considerably since we shot, so it will be very much re-shaped for the actual film.

More tests with the 7D have highlighted the problems of shooting dual sound, ie. recording the sound separate to the camera. It’s basically like working on film again, you have to spend a lot of time synchronising before you actually edit. But still, the images are nothing short of stunning, as you can see from this ungraded still image of the Meat-a-rino ad we shot with Eleanor James.

I’m really excited now about the shoot.. and I’ll try to do as much updating as possible.

K.

Follow it here:

www.stiffmovie.com

Zombie inspiration

In an attempt to make our zombies look a little more original I have turned to a perhaps an unusual source…

Harold’s Going Stiff - UPDATE

It’s been a while since my last update on Harold’s Going Stiff. So where are we at? Well we have secured almost all of our filming locations and our production base. Because we are trying to shoot in five days it is key that everything will be within easy access. Our production base is a beautiful Edwardian country manor house which will sleep all of our cast and crew and also double as a location for some of the shoot. We have also secured our bungalow which we thought would be a nightmare to get. We don’t have a location manager so we litterally had to walk around and hope to bump into the right people. In fact everything fell into our lap when we visited a nearby church and accidentally fell upon a Coffee morning. From there we managed to secure almost all of our locations via one local contact. Pure luck.

From there we visited our bungalow location where we met a dear old lady called Constance who now spends most of her time writing hymns. In fact she’s such a character that I’m going to try and work her into the film somehow. She even did a little song and dance for us. Filmmaking can be a bizarre business, one minute your eating bacon and eggs, the next your stood in some strangers front room listening to hymns.

From there we discovered a disused community centre where we are hoping to film one of our bigger zombie scenes. It doesn’t have any electric so we are going to have to be creative or run a very long cable from our production base nearby (hmm not sure about that one yet)

The script is coming along nicely, albiet slower than I had hoped. My plan was to have a first draft by the end of January, but halfway through Feb and I’m still only sixty pages in. I have to get my head down because we really need to have a second draft at least  before we shoot. To be fair there will be a lot of improvisation around what I’ve written so the dialogue is less important, but the structure is key. I do have my ending in place though, which means I can kind of work backwards.

The best news though is that we have managed to secure our lead actor for the part of Harold. Casting for older people can be a painful process, mainly because you get so few applicants. In fact when I did my casting call on Casting Call Pro I only got one applicant for Harold and nearly 30-40 for the younger roles. Luckily I had worked with Stan Rowe before and I knew he would be comfortable with my shooting style which often involves playing around with ideas on set and maybe veering away from the script. Myself and Richard Guy, the producer,  went to meet Stan at his home and chat about the project and we even did a little test shoot. He’s feeling very right for the project.

We’ve shot a few tests now with the Canon 7D, all handheld at the moment, I’ve just taken delivery of the Zacuto-Z Finder which makes critical focusing much easier. I’ve also ordered a Redrock Micro EyeSpy shoulder mount rig. I’m more at home with a shoulder mounted camera, in fact almost all of this film will be shot hand-held so stability and comfort are essential for me as an operator. We are still looking at post workflows between Avid and FCP at the moment. I’m personally more of an Avid editor but we might go FCP for this project just because that will give us more flexibility in a number of areas. I’ve been doing some tests between the various Apple ProRes formats and so far the ProRes LT looks absolutley fine for working with. I can see no difference between the LT and HQ formats in split screen tests.

So it’s on with the script for me and I’ll try to post some of our test footage soon.

Keep checking www.stiffmovie.com for updates

Keith