Ladies And Gentlemen

I think there comes a time in everyone’s life when they start to question whether they’ve missed the boat, whether there was something they should have been doing by now, but that, for whatever reason, kept being put off for another day. That’s where I find myself this year. I set up a production company at 23 with no experience and a pretty pitiful set of skills, but I did have two great friends who took the plunge with me and together we worked like fiends, never sleeping, taking any and every job we could lay our hands on till we had established the company and given ourselves a huge platform to build careers on. During that time I worked on everything from commercials to big tv shows, gaining invaluable experience along the way, and sleeping very little, learning just how hard you can work when you care about something.

Ladies & Gentleman follows the lives of a number of same sex relationships in various stages of disrepair and was written by Robert Lucas.

When I set up the company I wanted to be a feature film director. We wrote endless strategy documents naively assuming that, at our current rate of success, we’d be producing our first film within three years. Fast forward eight years and I’ve left the company, now working as a freelancer and still not producing that film. The fact is, if we’d written a script and just got ballsy enough to try and make it when we were still 24 or 25 I have no doubt we’d have somehow pulled it off – we were arrogant, irritating, naïve and brimming with ideas and energy. But we didn’t. We held off, trying to establish a solid platform for ourselves so that when we were ready to make the film it wouldn’t kill us. Nothing wrong with that, except that the process of building that platform became so important it eclipsed everything else and exhausted all that positive energy and naivety. We became professionals, carefully managing just how much of our creative energies we exercised on jobs, depending on how much we were being paid. That mercenary approach will keep your business afloat but it just doesn’t work when you’re trying to punch your way into an incredibly difficult job. You have to be prepared to scrap with every fibre of your being for everything that you want and never ever let go till you’ve got it. The professional life beat that out of me so I had to change. I left the company I had set up, poured my heart and soul into, worked 10 consecutive 22 hour days for – it was a wrench. But it worked. I got my mojo back. It took a year and a half but I’m now ready to break down all the doors and make a serious impression on the walls too. Good times.

I will be documenting the whole process and hopefully shedding some light not just on DSLRs but on my unconventional, unschooled approach to filmmaking in general

Drama is deceptively tough. Don’t get me wrong, all production is complicated, skilled work but there’s something about the peculiar ballet of drama that makes it such a challenge. It brings together the very best in every department and we’re so used to seeing it done well that when it’s done to a mediocre standard it’s really obvious. Forging a career as a drama director involves a huge amount of risk, poverty and disappointment (most of the time). You’re stuck in a pretty nasty chicken and egg situation and you need to do something unique and extraordinary in order to create a good enough reel to showcase your ideas, but there’s only so many times you can get it wrong. Directing is a skill you learn on the job and there’s no way round that – I never went to film school, sometimes I wish I had, but mostly I’m glad I learned things the way I did because the lessons have stuck. It’s so hard to get anything made because the funding schemes (in the UK) are insanely over-subscribed, perhaps too p.c. for their own good, and dwindling in size faster than you can say Tory Government. Despite having a massive CV, a wealth of production experience and a big reel of work that has earned me awards and nominations I can’t get funding for anything because I don’t have any real fiction work on my reel, and because I just don’t tick any boxes, at all. A lot of directors do find funding and I often find the work they produce to be far below the standard I would expect of myself and it makes me really really really really really really really angry. Genuinely, teeth gnashingly, frustrated and pissed off that a system supposedly designed to champion great new talent won’t support me, but this is the timeless struggle of the creative and I really need to stop crying like a baby. Which is precisely why I decided to put myself forward for Ladies and Gentlemen. However, it’s completely unpaid, will be demanding lots of my time and energy, use up all my weekends and we have almost no money to make it. So why do it?

We’ll be shooting mostly on the 5D (and yes it’s good enough for Greg Yaitanes and Shane Hurlbut so why worry, right?) but, for all my experience with the cameras, I’m still bricking it. It’s not a perfect tool, stuff goes wrong, bits break, cameras overheat, rolling shutter, moiré…

Firstly, the team behind it, Disclosure Pictures are young, bright, enthusiastic and are backing the project with their own money. Also, they’re not bullshitters. Production seems to be populated by every shade of bullshitter in the browniverse of wankmongery. I turn round and walk in the other direction every time I encouter a producer trying to dazzle me with who they know and how much more they know than me when the only thing they’ve ever produced is the constant stream of effluent erupting from their mouths. I hate bullshitters with every fibre of my being and I refuse to work with them. Disclosure’s producers are not and that’s a big draw. Secondly, the material is good, and it sits very neatly in what could be classed as a gaping chasm in my current reel. I’ve made tons of music videos, nice and pretty, or grungy, or effects heavy. Nothing uber high production value, but enough to know how to do the bobby dazzler. The films I have made up till now featured minimal dialogue and focused on non-verbal storytelling, something in which I personally place a huge amount of importance. However, my lack of dialogue work is apparently a major failing and one of the many reasons why my funding applications have failed thus far so it’s something I need to remedy. Finally, in order to really challenge for work in drama, you need an agent. Having a piece of long form drama on my reel will make me genuinely stand out from the short films of similarly placed directors and this is my big play. I’m not that old but I really do need to get a move on and make that play soon and when this opportunity arose it was a no-brainer to do my best to win over the producers.

Ladies & Gentleman follows the lives of a number of same sex relationships in various stages of disrepair and was written by Robert Lucas. Robert is also producing along with Linda Taimre and Jo Defendi. The script is witty, challenging and contains huge wads of truth with messy relationships that give the actors plenty to work with. We’ve developed and developed the script to make the scenes work harder for us and a future post will deal with exactly how we did that as it’s such a crucial part of filmmaking and one which isn’t perhaps always approached in the right way. We’ve assembled a really bright cast of actors and with those two giant pieces of the puzzle in place there was of course the thorny problem of what to shoot on as we literally have no money to work with.

On one-day shoots I can generally persuade a friend with a RED to come and help me for a film but the schedule for Ladies and Gentlemen necessarily demands a huge commitment of time from whoever gets involved, all unpaid. Yes, we’re working weekends, but it’s summertime and there’s a World Cup going on! It was a pretty straightforward decision to commit to DSLRs pretty early on, firstly because of the ease of access to the gear (I own it all), but also because there were huge opportunities for sponsorship to help us get the pilot made in return for blogging, writeups and banners etc., more on that in a future update. While I have no fears about using my 7D for jobs where it represents a significant and justifiable difference to the cameras we’d normally use i.e. an EX1, here it feels like a much scarier proposition. I’m used to the trusty solidity of the RED, its ludicrous resolution and those lovely RED primes.

We’ll be shooting mostly on the 5D (and yes it’s good enough for Greg Yaitanes and Shane Hurlbut so why worry, right?) but, for all my experience with the cameras, I’m still bricking it. It’s not a perfect tool, stuff goes wrong, bits break, cameras overheat, rolling shutter, moiré… We’re going to be a guerilla indie unit of the finest kind, we’re not the first to shoot drama on these cameras but there will be plenty of trip ups along the way, some camera related, others not. I will be documenting the whole process and hopefully shedding some light not just on DSLRs but on my unconventional, unschooled approach to filmmaking in general. There’s much to learn, and as I said before, much you can only learn on the job. This is a huge opportunity for me to make that crucial step into the really rewarding work I hanker after. Time to put my money where my mouth is: am I really as good as I think I am?

The first weekend. The week before the first day of a shoot I’m usually a bundle of nerves and I’m terrible at sitting down for any period of time as I’m constantly questioning everything and getting wound up about whether my ideas are any good or not. I’m very good at winging it, turning up on set and working everything out on the spot. That’s horrible for the production crew who are trying to put all the pieces in place for you and service the budget. So, this time I’ve had to be organised. That means putting my shotlist in place early in the week and being properly organised. I always find that I lose the spontaneity and spark of the ideas born on the set but you have to find a happy medium somewhere.

There’s no point ranting and raving about what you do or don’t have when you’re doing this kind of guerilla shoot.

First cast read-through was Thursday night with an opportunity to meet the young crew and quiz them on their knowledge of DSLRs. It’s amazing just how much people are shooting on them these days and the guys really know their stuff. I guess you have to. I think they also appreciate how much I know about the gear as well. I really enjoy the banter with the crew on set and being able to talk knowledgeably about a department that isn’t normally yours helps set a healthy relationship in place so you can get working faster and better. We have a delightful, sparky, cast and the read-through was highly entertaining. These get togethers are important as they allow the whole cast to understand the dynamics of the story and how their characters drive the narrative forward. You also forget that, while the crew are present on every single shoot day, the cast drop in and out, doing days here and there. So, giving everyone an opportunity to feel part of something big and exciting helps them feel it’s worth giving everything for.

The production company, Disclosure Pictures, have the tiniest budget to work with and everyone’s giving their time for biscuits and travelcards which is a massive commitment and hugely generous. I always feel a great responsibility to make that worth their while. So, on Day 1 I really wanted to get out of the blocks fast, get a really strong day’s filming in the can and build from there. We’d given ourselves a relatively easy opening day (or so we thought) with few cast members, and relatively straightforward setups, but first days are always slow and tedious and so it proved. The flat we were shooting in is pretty small and there was just no room to move in at all, plus it’s a lot of white walls which just makes life difficult for the dop to do his job. My monitor was recently buggered when I lent it to a music video shoot, so we had to hire in a monitor. Unfortunately it didn’t have an HDMI connector so we had to use the Blackmagic HDMI to SDI converter to pump the signal through BNC cables. These are way more stable, have locking connectors and can travel much further distances so they’re much better suited to production environments. On the downside the converter requires power for which we had v-lock batteries, but without any kind of tap for pulling the power to the converter, we were kind of stuffed.

Tell a great story with great actors and you will be forgiven a mutitude of sins but if the acting’s crap then you might as well go home.

Brian Valente at Redrock Micro has given us some kit including their microbalance which will allow us to mount v-lock batteries to the back of the redrock rig which forms the basis of our kit but it hasn’t turned up yet so we’re kind of having to make all this up as we go along! So, lots of power cables running to the converter and the monitor. That’s fine for indoor locations where you have access to power but when we shot outside we had to ditch the monitor and use the back of the camera. I’m always banging on about how important it is to have a monitor for DSLR work and yet at the end of the day, for reasons I will explain, I was shooting on the 85mm 1.2 at f1.4, with an actress walking towards me, pulling focus myself, with no marks, just off the back of the camera. Messy.

We had a stand-in gaffer and a stand-in focus puller who are both young and hungry but the focus puller had to leave at six, and worse still, the dop had to leave at 9. We didn’t finish till midnight. In the last three hours I had to operate and the gaffer had to light. That’s really not ideal when you really need to focus on helping your cast deliver a great performance. When you’re doing low budget your reliance on the cast is brought into sharp focus. Tell a great story with great actors and you will be forgiven a mutitude of sins but if the acting’s crap then you might as well go home. There’s no point ranting and raving about what you do or don’t have when you’re doing this kind of guerilla shoot. The miracle is that you’re there at all. DSLRs have made that possible for us and you just have to find a way to make it work somehow. When I took over operating I discovered that the camera had been set to 1600 ISO all afternoon when we had full control of the lighting and the scene so I was pretty miffed about that. Put it down to lack of experience with the camera from some of the crew. Never mind!

The 5D is the camera those lenses are designed for and you can really tell . . . . The detail and the resolution of the shots is mind-blowing.

At the end of day 1 we were shooting day for night which caused us real problems and it took us a long time to match the different parts of the sequence. When the DOP left it was up to me to operate and work out the best way of handling the shot and pull focus while doing it. Not ideal at all. I think we got away with it but it didn’t leave me feeling particularly positive about the first day. Fortunately the second day was a significant improvement. We shot a lesbian love scene which brings its own unique challenges and we had a larger crew which helped significantly in getting what we needed done quicker. We still had to move a scene as it’s taking us so long to get lit and blocked, but we’ll improve as the shoot evolves. It was sobering listening to Rodney Charters talk about how quickly they did things on 24 – madness. I’m also having to learn as a director, abandoning my normal music video style coverage for something simpler with more room to breath and placing more faith in my master shots. I’m not used to that but it’s a necessity on drama where there are so many more technical considerations to worry about, above all sound.

Canon have provided us with a set of lenses: 14mm f2 L, 35mm f1.4 L, 50mm f1.2 L, 85mm f1.2 L and 100mm f2 and I also have my 24-70 f2.8 L. We were shooting on the 5D and as expected the focus provides a unique and wonderful challenge. Each lens has its own unique focus ring and some throw further than others. The 100mm is incredibly twitchy, tiny movements sending you way out of focus, whereas the 85mm seems to have nearly 270 degrees of throw which causes completely the opposite problem. I’d bought an 18 inch Redrock focus whip as the camera’s so lightweight it really transmits vibrations from the follow focus when you touch it and we wanted to avoid that wherever possible. We’re a slow crew at the moment and the focus is a real problem, firstly because the focus barrels have no end stops and you have be careful not to overreach the limit as then your marks are out. Also, it’s often very hard to really judge whether you’re genuinely in focus from the monitor. When you’re shooting drama it’s absolutely critical.

Much more to talk about in subsequent posts but one final word on how it looks now I’ve seen the rushes. Astonishingly good. The 5D is the camera those lenses are designed for and you can really tell. No sign of the tell-tale H264 encoding junk on almost all the shots. The detail and the resolution of the shots is mind-blowing. It has a quality completely unlike anything I’ve been able to shoot on my 7d and I’m very glad we made the decision to shoot on the DSLRs. They’re an almighty pain in the bum to use for detailed precise work like drama, but I get to work through my rushes seeing stunning beautiful work that will only improve with grading. That’s very very gratifying. Next week we’re shooting night time exteriors and a monster day of interiors which we’re hoping to be able to present on Ustream for a couple of hours so people can log in and see what we’re up to. One weekend down and five to go.

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