Finding an audience

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Searching for the wherethefuckarewes!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I posted the Lucy & James trailer about a week ago, and have had some good responses to it from a few people. But a few people is the operative word here. I want to reach hundreds, even thousands of people, not just a few. The Internet is a great distribution platform but I’d also say that its one of the hardest to actually reach people as well. Making something, even making something you think is great doesn’t guarantee you an audience.

I’ll be learning a great deal more about this challenge as the series comes closer to the launch date, but it’s going to be a difficult. I have no illusions about that. There’s some great articles about online distribution, about cheating on Youtube to get loads of views!

I think a lot of it comes down to knowing what you’ve made, and who might watch it. Think about your audience, are they people your age, younger, older, married, divorced, middle-class, working-class, unemployed etc. I’ve taken Lucy & James into some people’s homes to preview some rough cuts, and we’ve had some great responses, I take notes, look at peoples faces, ask them what they like, and more importantly, what they don’t like and why. The why is enormously important, and will definitely shape the re-writes I do of the episodes.

It’s not really a surprise that finding an audience is a difficult process. Movies have the same money spent on marketing as they do on making the movie in the first place. Even posting on comedy forums doesn’t make a massive impact to our viewing figures, although we did get some good feedback! Other sites definitely make a big impact, we’ve had our trailer featured on a great website RJ’s written a lovely little piece about it, and I have no doubt we’ll get more viewers through this. Thanks RJ!

Compared to making it, getting it seen by people will be far harder!

So what do you do to get your film seen? Well don’t give up. That’s the first thing. Don’t be too disheartened. Don’t take it personally and keep pushing it around any place you can. And make good work. That’s the most important thing. Make something people can believe in and relate to, that’s personal but not too niche and then hopefully you’ll find that illusive audience. As for getting comments. Well that’s the next step…

 

 

Lucy & James Series Trailer

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Hello! here is the long awaited trailer for the series. We’ve been thinking about it for a while and wanted to get the episodes roughly into shape before thinking about the best / funniest bits. We wanted to tell a bit of the story of the series with the trailer so that’s what we’ve done.

 

Enjoy! Leave comments, share with friends, blog tweet, FB all that Jazz!

 

Editing Episode 2 – The Hangover

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So I’m obviously a brilliant blogger given how long it’s been between posts. We’re actually putting the finishing touches to Episode 2 – The Hangover at the moment.

Since I last blogged, we’ve moved. Hence my not posting. I’m not lazy. Honest!

So what happened next, well we filmed Episode 2 on the Tuesday (in April). Having lost the light at the end of the Monday we had some catching up to do on the Tuesday afternoon before we filmed the “getting drunk” part of the episode in the evening.

They’d only had a mouthful!

The scenes we were filming were after they’ve both found out they’ve lost their jobs. They did what I wish we’d done when we found out. Get hammered!

So for these scenes Lucy and James are getting progressively more and more drunk and more and more silly. I think it’s great when you get pissed at home as a couple, and you get up to all sorts of crazy stuff. We talked about filming these scenes in advance and all agreed that it would be best to do it for real and actually get drunk while we were filming to make their progression into drunkeness all the more real!

Barcadi effects people in different ways. James turns into a rat!

James didn’t need too much encouragement to be honest! We made sure we’d got the scripted scenes down first before they started going for it. As they got more and more drunk we just let the improve flow and got some really great moments. The drunk scenes work really well in the final edit and I’m really pleased we shot them this way. L&J were great and really got into character this way. The electric flute scene really came to life in a way that was even better than I imagined.

So a bottle of cava, some JD and Milk and upteen shots later, they were still going strong and we wrapped at 1am which was amazing given how much we shot. Everyone was fine and no one went too crazy with the drinking, so there was no fluffing of lines to speak of or vomiting! The singing and dancing scenes were all the better for the guys being a bit tipsy. I really felt for James when he was having to pretend to vomit, puking chicken soup in the bin! We mixed lemonade with it (at his request) utterly disgusting if you ask me but did the trick for him! He said it tasted like mulligatawny. Actors eh?

Too many scenes!

Once we wrapped I still had work to do. As the actors bedded down for the night I was busy transferring and backing up the days rushes and checking it was all there. I normally make a point of transferring the CF cards at the end of the day to make sure I haven’t lost anything. At this point I didn’t sync up all the picture and sound and to be honest wish I had because we lost the only sound file I’ve ever lost. Typical! I realised once we got to the edit but to be honest the camera sound is good enough to work with it for this short scene.

EDITING

This was the first episode of 2 and 3 that we’ve cut now, it’s taken about 4/5 days between Nell and I. We have a great work-flow, I’ll sync up and label everything, breaking clips into bins that are labelled with each scene so that it’s easy to pull the bits out and put the scenes together. Nell then does the job I hate and assembles to first cut. The hard part with the edit of this one was getting the improv sections down, it’s taken the longest but they work really well now. I wanted to get a sense of that confused memory you have the next day, when you can remember some of the conversations you’ve had the night before but not all of them! Or necessarily in the right order!

Improv can work really well and we’ve got some great moments that weren’t scripted, but to be honest it can be a curse rather than a blessing if you’re not really careful. I made the characters really clear to Lucy and James, we’ve talked loads about them, had the read-through and they read the scripts in advance and know where their characters are going and the sorts of people they are playing. Sometimes you can just get the actors being themselves in improv and not staying true to who they are playing and that is something to be really wary of. But I think it’s really valuable, sometimes they can surprise you and come out with something way better than what you imagined or wrote in the first place. In one scene when they are getting very drunk, Lucy came out with this great idea of playing Mallets-Mallet using shots! I’ve intercut it with the rest of the scene and it works brilliantly. I’ve always loved Dogme films for their jump cutting and I think for the drunk scenes it works great, I didn’t have lots of covering shots or cutaways but to be honest I think they’d have distracted you from what they are saying. And what they are saying is funny. It took me ages to go through it and cut it up, re-order it, shorten it, re-order it, shorten it. But I think it really captures the sense of being drunk and remembering a conversation the next day.

EXTERIORS

Before we moved out of the flat we also got some exteriors of the flat both at day and at night. Probably could have got more but we didn’t spend ages doing them (we were trying to move at the same time!). We got really lucky with the moon one evening and had an awesome moonlapse shot which has made an appearance. One of the things we felt we lacked from the first episode was exteriors which are used not only to break up the flow of the scenes but also to show the passage of time.

“Boring” but so so so so useful!

The flow of the scenes is what makes a sitcom feel like a sitcom, and breaking up the dialogue and working on good transitions between them has made this episode feel much “bigger” than the first one. It’s a cheap trick but it works so well. Next time you are watching any drama look how many “boring” exterior shots there are, or pauses in the dialogue not looking at people. It’s amazing how something so simple can give the audience time to relax and prepare for the next scene. Not to mention that it makes something feel more like “real” telly.

MUSIC

Music is massively important in drama, effective use of music and silence can make or break any film or tv drama. In comedy is paramount, I’ve watched and enjoyed a lot of the British comedies (Inbetweeners, Peep Show etc) and they love their stings between scenes (Friday Night Dinner, Campus, Green Wing especially) so finding some tunes was really important for this episode. I also really wanted to have some songs playing while they are getting drunk, different music for different times of the evening as well to show the passage of times. Whereas when they are hungover there is no music. I think most drunken nights I’ve had are exactly like that, and you crank the music up when you are drinking most (because you have no idea how loud it is!).

I didn’t always pick out the music before I cut the scenes but I had some tunes like Goodbye Horses and Lady Hear Me Tonight in mind when we were shooting. I picked some songs by People In Planes for the stings between scenes and during some of the day scenes because I really like their music and I think they sound perfect for moving on (and with the jump cuts I’ve used).

In the real world it’d probably have to have less music but for this I really felt it worked well. I wanted Kevin Carter for the dance sequence because I thought it would show their age, plus it’s a great song to dance to and sing along to as well. And then we had the Singstar tracks which we just chose at random on the day. I think they work brilliantly and their mixed attempts at singing them worked great.

There must be 15 songs in there or something, but hopefully I’ve mixed them in well enough that they blend nicely!

GRADING

Once I got the cut done I whacked on the grade. I’m unfortunate in that I don’t have an HD grading monitor on my desk (what poor film-maker does?) so I have to be careful and not go too far in any direction.

The first thing was to differentiate between the day and night scenes. As the night was meant to be sort of a flashback I went for a grainy, desaturated, high contrast look with very bright highlights and a vignette. For the daytime in contrast I added some saturation and brightened the mids and highlights. I find with DSLR footage it tends to be a little undersaturated and a little lacking in ping when I get to the grade. I use the Marvels Cine setting with my 7D which works great and gives you a lovely image that’s easy to manipulate in the grade, much better than any of the default looks or indeed one you can create in the camera.

The ungraded look is pretty uninspiring but a great platform to work from.

Ungraded

The first grade I applied to the film and then spent hours rendering. At the moment I’ve just re-graded it all and it’s been rending an hour now (it’s only 6 minutes down the timeline!). The first grade however was a bit of a disaster. I’d pushed it too far.

First grade. Too much vignette too much saturation. Just too much!

We watched it back on an unforgiving LCD TV of a friends and it looks terrible. Skin tones were oversaturated during the daytime scenes. The night scenes were overly grainy. So I toned it back. And now it looks a lot better. It’s taking forever to render though!

Final grade. Somewhere between the two!

WHAT NEXT?

Now I have to leave my computer to render for hours. I can’t wait for Final Cut X! There’s so much waiting around for FCP 7 to render it’s unbelievable!

Next week I’ll edit Skint and then do the write up on that and on the edit of it.

I’m really pleased with The Hangover, I think it’s really good fun, and good value at 20 minutes long. It’s about the length I was hoping and for 2 days work I think it’s great. Can’t wait to share it with the wider world!

Episode 2 – The Hangover Shoot

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It’s Thursday, it’s roasting outside. In London we’re experiencing one of those now regular occurrences a heatwave (should be called sweatwave actually), and I’ve been syncing up rushes all day. The glamour of film making eh? It’s great being your own data manager sometimes. NOT! But the rushes are looking brilliant so far, great shots, great performances and some brilliant moments. A lot of directors are (understandably) worried when they get to the edit, but with this project I’ve been really delighted (so far!). When I see how much we’ve shot in so little time, and how good it not only looks, but also feels, it’s always a relief. Shooting on DSLR and using only a tiny LCD when you get it back on the (frankly unforgiving) Mac screen it looks even better than you remembered!

Last week we filmed two episodes, The Hangover and Skint. Four days of hard work and lots of laughter. Lucy and James were on top form (thanks guys) and we had Michael Quartey join us for a brilliant scene in Skint.

It was an amazing week!

Right so sitting uncomfortably? Glass of Iced Tea to hand (I wish!) here’s what last week had in store for us.

MONDAY – DAY 1  – EPISODE 1 – THE HANGOVER

Monday we started with the “Hungover” part of The Hangover. The episode shows L&J getting drunk after losing their jobs and the resulting hangover they have the next day. So we kicked off around 9 and bashed through a lot of the 20 or so Scenes we had to do. There was a point (about 11) where Nell and I looked at each other and went, shit! how are we going to get this filmed.

A few scenes were literally one shot (thank God) and we bashed through those quickly enough (always nice to start ticking off things quickly). By Lunch we were on schedule. The day was going really well although James wasn’t feeling a hundred percent. Given his character starts the day ridiculously hungover and vomiting every half an hour this worked really well for us. And as you’ll see in the next few photos. He looked well, hungover. Even though he insists he wasn’t!

He’s acting. That’s with no make-up. He’s a method man.

James and Lucy are going in different directions hangover-wise in this episode, with James the worse off at the beginning. The day went really quickly, too quickly to be honest but we were getting some great stuff and the read-through the week before was definitely paying dividends. So important to rehearse before you shoot it really makes the process so much easier and run smoother.

On L&J the camera and sound department is just me. This has a lot of benefits for me and the actors I think. I think it’s much easier for them to get into character without an enormous crew staring at them (lights burning out their eyes, sound men poking them with their boom poles!). It also means you can work a hundred times faster. My kit is so streamlines the only faffing is the occasional battery change (every 2 or so hours) and the odd memory card change (every 90 minutes), but they can run lines or breathe when I’m doing that!

There are lots of ways to do drama, and personally I really like this way of working, you can focus on performance in a way that I don’t believe you can unless you have a massive crew. And then you can’t shoot on location… Though shooting on location has it’s own problems, as we were about to discover.

”My God woman, what have you done!”

One of the great scenes we shot this day was when Lucy decides to “tidy up the DVDs” which she thinks is a good idea. It’s not. Because not long after, her own hangover starts to kick in.

This scene was a lot of fun to film but did meant that we had to actually empty my DVD shelves! It was hard work filming that to be honest! I get emotional just thinking about the poor DVDs. I’m welling up.

Any collectors worst nightmare. I could’ve cried. Actually I did...

This scene is based very much on something that’s happened to us and I’m sure a lot of other people as well. When one of you is feeling better than the other but not well enough to go out they often have a “good idea”. Ours has been tidying, with us deciding to empty shelves, cupboards, drawers etc over the years.

So we put the DVDs down and Lucy started sorting them for the scene. I’ll be honest it was painfully real to film and really funny as well, as James is still enduring his awful hangover and walks in on Lucy mid sort and tidy.

"Wonder what else I can do to make him feel worse..."

So the day was going really well, on schedule it’d got to about 5pm and the realities of location shooting with natural light hit us. We lost the light! I was gutted as sunset wasn’t due till 8. But with our flat east-facing we were doomed and we had to call it a day 2 hours early. So we were behind on our first day but we’d got through a lot.

For me the natural light is so much better than trying to hash together something. Lighting drama is a real skill and massively hard to get right without the right amount of space and more importantly time. Given how small our flat is in reality it looks big on camera but actually its a mare to film in. Something that would come back time and again later in the week.

But one day in and things were going well. We arranged to get the guys back a bit early the next day to finish off the day scenes before moving on to the most important part of the episode, getting drunk!

I’ll post the write up for the next day soon but I must away to more syncing joy!

Read-Throughs!

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It’s Friday and things have moved on a bit since we last wrote anything. We’ve had a read-through of Episodes 2 and 3 yesterday which was really successful. It’s great to hear the script out-loud before you film it and hear what jokes work and which fall flat. Some of The Hangover (Episode 2) was exactly that – a bit flat in places but we thought up some good jokes and it flows much better now, big scenes getting crossed through and we’ve come up with a much better whole now.

Very excited if a bit nervous about filming it now.
To be honest a lot of it is in their hands (Lucy and James) and in that aspect I shouldn’t really be nervous. They are brilliant together, really believable as a couple and a great bit of casting (he says patting himself on the back!) but it’s the most important thing in drama. Casting and sound, it’s no good having a funny script if you can’t hear it!

I suppose I should mention the writing at this stage as well, because the words really are the most important thing. It’s a very personal project for me, not only because it’s the only thing I’m doing at the moment but also because it’s based on real experiences and often real people I know. I’ve had so many bad hangovers in my life, I’m sure most people have! But a bad hangover and not having a job to go to on a week day seems like a particularly cruel day!

So next week we embark on the shoots for episodes 2 and 3, assuming we can get our third actor for episode 3 and our location sorted (another job for another working weekend!). The great thing about these DSLR cameras is the fact that you can just do it. It’s cheap, you don’t need lights or a massive team or crew you can just make it happen.

They’re very different scripts and very different stories, in fact episode 3 was the more finished script when we read it through, laughing out loud a great deal. There’s one scene in that episode which I think will be iconic of the series, it’s a very funny situation involving a door-to-door sales person and I think it could be a real highlight for the series.

So we’re excited, we’re also a bit nervous and there’s loads more writing to do for episodes 4, 5, 6 and 7 still to do! ARGH! When I think how many words that is it’s a bit scary. Just have to remember to do a bit at a time, (except that never happens!). So just another 120 pages to write and shoot…

We’ve got our stories all blocked for the series, involving an episode with a disastrous camping trip, the flat-mate from hell and a family sunday lunch.

So it’s all go at Picnic for the next couple of episodes!

We’ll be editing them in a block over the summer but updating with pictures and behind the scenes as things happen and unfold.

Hello world!

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It’s Monday, and today feels like a bloody monday to me! I finally worked out a Web site layout I was happy with and you’re looking at it. Don’t like it. Then p!$$ off!

So an update. What have we done so far? Bloody Mondays the 3 minute short film (see film here) has had a fair few watches so far which is great news! Pleased what a bit of Facebook word of mouth can achieve. Had great feedback on it as well which is also very good. People love the situation and the characters and the humour. So that’s a win on all fronts!

The first cut of Episode 1 has been completed and is running about 17 ish minutes. It was a 26 page script which should be 26 minutes! So that was a learning experience with this first episode. The shoot went really well and other than a couple of camera related line gaffs, like me forgetting some basic drama shooting rules, it turned out really well. I’m amazed with what we achieved in such a short length of time.

Episode 2’s shoot was sadly cancelled when Lucy fell ill, get well soon Lucy, but we’ll be back early April to hopefully shoot a block of episodes in one go.

The series isn’t just set in the flat, we’ll be getting them out and about as well through the course of the series and introducing some new characters to.

I think what’s been great for me so far is how much fun it is for everyone working together. It’s a big thing on a shoot and I’ve really enjoyed the whole process so far, from writing it, to shooting it, directing and editing it, the whole experience has been so easy and enjoyable and I really hope that continues in the coming months.

It’s very ambitious trying to shoot a project like this unfunded but I think if you have the equipment it is so easy to do now and everyone should be doing it. I’m sure it’s how people are talent spotted more and more these days. I was speaking to Gareth Edwards (director of Monsters, brilliant British film) after he gave a talk the other day and he said more and more directors are getting picked up from short films now than ever before.

The plan then is to shoot the episodes over the next 6 weeks (as many as possible!) and then get into a summer of editing! I think it’ll be about a week per episode editing and then we’ll start trickling them out weekly. I plan to update the blog regularly and we’ll be doing making ofs along the way so that you know how we are doing it and how it’s going.

So it’s going to be a very exciting project and I hope you’ll follow us all the way.