Rushed rushes

5.55pm. Official cars sounding their horns in the cemetery, telling everyone it’s time to get out. Time for another take. Don’t reset - keep the camera rolling. What are we doing again?

RSPCO&J

This is Dulcie. She’s a Springer Spaniel. She can’t help that but did she have to strengthen her jaw muscles by exercising them on a DVD case containing two discs - the latest edit, opening sequence and vignette options, which I was supposed to sit down in front of last weekend and think carefully about, the discs themselves having been carefully prepared at Ocicat, whose corporate patience with Oscar & Jim must be wearing slightly thin, with 850GB of film clogging their drives… well did she? Anyway, she seemed to enjoy the film.

Taste

The Sign Ups are coming in on the Oscar and Jim community. This is massively encouraging because it gives us a potential core audience for the film. If we can get people signing up to watch the film - and they like it (two quite big ifs there) - they could, conceivably tell their friends (another one) and we are on our way to distributing the thing without the apparatus (or the cost) of a traditional ad and PR campaign. (I see the Film Council just awarded The Hunger £250,000 for exactly this kind of thing http://www.businessofcinema.com/news.php?newsid=10388).

Also encouraging is, frankly, the sheer goddamn calibre of film-goer we are getting in. Now, we have to be a bit careful (if you ask someone in the street what their favourite book is, they are more likely to say ‘War and Peace’ than ‘The Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Collection’.) Nevertheless when we ask the question about films, we get some striking replies. All human life and taste is here, from ‘The Deerhunter’ to ‘Weekend at Bernie’s 2’. There a strong classic element ‘Kind Hearts and Coronets’ ‘The Godfather’ ‘Some Like it Hot’ and even a bit of a Paris thing going on ‘Les Amants du Pont Neuf’ and ‘Paris Je t’aime’ - spotting the Pere Lachaise section there, perhaps.

Point is there is a gigantic multiplicity of taste - absolutely what anyone hopes for and depends upon when they set out to make something. My favourite among the O&J community favourites? Probably ‘Fargo’. Maybe ‘Goodfellas’. Possibly ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’ (but no ‘Confessions of Dangerous Mind’? Now there’s a good film…)

Kneecap

We set up the shot, down the long vista of Avenue Transversale No1. Martin retracts the tripod legs and the camera squats down low. The light is nice at this time of day and there are dozens of people about, doing exactly what our characters are doing. Useful thematic cutaways perhaps. Some folks even oblige the camera with a tender, idle gesture. Perfect. The shot’s a gem, it’s in the film, it has to be…. Oh. Maybe not. File under Ministry of Silly Walks.

The formula

Rosey Tyler, one of our sainted Executive Producers, spotted this link on the BBC http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7644338.stm (forgive me, I haven’t worked out how to embed these links in a more elegant way). As you see, it’s for something called Co-Producer a ‘crowd-sourced movie’ that says it has 90,000 producers. Blimey. If we get 90,000 executive producers - well, you do the maths. PayPal will be happy, anyway. Maybe we all should give up on the film and buy, I don’t know, Lloyds TSB instead.

Look out too for A Swarm of Angels (aswarmofangels.com) another crowd sourcing thing in which collaborators pool ideas and together, gradually (and democratically?) decide the kind of movie they are making. I applaud both these projects but confess they blow my mind a little bit. Doesn’t a sound creative idea need, at its germ, some singularity of vision? Safely transferring the heart of the idea to key collaborators is the trickiest thing you do - what happens when there are thousands of them?

For the same reason I was sceptical a year or two back when i read a wonderful Malcolm Gladwell piece on software that would predict hit movies http://www.gladwell.com/2006/20061016aformula.html It’s unpredicatble isn’t it? The great Hollywood dictum is Nobody Knows Anything. The Oscar & Jim executives are making the thing possible, coming up with distribution ideas and spreading the word too - but the creative buck has to stop with Paul and me. Maybe next time though?

Moving pictures?

We’ve got various outtakes and bits and pieces from the shoot and edit that we’re trying to share with everyone. Eventually we’ll have the trailer streaming here on the site and, we hope, the film to download too but for these clips Dara thinks YouTube should be the easiest way to get things out there. Easy? Hm. I have a new respect for the people who film their cats falling off TVs and put them up on YouTube. Let’s see if it works. Here’s Charlie multi-tasking in the Gare du Nord and Paul giving a clapperboard masterclass…

The Artist himself

Once you’re in to post production you forget about pre-production and filming - you just move on to a new set of challenges and leave the old ones behind. The sound and pictures are just there, and you take it for granted. I can’t remember how we got them. Then I was browsing through pictures of the shoot and came across this bloke, Lighting Cameraman Martin Lightening, the artist himself, without whom etc etc.

Blue Harry

It’s astonishing how much the picture grading affects things, and how many decisions there are to be made. Is the vignette too strong in this scene, not enough in that? Should there be one at all? That’s too warm, that’s too cold, and that’s too saturated. Here’s a freeze-frame of Harry in scene 8 - do you think we’ve crushed the blues enough?

You eat sushi!

We are editing in the spanking new facility at Ocicat in West London. It’s in an office complex called The Courtyard and there are other businesses all around. We have the window open and the sound up fairly loud. Charlie has a line in the film - ‘Louis Suchet!’- which she delivers… strongly. We have been at this for two weeks when Martin Kelly, who runs a business next door, put his head in at the window. ‘You eat sushi!’ he says. We look at him. ‘You eat sushi! My favourite line in the film.’

Color

With the drama assembled in Final Cut Pro, Simon switches to Color for the grade. It’s a powerful piece of kit - in fact it’s alarming what you can do. At one point Simon says ‘we haven’t made a black and white film, have we?’. This, film texture, ‘vaseline on the lens’, upping contrast, ‘crunching blacks’, saturating, desaturating… there are almost too many bells and whistles. We want it to look good but we also want it to serve the drama, to feel ‘natural’ and right for the piece. But a concept like ‘natural’ struggles a bit in the convoluted artifice that is making a film. With a test grade done, we instantly forget what the film looked like in its ‘raw’ state. Simon describes the look as ‘smoky’ but also ‘meaty’ - it’s like wine-tasting and the palate (or rather the palette) is infinite. Have we made good decisions? Will anyone even notice? The sheer labor (go with it, color lost its ‘u’ too) needed to make something so apparently light…

Font luck

Simon is looking at the title sequence. We have an idea to use title cards between scenes too. Phil is on the poster. Quite independently they both decide to use Gloucester MT Extra Condensed as the film’s and poster’s typeface. It’s nothing - it’s less than nothing - but this tiny serendipity still feels like a validation or a blessing at an otherwise nervous time in the proceedings.

Elements

To Bryanston School at the invitation of Chloe Bentinck in the English department to talk to the Upper Sixth about the film - part of their Current Affairs programme. A week’s editing means there is no time to write a speech (a huge relief for everyone). Instead Simon puts the constituent shots of one of our scenes on a DVD and we talk through how it was imagined, shot and assembled. Stess and Lara help with an impromptu drama workshop. Aeneas (good heroic name) heroically helps illustrate camera angles. Rupert, the size and width of two men (a rugby player) gives a masterclass in comic timing. I bring a camera to take a photograph of the hundred or so people there, thinking, now they’ll have to sign up for the film - and then I forget to do it. Afterwards we walk through the chemistry department. Remember those dog-eared periodic tables in labs of yore? Here they have a periodic table, with every element there, in situ - vials of sodium and potassium, a hunk of lead, an ingot of titanium, silver, gold. The inert gases light up when you walk past. Not much to do with the film - but quite cool anyway.