Charlie Productions : Making Juice

2002, 10mins, miniDV.

"Sure all Film makers make films. But the Blaine Brothers have made this one."

top 10 48hr FILMMAKING CHALLENGE 2002

Conceived, performed and edited in 48hrs this fantastically silly film was one of the winning entries in the original 48hr Film Challenge and was subsequently screened at the London Science-Fiction Film Festival in 2003.

"All Filmmakers make films. But the Blaine Brothers have made this one."

In the summer of 2002 Johnnie Oddball launched the very first 48hr Film Challenge. The idea was very simple. Teams of filmmakers would randomly pluck a genre and title from a bag . They would then have exactly 48hrs to write, shoot and edit a short film between five and ten minutes long.

Naturally, Emily was very keen that we all took part. Naturally, both Ben and Chris thought it was a terrible idea. Any film made under such restrictions was always going to be basically amatuerish so, if we suceeded we'd have a bad film, if we failed we'd have a bad film and a mild dose of humilation. So, sitting in the upstairs bar of the Curzon, Soho at 10am on the 31st August 2002 we both found ourselfs nursing hangovers and wondering quite how we'd ended up exactly here.

The simple answer is to lay the blame with the Apple Macintosh computer company. It wasn't until Apple released Final Cut Pro and it was possible for us to afford an edit suite that was of some practical use to us, that we considered buying a computer. Once we found ourselves with our own internet conection and email addresses we found that a whole world of film was opening up online; in most cases simply to go bankrupt six months later when it alll failed to catch on. However of the few websites that survived, Shooting People was one of the most important. Based around the idea of connecting filmmakers across the country, Shooting People was unlike most other film websites in that it didn't attempt to make money out of screening films at very low resolution. In fact for the first few, blissful years of its existance, Shooting People didn't actually attempt to make money at all.

The idea was quite simple. If you had a question, or you were looking for cast, crew, equipment or stuff, or if you wanted to argue the toss about something that was going on - you emailed your needs, thoughts or desires to a central address. The next day your comments would be included in an email that was sent to the entire membership. In this way filmmakers all over the country and of all abilities were finally able to communicate with each other on a daily basis. Before Shooting People making contacts within the industry was a time consuming process that pretty much depended upon you getting a job in Soho. After Shooting People there was anarchy.

The network was argumentative, passionate, often irritating and occassionally sublime. Ben joined Shooting People in 2000 and soon found himself at home. Whilst the membership was growing all the time and soon reached thousands rather than hundreds, those who took an active part in the bulletins were slightly fewer and Ben, with his love of arguing the toss and comparative ability with spelling, soon became one of them. Another regular voice was the self styled Digital Guerrilla Filmmaker Johnnie Oddball a man who is so fundamentally dyslexic than most of his early Shooting People rants read like the product of throwing a typewriter downstairs. For a short while Ben and Johnnie corresponded before Ben, fed up reading emails that read like they'd been through the Engima code, dismissed Johnnie as a hapless loon.

Towards the end of 2001 Ben got involved in a rather heated debated with a Canadian actress over some comments one or other of them had made with regard to something else. As often happened this argument spilled off the network and into a private correspondance and, as often happpened, once the original point of contention had been smoothed over Ben and Emily became firm friends. Emily Stone moved to Chelsea in 2001 and soon found out that no agent in this country was willing to recognise her qualifications. She turned to Shooting People in order to find work and soon ended up working with Jacquie Hamil and her friend Johnnie Oddball.

Not that any of this actually explains how Emily convinced us to take part in the first 48hr Film Challenge; that was just one of those things. However, finding yourself doing something that you're sure you'd sworn blind you wouldn't do under any circumstance is a good sign that you're working with a good producer and Emily is a good producer.

PREPRODUCTION.
Realising that we were unlikely to sleep for the next two days Chris had chosen to prepare for the challenge by going to the Hamilton Arms and drinking until he was sick. Ben, on the other hand, chose the more sensible approach of a night of drinking rum followed by four hours sleep on Barrington's sofa.

We had, however, not entirely wasted the build up to the event and managed to assemble a group of talents who were all willing to come with us. These included Actress and Production Co-Ordinator Sally Sammad, Director Of Photography Jonny Tyson, Make-Up Artist Reno Horn and Costume Designer Clint Goncalves, all of whom were waiting in the Costa Coffee down the road. Alex Mayover was there too. We had also put a great many more on stand-by, though we wisely left them at home until we knew wether they would be needed because there was a limit on the size of the cast and crew.

Venturing into the bowels of Screen One the three of us found that, despite Ben's hopes that we'd be the only ones and would win by default, a lot of people had taken up the challenge. As a result it was nearly eleven by the time that Emily finally drew the pieces of paper which were to decide our creative path for the next two days... She drew - "Spoof" and "Out of Juice".

Chris and Ben then went to the toilet and agreed that, all in all, it'd be best to call a halt to the whole thing now and go and get some sleep. However by the time we had all reassembled in Costa our inherited mind had clicked into gear and, as usual, we'd both had the same thought: "Lets do a spoof "making of" documentary" we both said, both also failing to mention that this was an idea first put to us by Adam some three or four years earlier.

Adam's idea, which soon became known as "Green Movie" was that we'd shoot a science fiction film against green screen and tell the cast and crew that all of the backdrops and some of the characters would be added in digitally afterwards. We would then release the film without adding anything and so all you'd see is a bunch of a-list actors bouncing around in a big green room fighting monsters that only they can see and operating space ships that are not there.

Emily was a little concerned that this wasn't that connected to the title "Out Of Juice", however no one had thought of anything better and everyone could see the comedy potential of the blue screen joke and the fun of dressing up in space clothes...

PRODUCTION
Emily, Ben, Clint and Sally spent the rest of the morning shopping for costumes and props whilst Chris went and started to transform the Cruet Company into the set of the film "Juice". We also put calls into actors Garth Maunders, Damien Kell and Carl Pizzie all of whom were happy to come down to Wandsworth to be silly for a bit.

Because the rules of the Challenge stipulated a limit on the number of crew you could have but none on the number of actors we decided that, because we were making 'a making of' most of our crew could also play themselves and so be considered as actors. In this way not only would Chris and Ben direct "The Making of Juice" but they would be in it too, playing Chris and Ben Blaine the Director and Producer of "Juice". In the same way whilst Jonny Tyson would not only film the film we were making, but he'd also appear in it as Jonny Tyson the 'making of' documentary cameraman.

To add a further level of confusion Jonny's girlfriend, Heather, who, unlike most of the rest of the cast, did not work in the film or TV industry but, by coincidence, for Lonely Planet with Tom Lloyd (who at this point was teaching English in Brazil) would play the Clapper/Loader in "Juice" and, quite unexpectedly, would perfectly capture the look of put-upon boredom and the sense of quietly being much more capable than anyone else in the room, which Tom's sister Katie (who at this point was living in Brighton) had so perfected.

In the end the only person who did not play a character involved in making the film "Juice" who shared the same name and job as they were actually doing in making the film "The Making Of Juice" was Carl Pizzie who refused to play actor Carl Pizzie and instead played dancer Ashley Campbell.

By this stage, about 5pm on the Saturday, we had a few jokes that we knew we wanted to include (Like Alex's 416 joke, which was one of the first things Chris thought we should do) and we had an idea of the general tone and the characters that everyone would play. We knew that Garth would be playing a CGI character and so would be painted blue, we knew Emily would be a starry American who no one had any respect for and we knew that Chris would be an utter bastard.

This was about all though, so, with the central space of Cruet cleared and dressed with blue cloth we set about making stuff up in what was to be one of the most enjoyable and creative shoots we've ever worked on. Given the chance to take the piss out their day jobs and the strange, border line pyschotic, mannerisms that filmming tends to encourage, the crew/cast all went to town. With everyone tending to stay in character all the time we worked in long frantically improvised takes in which everyone just got odder and odder. After a few hours it was getting hard to tell what we were pretending and what we were only pretending to be pretending. Max, the Argentian camera operator started to flirt outrageously with stills photographer Fiona and no one was sure if he was doing this because it was funny or because he fancied her or both.

By 7pm Emily was finally dressed in a costume that Clint had sewn together from scratch that day and we are arguing about whether we can drink the pretend juice for real or is there really something dangerous about it. Eitherway we shot a sequence in which Chris forces Damien to drink the juice and Damien refuses and no one, not even Chris or Damien, are sure if they are arguing for real or not.

We finished shooting by midnight and everyone save for the Blaines, Alex and Max went home to sleep. Having moved all the vans back inside the building we were looking for Max's keys and the distinction between Max's onscreen persona and reality was blurring further. We moved all the vans back out of the building in case the keys were in or beneath one of them, but we can't find them anywhere.

At one o'clock in the morning we eventually found Max's keys. They were on the shelf were Max keeps his keys.

POST PRODUCTION.
Before we could edit anything we had to transfer all the footage from DVCAM to miniDV, the only format that our edit system could use.

This gave the three of us still standing, Chris, Ben and Alex, a handy break in which we ate our first proper meal of the day. Or perhaps the first proper meal of the next day. Although since Chris, in the character of Chris, had been eating all day long this was actually just Ben and Alex's first proper meal and since it was just everything that the KFC on Brixton High Street hadn't sold by 2am Sunday Morning, it wasn't really a proper meal either.

The duplication of the footage from DVCAM to miniDV took until about six in the morning, during which time Alex left and Chris, who had to drive later, slept. Whilst the improvised shooting process had been creatively vital it did mean that we had an excessive amount of footage which not only had to go onto miniDV but then needed to be captured onto the hard disks in our edit suite in Brookmans Park. In someways, with less than 24hours in which to edit, score, mix and grade this delay was worrying, the good thing though was that at least it forced us to watch everything at least twice. Since all we really had was a series of randomly hysterical moments this was vital because it gave us a chance to see what was working and to start thinking about how we would pull all of this material together into a coherent ten minute film.

We were helped in this quest for coherence by our decision to rely on voice over. By 2pm on Sunday we had a rough cut of all the sequences that were working and Simon Poole was in our front room recording the links. Simon's bread and butter was in voice over work and, like the rest of the cast, he jumped at the chance to take the piss out of the work that pays his keep. He wrote most of his own links and in the end his deadpan performance is one of the few consistently funny things about the film. From here on any problems we faced with the edit tended to be solved by cutting to a montage of stuff with Simon saying something sublimely ridiculous over the top.

At around 4pm, having swapped Simon for Keith, we ate a huge Sunday lunch and showed the rough cut to Keith, who got a spare roast potato (the only wage we have ever paid him). Then Chris drove Keith back to New Barnet so that he could start composing, and picked up Garth and Emily. The four of us spent the rest of the afternoon and evening cutting until around about the time of the last train. By this stage Keith had finished the recording the music blind in his bedroom so Chris took Garth to the station and picked the tracks up from New Barnet.

At this stage things were going well, Emily had decided to stay the night to see the film through to the end but with the edit pretty solid and all the material in place all that we needed to do was to apply a bit of polish. We have ham sandwiches, fruit and an inflatable bed that in the end no one found time to sleep in. However it was now that exhaustion really began to kick in and time began to turn liquid. Despite the heater and the hot coffee we were all unable to stop shivering and jobs that should have taken minutes stretched on and on as our reactions and thought processes began to slow.

At 4am Chris had to leave because he had to get back to Wansworth where he was down for the early shift at Cruet. As it happened when he arrived he was asked to drive the Heathrow and eventually did not sleep until the Monday evening. Thankfully by 6am the trains were running again and, with the film finally mixed, graded and put down to tape Emily set off to hand it in at the Curzon whilst Ben, who had had eight hours sleep in three days, fell gladly unconcious.

We had achieved what, forty-eight hours early, we would have said was impossible. We'd made a short film from nothing in two days flat that was actually worth watching. "Making Juice: The Making Of Juice" may be a little too like a TV sketch, it may not be as original as all that, and the final cut does include some jokes that perhaps aren't that amazing. However it is undeniably funny, it is slick, well performed, expertly made and at no point betrays it's overly rapid creation.

Having made it into the final top ten we reassembled the following week at the Curzon with high hopes of having won. When we watched the other films that had made the top ten our hopes grew higher. Some were well made, some were quite thoughtful, a few were a bit funny but most were just plain bad. The energy that Johnnie had created with the event was palpable, the sense of release from the tired restraints that can make a short film take years to produce was fantastic, but most of the actual films were actually pretty rubbish. It was, therefore, even more depressing when we didn't win. Again.

We weren't even in the top three. All the other teams were as surprised as we were, although at least three of them were rather happier. Everyone thought that we'd won but, like the unlucky title contendors that we are, we'd once again managed to fight the better fight and still lose on points. Johnnie has subsequently suggested that "Juice", with it's special effects, believable performances, good camera work and slick editing, was just too professional. His aim was to inspire people to go out and make films and had "Juice" won the bar would have been set intimdatingly high... but you know, he was probably lying when he said that.

Having been impressed with his chutzpah in getting the first 48hr Challenge off the ground we were once again finding out why Ben had originally written him off as a loon. An invitation to screen "Juice" at the London Sci-Fi Film Festival early in 2003 turned into an utter farce with Johnnie rambling incoherently about digital DV cameras and keeping the audience waiting an hour whilst they sat through a demonstration from softwear manufacturers Adobe. Emily and Damien had both invited agents to the event and we all left in high dudgeon.

As we had all enjoyed the process of making Juice, Ben, Chris, Emily and Damien did attempt to turn the project into a sitcom. Our hope had been to capture something of the spontaniety of the original however a meeting with Jon Plowman, head of comedy at the BBC, soon made it clear that if we were to get the project off the ground we would not be trusted without a script. Increasingly unhappy with the quality of the ideas and far more interested in other projects we effectively shelved the idea then and there; a further meeting with the BBC a year later during a search for something new only confirmed that there was no future in a "Juice" sitcom.

"Making Juice: The Making Of Juice" was shot on location in Wandsworth, South London and cost £5xx.

SCREENPLAY FOR JUICE

When entering films into non-English language film festivals you are often required to provide not a screenplay but an exact list of all the dialogue for translation purposes. "Making Juice: The Making Of Juice" was entirely improvised by the cast and crew and there never was a script, this however is a transcription for translation.

Making Juice download 60Kb PDF

Charlie Productions believe passionately in doing things and always trying to stop in time for tea.
Brook House Design Studios, Bluebridge Road, Brookmans Park, Herts AL9 7SX
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