Charlie Productions : How We Made It

With the DV "Good Morning, Who Are You" shot but unedited we wanted to cut our teeth on celluloid and film a film using film.

PRE PRODUCTION.
We needed a short, straightforward script which would be practical and simple to make. As it happened a couple of years earlier Robert Orr had given us exactly that advice after watching "The Bible According To Charlie". Robert was a Scotsman who came into the shop where Chris had a part time job, he was a Director of Photography with connections to the Scottish Film Commission and he had offered to work with us in his spare time. He had suggested something short and with a regular change of mood that would enable us to experiment in creating different tones with our camera work.

Ben wrote "Crowd Scene For Existentialists" with the intention of shooting it with Robert that autumn. Chris then lost the script in his bedroom and the whole thing drifted away. However in the summer of 1997 Chris finally found it again and with a little redraft the script soon turned out to be exactly what we were looking for - short, straightforward and simple to make.

Nick Goss and Anna Steward had both auditioned for "Good Morning, Who Are You?" and were both obvious choices for Jean and Ruth. Chris Klien had sent us his CV for "Good Morning," but didn't suit the part, however he looked right for Paul and his audition was a pretty breezy affair which mainly consisted of him admiring our pond.

So all of this fell together without much effort, which was lucky because neither us had any idea what we were letting ourselves into by attempting to work in film. We were used to the world of video, were camera hire was a few hundred quid and no one asked any questions. It was a terrifying shock when Nathan at the (late lamented) Film Centre smiled charmingly at the pair of us and then asked us to put the camera together. He claimed that this was normal practice however I imagine that when faced with a pair of teenagers, one with dreadlocks and a leather top hat, who had probably just admitted to him that they were filming on Super 16mm because, as Ben put it, "it's called Super and so therefore must be better than Standard 16mm" he probably thought it best to make sure that his fifty grand's worth of SRII was going to be safe. Which of course it wasn't.

However having already averted one disaster that day (by getting Tom Lloyd to give us a lift down to the Film Centre to pick it all up in the first place) we were in no mood to walk away empty handed. More to the point the Film Centre was a beautiful institution set up by Dave, Nathan and Boyd with the express intention of helping independent film makers get stuff done. This was still before the introduction of affordable 3 chip DV cameras changed the face of low budget film making forever by enabling people to buy a decent just-sub-broadcast standard camera for the cost a weeks hire of a 16mm shooting package. These days the most pressing concern for a film maker is getting their work seen by anyone, back then the first problem facing anyone wanting to make a film was how to get hold of the equipment and the Film Centre was set up to satisfy exactly this need. Like most people who are trying to kick start something creative the guys at the Film Centre were passionate about their job, which instantly made them a better place to go to than the average hire outfit. As a result, with Robert Orr as our guarantor it took almost no persuading at all to convince Boyd to come with us on the shoot to look after the camera; in fact it was his idea.

This generosity on both parts stopped us from chickening out and shooting again on DV. This would doubtlessly would have stopped the film from getting into the Edinburgh Festival the following year. More importantly this would have stifled our development as film makers pretty much in the womb; we had decided to shoot on film rather than DV for the flimsiest of reasons that largely amounted to 'because we could' and it wasn't until we'd been through the process that we understood quite how much more we had to learn.

PRODUCTION.
We shot Crowd Scene For Existentialists on a very cold day on a post box near our old school with Boyd acting as a last minute replacement DoP when DoP Robert Orr decided his role was more that of head chef. Chris operated the camera but Boyd set the exposure and focus, guiding us through the day magnificently. The facts that you need both a someone who really knows the camera you are using and someone who can cook are two of the most important things that this shoot taught us. This is also the point at which James Waller became known as the Lollipop boy for reasons that will not become clear again. Apart from the weather the shoot was one of smoothest we have had the pleasure to experience and we went away feeling even luckier than usual. Boyd taught Chris how to load, a skill he would lose almost as quickly as he learnt it. And apart from Robert's fantastic cooking, he also insisted that we shoot close-up cutaways of reactions from the actors, stuff which would be able to be cut into any part of the script. Reactions are one of the key parts of our comedy films and Nick's expressions to Chris' impassioned pleas were used throughout the edit.

POST PRODUCTION.
It was around this time that, thanks to his Norwegian friend Stig Jackobsen, Ben met Steven Eastwood at a party and he offered the services of his friend Duncan Western as editor. By this point we had also got a hold of the classic "Guerrilla Filmmakers Handbook" and had followed all of Chris and Gen's advice on preparing paper edits. As a result for once we turned up to the edit well prepared and managed to capture and cut the entire film in one longish session on the AVID at Panico (round the back of the Astoria). A short while later we popped back to do a second cut to iron out a few of the problems and irks that we had noticed in the intervening weeks.

By this time we had shot "Cold" which, at the time of writing some seven years later has changed it's name to "Cinema" without reaching a final cut. This left us bankrupt and with three short films, one unfinished, one unwatchable and "Crowd Scene" which was good. With no money, no connections in the industry and nothing to guide us but the GFH's procreational ethos of "Get out there and get shooting" (which doubtlessly offered a tacitly conquistador appeal to two young men without girlfriends) we formed a vague plan of sending "Crowd Scene" to a random collection of film festivals in the hopes that they'd take it on and then we'd meet people who would offer us money to make our next film, or a feature film.

Surprisingly enough the first part of that plan worked out and nearly every competition we entered wanted to screen the film. Crowd Scene premiered on video at OMSK (an art house film night curated by Steve Eastwood) rather fittingly as prelude to a two hour existential drama which involved a man trying to swim across a river of film to reach his subconscious. It is just possible that no one in the club realised we were taking the piss. We then went through the expensive but fascinating neg cutting process in order to produce a print for the Edinburgh International Festival.

This is where we came slightly unstuck again. We had shot on super16mm for the entirely erroneous reason that it had to be in some way better than standard 16mm, not realising that the only difference between the two formats is that super16mm is designed for blow-up to 35mm. It sacrifices the space on the film where the sound information is usually printed in order to capture more image so that there is less quality loss when the picture is enlarged. As a result if you wish to screen a super16mm print then you need to run the sound from a separate magnetic tape which is synchronised to the picture. This process is fidly and rarely used so the possibilities for a super16mm print are rather narrow, however, we couldn't afford to blow up to 35mm. The other problem with running separate mag sound is that if, for instance, neither you or your editor have really worked that much in film and have very little idea what you're doing it is very easy to screw up the synchronisation of the sound and picture. Very easy.

Thankfully in 1998 the Edinburgh Festival was split into industry and public screenings. The public screening of Crowd Scene took place in a venue that was unable to run separate sound and, as a result, we screened fully synch from Digital Betacam. The industry screening screened the print with it's horrifically out of place sound track limping along behind. These days the festival has taken the sensible step of bringing both public and industry events together, probably to maximise attendance since, to our great relief, only one other living human being turned up to see the tragedy that was our industry screening. His name was Simon Cameron and he bought us a drink after wards.

At the time we were really excited to be accepted by Edinburgh. It felt that at last someone other than us thought our work was good enough to watch. A couple of years later we found out from Rachel who programmed it that she'd chosen it because we had drawn some silly cartoons of the cast and crew over the entry form and that made her laugh after sitting through hours of serious short films on a rainy day.

A couple of years later when the cost of such things had fallen enough to enable us to afford them we bought a computer with Final Cut Pro and Commotion. Using both of these tools we put together new and rather jolly credits (it was at this point that the old recording of our mates Matt and Richard became part of the mix) and also 'painted' out the boom that drifts momentarily into shot during the opening/closing shot.

"Crowd Scene For Existentialists" was shot in October 1998 in Potters Bar, Hertfordshire. It cost £4,121.

Charlie Productions believe passionately in doing things and always trying to stop in time for tea.
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