SEARCH THE DARK Part 3 (SHOOTING YOURSELF)

Writing the blog entry for this has become much of a bigger task than I first thought, But saying that I suppose to make sense as its the biggest (or at least one of) that we've ever taken on. Very much a team effort and it four of us working round the clock for a week to being it together. But after a several days  of building and a long night of shooting it was time for the main shoot.

one problem I've always had with directing our videos is that I usually tend to be in them, meaning that I have to bring in an outside cinematographer for the shoot. Initially I spent about 3 months last summer training up someone to do jobs like this... But he very quickly turned out to be a bust (of the worst kind, but we'll go into that whole fiasco later). Luckily whilst working on several films (for other people) I met another very talented Camera guy, who never seemed to make me look too bad ;) So After the stellar job he did on the 'No Fate' video I asked him to join us again.

Now here's something I didn't really think about to much, you see every time we've done a video and I've been on camera, I've had the whole band and their instruments sat behind me. But the video was a very different concept and suddenly I realized that not only was a going to have to act, whilst singing, I was going to have to do it at double speed to achieve the effect that we were going for. This was something that can really bring a performance or  video down, when there is too much going on all at once.

Another issue I had was that I'm used to shooting everything on my own, and so when I'm shooting I know that I've got what I need because ultimately I'm going to edit it and I shoot with that in mind. So having that extra added thing tends to make me unsure of exactly what I'm dealing with until I get into the edit. Having someone you trust to shoot is very important when I comes to this as it can at least relieve the added pressure.

The shoot went well, We tweaked some stuff and the stuff we shot the night before added a beautiful look and feel to the set we built when we had it all uploaded on the TV's. We also took much less time to shoot as the double speed track, obviously halved our turnover time.

So one week later we had spent £32, and after a butt load of work had one our most visually impressing  videos so far.

The video is released 30th October along with single 'Search The Dark' released on Mycho Records

SEARCH THE DARK Part 2 (SHOOTING YOUR PERFORMERS)

So we managed to build a set for the grand total of £12 and now the day came to shoot. Now unlike most shoots I've ever done which happen over the course of anything between 3 - 18 hours, this was  different kind of animal all together.

I wanted something very specific playing on the TV's, but that meant that I would have to shoot it before the day of the shoot. Originally I had figured out the whole thing to be shoot with our standard black back drop in our oversized living room, something that would have taken an hour or so. Then I got a mix of the song, it became obvious to me that I was going to need a bit more than just the TV stuff.

SEARCH THE DARK 
Search The Dark was the second single that we planned to release from our debut album 'Seven Rising', but there was a large shift in the band and after a couple of months of planning and talking about the direction of the band we decided that we wanted to collaborate with the amazing Heather Coulton. Search The Dark seemed the perfect choice and we decided to 'reboot' the song featuring Heather. 

A shot of our £12 set

Of course I had based the original concept on the original version, but the new mix changed things up a bit and this meant changing the idea ever so slightly.

We decided to make more of a feature out Heather and shoot the video side by side, so that she featured in the main shoot instead of just featuring on the TV's we'd sourced. So we tweaked the idea, but this of course meant that out 'set' would be needed a day earlier. 

In the name of efficiency it made sense getting Heather down to shoot all her stuff at the same time so that we had less to shoot the next day (more on why later). Of course featuring in the main shoot, Heather now had one of my favorite questions "What should she wear", I had something very specific in mind, But Heather didn't own anything like that and so my quest began to find the perfect outfit for the video.

Being a fan of the 80's in general, I wanted a Meatloaf-esque gothic looking night gown/dress, and we found the perfect one. It cost us just under £20, which through our budget up to £32. 

The shoot went well, the dress looked great and being a 2 part shoot there were alot of things to watch out for with our main focus being to make sure that the lighting matched for the next night. It was then that I had less than 15 hours to get the stuff that we had shot for the TV's edited and prepped to appear on the screens for the next night.

To Be Continued...

THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO... MUCH?

Yesterday I was sat working when a few situations from my life both personal and professional kind of aligned and I had a thought. I posted it on facebook and it had quite a response from people who had obviously come across the same thing. So because I'm lazy and didn't have time to write a blog this week I figured I would post it here. Because I can. What I wrote was...

"See what I enjoy is when people do something shitty and underhanded and then when they get caught pretend they have some kind of moral high ground, that somehow you deserved that thing to be done to you... Then over time they turn that thing into a reason why you are a 'dick' and create a story around it, then they begin to infect others with that lie and that passes to others and others and befor

e you know it so many relationships have become damaged because you NEVER even had the slightest clue that you should need to defend yourself against the actions of another...

So the assumption is made that because you just get on with it and accept that a 'friend' or 'loved one' has shown their true colours, they carry on with blind self righteousness that is backed up by the people who choose to believe that there is only one side to every story. There are 1000 situations like this I have seen and been involved in where the guilty party plays this game for so long that eventually they run out of supporters, but for those of us who sense, who feel this despicable nature early on, the price is a social shunning.

I have come across this kind of person many times in my life and the result is always the same and every time I've turned the other cheek as i've watched these two face bastards lie and cheat their way through life instead of taking responsibility for their own greedy, selfish actions and every time I've put that name on a mental list that I recite every morning... because people say "Let it go"... or "Why do you care?"... or "its not worth it"... And these are the people that allow these c**ts to carry in own in their own oblivious self righteous existence.

Well you know what? I shall not... Every single one of you that sits on this list will get whats coming to you and if I have to take care of that personally then so be it... Because I know i'm not perfect my friends, But at least I'm honest with myself.

And sometimes all it takes is "Sorry"...

I'll write that on your tombstone ;)

MJ"

SEARCH THE DARK Part 1 (BUILDING A SET FOR £12)

It's amazing what you can do when you just think about it logically. Over the last few months we have been trying to organise the shoot for the new Subject Seven video for the track 'Search The Dark' (Due for release this Halloween). From moment one I knew it was going to be tricky, The song had always been a bit different from what we had done before and the video should follow suit. 

Early on I had come up with the basic concept for the video whilst listening to the rough demo's in Autumn last year, it was always a matter of finding the right location to sell the concept and that where things became unstuck.

Finding a run down old apartment that hasn't been condemned and has a feature window is not easy, and in a small town like preston, it's close to impossible. Anything I did find was unsuitable for various reasons, The view, Space, People living in it, Asbestos, Giant Rat-Men plotting to over-through man kind.

In the end what I realized when we were at the studio one day is that we had the perfect windows in the open plan space up there but the space around it was basically a warehouse. Making it unsuitable. Then I had a thought, "What if we built the room?". The concept was simple, what if we made the rest of the room to match the preexisting window? Sound's expensive though right? Well actually no.

See Sam (Our guitarist) works in a wood yard as a day job and so it was easy for us to get hold of enough materials and props to build two walls either side of the feature window, and before we knew it we started to have the shape of a room.

From there it was a matter of wall papering the walls with some basic textured wallpaper (3 rolls for £10) and then finished off with some skirting board (£2) and what we essentially had done is built a smaller room in a warehouse for the grand total of £12.

The set also needed a bunch of TV's that were to be used as monitors to show another image whilst the video was being shot. This came early on in the development when I was looking for a TV for my old flat and found that people were simply just giving them away. Not liking things to go to waste I started to think "What could I do with a bunch of TV's?". So I worked a kind of japanese Horror/Whitenoise element into the video and it all seemed to gel.

From there it took us about 2 weeks to organize collecting about 20 TV's for the set simply based on distance travelled to get them. During this time we were also pasting walls and figuring out how the whole thing would stand up.

I suppose my point here is this. People think (I'm referring mainly to the low budget world), that building sets is beyond them or that it's expensive, But the trick is always to use pre-existing locations to turn them into what you need them to be. A little bit of thought about what you have access to can make all the difference. 

I'll write a second part about the pre production shoot and how we did the stuff to go onto the TV's as well as revealing the reason of why our shoot ballooned to a grand total of £32 ;) But until then...

MJ

PRE-PRODUCTION IN 2 EASY STEPS...

Ok so Down to business I guess. It's hard for me to think of anything but sound design at this moment in time as that all I've been doing for the last month for my second feature Slasher House. But I figured it makes very little sense to jump to something about post so early on, So I used the last few days to reflect on what I was mixing sound for and realized that probably the first thing anyone want to know about how I make movies is how I start out, Here I'm going to break down Pre-Production into 2 very easy steps.

Once you have a script or story (I know there are some people who just like to make these things up on the spot) then there are two steps you need to take in order to be ready to film.

1. GET HOLD OF EVERYTHING YOU NEED BEHIND THE CAMERA.

2. GET HOLD OF  EVERYTHING YOU NEED IN FRONT OF THE CAMERA.

Thats it.

Honestly thats all you need to do. Obviously there is a little more to it than that, But I find that looking at it like this makes what is quite a huge task, feel smaller and much more manageable.

Now at this point you should have a list of

1. People who need to be in front of the camera (actors)
2. Items that these people need to interact with (Props)
3. A place for these Items and people to be placed in (Location)

Then you should look at getting a couple of people behind the camera

1. Someone to Shoot it for you (You)
2. Someone to Direct the shoot (You)
3. Someone to Record sound (Sound guy)
4. Someone to help out (Sound guy)

I always tend to have a couple of people (P.A's) running around, but even then these are usually made up of people who don't have a job or anything better to do or my close friends and more often than not my girlfriend.

It's quite simple when you start looking at it like this and it makes the daunting task that is pre production a lot easier, just make a list of things you need and get it together.

Trust me, enjoy pre production, because quite honestly on a no budget production, Pre Production is the last chance you'll have to enjoy making your film until you're finished in the editing suite.

I know I've skimmed over a lot here, but it's good to figure out your own way of doing each thing, Of course I'll go into every step here in more detail of the coming weeks.

But so far this approach has worked on 3 short films, 2 features (albeit with a couple more specific crew) and countless music videos.

Of course it's hard, it's a challenge, but lets be honest, if you don't like challenge's, The last thing you want be doing is making no budget movies.

MJ

ITS A WONDERFUL LIFE...

It is (Most of the time)... I figured I would try and keep these post titles named after movies, which fits in quite nicely with what I wanted to talk about this week. You see this week I got to work with one of the best Bands that we've had through our doors at Mycho, Wigan based Sinnergod. But also featuring on their track 'It's A Wonderful Life' was Ex-Iron Maiden singer Blaze Bayley, which any of you who know me will know that this was a huge deal for me being that Maiden are one my biggest inspirations when it comes to my own Metal outfit Subject 7.

But thats enough name dropping from me ;) This blog is mainly about sourcing locations and getting the right one. It's fine if you are shooting your own projects, but when you've been hired to do a job, and there's a chance you could be removed from your set at anytime, the pressure is well and truly on.

Cut to : 
The woods in Longridge last Wednesday, I had been to scout the place about a week before and everything seemed OK. A filmmaker friend of mine had tipped me off about the location and where to find it and so we headed up there to take a look. Of course as I knew it would be, it was perfect for what the band had asked for, so we knew it had to be here.

It was at this point that we hit a problem, I had ben told that there was a 'caretaker' of sorts that patrolled the area, so we decided we would need permission to use the woods, even though it was public land. So we tried in vein to find the man who could give us permission. We failed. So without a better plan, My other half, thanks to a husband of a friend, managed to get us written permission from the police in the hopes that we would be able to use that to convince the 'warden' that we should be allowed there should he appear during the shoot.

So the morning of the shoot arrives and of course the forecast was thunder and lightning, still we braved the woods. Which btw was nowhere near where we had to park, and so it was down to us to carry everything and a generator up to the inaccessible woods. 

Oh yeah, that right, a Generator. Generators as a rule are not very light and to add the fun we had to then get it up a hill that was difficult to climb to begin with. You see, the reason I realized that we would need permission was because of 2 things. Generators make a lot of noise, which I knew would draw attention and of course the other thing that was louder than a generator were 'drums'. If it hadn't been for these two things, I would have just let the cops know that we had replica guns and shot then just kept my head low whilst we were shooting, as the last thing you want on a professional shoot is the police turning up ready to shoot you. But of course keeping a low profile is hard when you have an entire band playing in an open area situated next to a public foot path.

Luckily with a bit of praying to the gods and a lot of help from my team and loved ones and the band who sourced all the costume elements and even some very talented make-up artists and with the added elements of having one of my heavy metal heroes appearing on set whilst we were behind, We came out the other side with some of the best stuff we have ever produced.

And no one got shot... not in real life anyway... or did they? ;)

MJ

A NEW HOPE....

A New Hope? That pretentious, really? Well to be quite honest with you its always nice to follow a good cliche every now and then and Starting anything with a Star Wars reference always helps. At least in my book it does. But actually it also make sense to me as technically this not really a brand new blog but more of something that kind of starts half way through the story, something that Star Wars : A New Hope eventually decided it was ;).


This blog was created (Or rebooted if you will) for two reasons. The First being that I have always had a thirst for knowledge in my chosen field (Filmmaking) and as a result when I learn or discover something new and exciting I feel the need to share it. The second reason is that sometimes I find it difficult to even understand why I'm still doing any of this, it's hard, it calls for long days, stress, failed relationships and tension amongst those you can actually maintain one in the chaos. I decided that maybe the best way to try and deal with these tougher times was to put my thoughts here, so that they have a voice and aren't stuck in my eternal monologue that is making my life more and more like an episode of 'Scrubs' everyday.


So heres to Filmmaking and Life lessons. I'm sure it will be tough and I'll rant, But the plan is to also impart some information about what I get up to and what I discover on this journey.


MJ