Making Deadville 04/17: A Motley Crew

Posted September 30, 2011, under Deadville
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It was a case of getting who we could for when we could. Alex had been talking to various perople about the film. The main problems was trying to get someone to do sound and trying to get someone to do the camera for us.  We met a few people about the sound and Alex had reservation because these people had other commitments and this was understandable, they would be working for us for free, so we completley understood that they would give higher priorities to the other stuff going on in their lives.

The hardest thing to do is get people to show up, this would be the main thing, part of the test for us is do people actually show up when they say they will. For me this was a decider, if I am meeting someone for the first time and they cancel on us on the day I take it as they are uninterested, the other thing that they do which I think is unfair is that they give you an excuse that is non reproachable ie “My grandma died” which, honeslty I would like to say is, “Oh thats terrible, when is the funeral” Either I am cursed or this is the basic excuse that people give when they dont want to do something. The other one is “my car wont start” to which my reply is get a taxi, they then say “i have to wait for the mechanic”  If they were to turn round and said, ” I don’t want to do it” that would be preferable because then you know to move on rather than thinking that they want to do it and they are a victim of circumstance. Either way if they don’t show up the once, they’ll never show up.
We got one make up girl who helped out on the teaser, after that things went quiet and we couldn’t get in contact, this was a shame as her work was good. That didn’t matter though because she did put us in contact with Sasha who was great. She met us not once but twice. She was organised and was able to answer all our questions, she was going to do make up. She was able to understand what I wanted and was also friendly and was honest which was great. She was able to give us time frames for her to work in which she kept to and updated us on what she could or could not do.
As for sound we still hadnt found anyone and this was becoming scary.
I don’t know when I came to the descision of shooting the film myself but it wasn’t a decision I was happy with. Technically I am probably one of the least skilled out of my peers, I still don’t know what an f-stop is, and my camera, while good was not brilliant but it did shoot in HD and I remembered a few tricks from shooting a few short projects. The only real thing that I learnt from cinematography is that if you want it to look cinematic is that you have the actors in focus with background out of focus, nothing could go wrong.
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Making Deadville 03/17: Casting and Rehearsals

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We needed a cast, there were five speaking roles in the film. There were a few people I had in mind. Neal McWilliams, I had made a short film; A Day in the Life of a Cleaner. Neal had a brief role in it and Alex and I really liked Neal’s performance, he was subtle. The problem with most theatre actors is that they can only act big. Neal on the other hand completely understands how to act in front of the camera. Padraig Wallace was another one that I wanted to work with; he has this cool film look, a prominent chin, deep voice and good physique. I had worked with Lesa Gillespie previously on our final year film project, she could act and she was a consummate professional during that, at times troubled shoot. We were lucky to meet Hugh Yeamen from our friends cancelled horror film project. He had a great deep voice and simplicity to his acting style. For the part of David’s girlfriend Neal said that his girlfriend would be interested in playing a part, this seemed like a good idea and it turned out to be a great idea as there was a real chemistry between the two. This was to be the main cast. Alex would work on getting the crowd of zombies and also someone to do the makeup.

We had a series of read through on the script. The script was going through several tweaks as well when we were doing the read through. What happened during the rehearsals was that I quickly learned how much nonsense directors talk. I gave a wank direction which was “imagine you’re a bottle with a hole in the bottom”, that was a real low point for me, not in regard to the film, I’m talking about my life in general. From that moment I decided that I should never give a direction more complicated than opening a door. Aside from that there wasn’t really much else to say about rehearsals, the actors were great and they didn’t really need me there.

One thing that we did do during the rehearsals was get scenes on their feet get them moving which sped things up even further. I began filming them in order to get an idea of were I would be putting the camera and how scenes play. It worked as a really basic kind of storyboard schematic because I cannot draw to save my life and can’t concentrate enough to do it over and over. From this live storyboard I constructed a shot list from it, this was a very limited, it was a shopping list which contained basics like “Close up of feet” and “Medium David opens his eyes” This list was taken and was put into order so that when it came to the shooting we could do it in the quickest way possible.

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Making Deadville 02/17: Writing/Rewriting

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There were things about the first draft that I liked. Originally the premise was Reservoir Dogs meets Night of the Living Dead. It was about a group of thugs stuck in a safe house and were trying to plan out what to do next. The protagonist was a criminal who wants to leave the place to get back to his wife who is dying of leukaemia. The film would cut back and forth between the protagonist trying to escape the safe house and the wife trying to keep the zombies at bay while suffering declining health.

There were elements that I liked in the script, mainly the idea of the man trying to get back to his wife. It needed changed though, I had another idea for a film about a doctor stuck in Europe after WWI who arrives at the chateaus of an eccentric aristocrat. He is involved with a cult who are trying to resurrect his dead sister. I liked the idea of the outsider stumbling on the madness and incorporated this into the second draft.

We were working to a deadline, we were filming at the end of August regardless. We were in April.
The first read through went horribly. Alex and I alternated lines.  As we read over it I could hear confusion in Alex’s voice and I can’t blame him, I didn’t have a plot, I just knew that I had to get from point a to point b and take a certain amount of time in doing so. Therefore there were long passages of dialogue which didn’t have a purpose so it would constantly circle back and repeat itself and then when it got to a certain amount of pages, I stopped. In this draft the brother and sister were very clearly mad from the start and David, the hero, was a doctor and he was being kept in order to provide a cure for the two antagonists.

When leaving Alex’s I remember saying “I know where I went wrong, I’ll fix it”  understatement. There was so much wrong with that first draft. It was unusable, it felt like much time had been wasted on it and we were running out of time and the end of August was coming. We had not even fully cast the thing yet or really done any form of preproduction.

This draft was eventually thrown out when I decided to flip the roles of the hero and the antagonists. It would give David motivation, in the first draft why would he leave his lover if he was the best chance of saving her, in this new draft though he would be going to the doctors in order to get the cure.

The plot was the myth of Orpheus, so I went to the text and used it as a paradigm to hang the plot on. David like Orpheus, is venturing into the underworld. Here the Greek underworld becomes the Belfast, city of the dead. The king of the underworld and Persephone are the two doctors/scientists, Robert and Sarah, they hold that which can revive Elizabeth, in this case the “cure”, once I had these aspects in place it made the rewriting happen a little quicker.

There were other elements that I incorporated into the script. Since this was my first feature and we had about £800 budget I wasn’t going to have too many crowds of zombies, the catering alone would clean our budget out. I was going to keep the cast minimal. The good thing about the zombie genre is that it hinges on staying in one location and is about the tension between the characters until the last twenty minutes when the zombies finally get in somehow.

Keeping all these elements in mind is what informed my subsequent rewrites.
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Making Deadville 01/17: Beginnings

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Deadville came about when we were supposed to making someone else’s film. I was going to be acting in it. It was a horror film and Alex and I were helping out. We were excited, we had been out of university for two years and we hadn’t really done anything. Nothing had killed of our desire for making film quite like a BA in Film Studies. We had become sickened with film to the extent that we went in the opposite direction and formed a band.

The band was our holiday. We started it as a joke, we had been filming local bands on a semi regular basis and thought that many of them didn’t engage the audience. We were going to change that by having a show that combined film, theatrics with really heavy driving rock. The band was slow taking off and we found the same frustrations arising that we found with trying to get film work. The band was fun and it started to get some recognition. We were surprised by how quickly the band became well known. In many ways Alex and myself got carried away and were putting more effort into the band.

We came to the realisation that music was our mistress who we would go to when we wanted some excitement and that film was the wife. Now we were coming back home to the wife.

Doing this film would be just what we needed, we were excited for it, to be working with people who just decided to go for it. The cast and crew had met together and we had seen some of the location via some test footage that they had shot. We had done a few read through on our friend’s script, it wasn’t yet finished as it was only forty pages long. They were going to keep working on it.

The read through of the script was enjoyable and everyone was excited to be making a film. It was with a group of people who got on together and we were set to be filming at the end of August. We all booked it off work and were looking forward to production.
Time had passed and there was no progress.
We waited and then we heard how they were trying to move the date of the shoot forward. This led to confusion as nothing had been organised and we hadn’t even seen a schedule. Before we knew it the film project had been canceled and we had nothing to look forward to, we were disappointed.

Alex thought that since their project was a no go we shouldn’t waste the two weeks. We should try and make a film. He hadn’t anything ready so he asked me if I had anything, I had a few projects at different stages, none of which were ready. I took a project which was the most doable financially and gave it a read over. On looking through the piece, a 90 page feature called Zombies Outside Everywhere, ZOE, for short. What became clear was that it needed work.

 

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