Moviemaking Updates and Other Miscellany

I claim to be an amateur movie-maker at the top of the blog, but hardly ever seem to post anything about that very subject. Well the truth is that for the last while, I haven't been entirely focused on the movie making part of it.  My last big effort in that direction was completion of the fine tuning for The Stone Unturned edit, the entire project of which has been rumbling on for a couple of years now.  The edit is now, as they say, locked.  All that remains is for the sound mix to be completed, at which point I should theoretically be able to drop it straight into Premiere, render it out and we have a complete movie! Theory is all very well in theory. Dropping the sound mix straight in should perhaps be more of a hypothesis than a theory, until tested against the evidence of having something that works.

Rendering for this half-hour production used to take my machine twenty minutes, until I figured that it could use some fancy colour-grading to give it more of the cinematic feel which all amateurs working in video seem to crave.  Movie-looks were provided by a plugin called - unsurprisingly - Movielooks, a freebie obtained when I bought Premiere in the first place.  Rendering it out no longer takes twenty minutes: it takes thirty hours.  Looks great though.  I'm especially pleased, since the free version is no longer available as a promotional item.  And the reason I'm pleased is because I was able to find it cowering in a corner of one of my old hard drives.  And that reason that pleased me is from having to partially rebuild the computer a few months back, when everything started to fail spectacularly. (An obscure interaction between the ATI graphics card and the rest of the system caused drive cacheing to fail. Not sure I believed the explanation, but only became convinced when the card’s fan physically spun itself right off the board.)  I thought I'd lost the plugin entirely and the full - and only version - now available is a tad outside the range of my budget.

The Stone Unturned is tentatively scheduled for free release sometime before mumble mumble mumble. Potentially before the end of the year, but as we’ve learned these things never go to plan. In any case, I reckon it is the best-looking episode of Intrepid we’ve made so far. (Up to speed section: The Stone Unturned is a Star Trek fan film, the latest in the series.  We're approaching it all quite allegedly professionally you know.)

Mainly, however, I’ve been preoccupied with writing or at least attempting to be preoccupied with it. To this end I've now got a complete short script, around 23 pages, which I've passed both to Nick and T'Other'Alf.  Nick likes it well enough to film as-is and Lesley has assured me that "it's not complete pants".  Which is encouraging!  Executable, as it's now titled, has had an odd history.  When I was writing Bit Patterns as a full-length Intrepid script, I was halfway through when Brian Matthews' script for The Stone Unturned made an appearance.  At the time I didn't think I could complete mine quickly enough to start filming in the following months, and so it got bumped to next in line.  Nick was working on a feature length Intrepid script called Conviction of Demons, of which some scenes have since been shot.  I was concerned about what would amount to trying to make two feature films simultaneously, both of which would require extensive outdoor shooting.  In typical Intrepid fashion, both were written in the large.  A huge effort, then.  Multiplied by two.

This was the point at which I started thinking about a full length original film which would be simpler to make.  Something in a single location and with as few characters as possible.  So I started jotting down notes and thinking about a project which had the working title Bottleneck, potentially our first original film.  Then something odd happened.  As I've written in another post, myself and Nick had a conversation, the outcome of which was to rejig Bit Patterns as an original film.  Nice idea, but it involved way more than merely changing names.  As it happened, it needed almost as much effort as writing it in the first place.  Now that it's in the only-tweaking-required stage of scripting, it's obvious that it would need a serious budget and huge effort.  We reckon we could start on a sizzle reel this year - well, next year - but so far it's just in the speculation stage.
(Of course this means that I still owe Nick an Intepid script...)

So now I wanted to think once again about something which could be achieved with less effort, and with the bonus of being less likely to drive me crazy.  So I turned to the idea for Bottleneck and wondered how it would work not as a full-length script, but as a short one.  And that was the genesis of what is now Executable, the final words of which I wrote just recently.  Since it effectively takes place in a single location, is indoors and requires only three actors, we think it could be filmed in a weekend!  Even better, from my perspective, it gives me a chance to make use of the DSLR for shooting, which I bought for the very good business reason that I really, really wanted one.  DSLRs aren't known for their audio quality, however, but since Nick has just ordered a digital audio recorder...

And that’s where I am at the moment. No doubt everything which happens from now on is subject to change.

Long Overdue Update

There's plenty things been going on the last few months and they're all continuing.  I've finally got a mostly finished version of the Bit Patterns script currently at the being-scrutinised stage of development.  I'm hopefully going to get some feedback in the next few weeks at which point I have to write some additional scenes, make good any places where it's lacking (too many characters is an obvious one!) and give it a final polish.  With any luck, we can get it into pre-production by the summer.  Still very excited by this as it'll be Intrepid's first original movie.

I'm also working on a script/design for a computer game of which I can't say too much, suffice that it's still the early days and will likely take increasing amounts of my time as the year progresses.  And bear in mind that I do all this stuff in my spare time - which is only laughingly called free!  More details when I'm able to talk about it freely.

The editing of the Intrepid episode The Stone Unturned is almost finished.  Myself and Nick filmed the last outstanding scene last weekend, which went smoothly - I wish all the scenes were like that - and also a short scene for Star Trek: Odessey, another fan film series.  The only "setback" was hooking up the camera to the microphone, where a loose connection inside the audio connector box resulted in a lot of crackling.  So instead we used the HD camera in DV mode.  Nick was kind enough to edit together the Stone Unturned scene to take a little pressure off of me.

Speaking of filming, we're tentatively scheduled to do some filming in a fortnight's time for The Conviction of Demons, the latest Intrepid episode.  Nick is nominally directing this one, his first time, whilst I'm doing camera.  When we shot the first scene (production-wise, not Scene 1) in Perth a few months back, I was still so used to being director that I was shouting "Action" and "Cut"!

Finally, I'm dabbling away at a novel, the idea of which I'd had literally twenty years ago.  Only now am I feeling confident enough to actually write it, but I'm having to fit it in amongst everything else because other people are involved in the other endeavours and that's a commitment!  It's been simmering away at the back of my mind for all that time.  Part of my motivation for doing an Open University course back in 1998 - Astronomy and Planetary Science (passed!) - was to get a good handle on how a supernova worked, a central part of the book!

And finally, finally, I'm working on a large blog post about Body Harvest, an old DMA Design game which I was involved in.

There's other stuff I wish I had time to do, but I suspect that'l always be true.  Too many ideas and not enough time.

Bit Patterns Redux

Recently I completed the first draft of a screenplay for Intrepid, that old Star Trek fan film for which I've directed a number of episodes.  The story takes place shortly after the events of the pilot episode.  It was quite a journey getting it to the point where it made sense to me, let alone to the stage where it made sense to anyone who read it.  Events in the Intrepid universe overtook some of the plot points and I had to rewrite it, an actor who played a key role wasn't available so that meant another rewrite.  A lot of headscratching and aha moments occurred before the stage where it was actually, genuinely complete.

The night that happened, I had a short list of items I needed to change, points I needed to make and dialogue I had to invent.  One by one I got through them.  Completing the script came as a surprise – adding the last item meant adding some extra lines just to bring that scene to a natural end.  And... oh.... it's done.

This was in stark contrast to the first major story (in terms of mere wordcount) I'd written when I was younger and didn't really understand the concept of polishing the work.  Even though there was a huge gap between writing the first half and coming back to write the second half, I'd know since the very first paragraph what the very last line was going to be.  In those days I started at the beginning and wrote linearly until the end.  Writing those last words was an incredible experience and I was bouncing off the wall for days.
So the unexpected completion of Bit Patterns may have been a hint that I wasn't done with it yet.  Oh sure, it was finished but that didn't mean it was done.

So.  A couple of weeks ago myself and Nick had an extended discussion about the future of Intrepid and part of that was the other possible projects that were always there but never seemed to get to item one on the agenda.  We'd always wanted to do an original piece of work once Intrepid was at an end (if indeed it ever was – I once said to him that if Intrepid was a success we'd never be allowed to stop making it.).

I'd been thinking about the timescales, which made me squeak uncontrollably.  The next Intrepid script, Nick's Conviction of Demons, is a monster.  After the readthrough, I estimated that it'd have a running time of at least two and a quarter hours.  And that means a couple of years making it, though that depends on how efficient we can get.  Bit Patterns was almost as large.  So that meant a couple of years plus whatever additional time before we could have something full-sized and original finished.  That's a while to wait, since we've been doing Intrepid since 2003.

So I made a suggestion that I'd been thinking about all the previous week and after much soul-searching, we're going ahead with it.

And that means I'm re-writing Bit Patterns to be an original script.  Not Star Trek.  Original.  And once I've finished  - really finished – I'll be directing a Science Fiction film.  It feels great to be able to type that!  Even if it means that I've just given myself a lot more work for the same total of completed screenplays: 1.

What this means is that I have to do the obvious things such as changing character names.  What's possibly less obvious is that I also have to change the character motivations and backgrounds and relationships.  I have to change the technology.  I have to change the backstory of the whole universe it's set in.  And that's the say nothing of all the additional scenes that will be necessary to do establishing in a way that simply isn't required for Star Trek.

This will be an interesting experience.

Adventurous Scots

That would be me.

Seems that there's been a recent study showing that we'd all rather stay in and watch TV or waste time on the Internet.  Well, that's pretty much true as far as I'm concerned, but nothing beats actual data.  So on this morning's adventurous trip to the shops with the express purpose of obtaining caramel cheesecake, to undo the cycling I did the other day, I was stopped by someone from the Evening Telegraph.

She was looking to speak to ten people and ask then what adventurous thing they'd done recently.  It's a regular feature in the paper where the public is asked a question.  What had I done?  Aside from visiting the crash site of the light aircraft in the park earlier on (the pilot was OK and more of which later), I thought the perfect answer was a plug for Intrepid.  After all, as I said, we'd been filming at Glen Doll which gave us the opportunity to go camping and do some hillwalking; an excellent antidote to sedentary habits.

I've no idea whether it's ten people or it's more and whittled down to ten.  Hopefully I'll make the cut!

Update:
Yep.  I've just been in the Mon 17th edition along with nine others.  Intrepid itself wasn't mentioned, although it did say about Star Trek fan films and the wilds and cliffs.  The actual quote from me contains about 60% of my own words!

Intrepid Release Day

Release day 2007, that is.

Courtesy of Jo, here's a photo taken on the evening on the release of Heavy Lies the Crown.  The afternoon was a rather fraught one, spent with Nick grappling with rendering a recalcitrant movie that didn't want to be rendered.  A month or so earlier I'd converted all the sequences to Quicktime because my laptop didn't play nice with the MJPEG avis that I'd been using all this time.  Rendering took an hour and we were running short of time to make the midnight deadline, inlcuding uploading for Micheal to place them on the servers.  David's final theme hadn't arrived, so we agreed to use one of the trailer tracks in its place.

The IM was silent.  Ten minutes.  Fifteen minutes.  And just as I was about to hit the button for the final output, David popped up with a message saying that the theme was ready to download.  Hastily placed in the edit and then an hours rendering, then an hours uploading and four and a half years of effort was at at end.

I felt decidedly odd at that point.

What would everyone think?  Would they like it?  Would they hate it?  So Nick went home and I went for a few drinks with Jo, who took the picture.  As far as I know it's the only photo we have from release Day.  The hat and TV were added by the camera phone she used.

I'm still not sure what my expression means!

The Stone Unturned: Friday's Shoot

Friday was when I realised that my fifteen minutes had expired. Nick had invited the Courier to come and have a good old look around our filming efforts, and just shortly after I'd been given a lift to the Abbey Theatre, a reporter and photographer arrived. I was prepared for this, of course, feeling as I did that I was something of a veteran after 2006's little publicity epidemic. (And some of 2007 too). With CNN, the BBC, ZDF all having interviewed myself and Nick for television and a number of newspaper articles appearing at the same time, it was almost routine. (I keep all the newspaper articles in a special shrine where I go to in times of feeling sorry for myself.*)

So I made certain that along with the other camera, the script, a pen, two pounds fifty pence, chocolate, a handheld GPS (don't ask) and a thing that glows in the dark for no reason, I'd also packed my World's Greatest Director baseball cap. Nick and Lucie had brought me this back from Las vegas and it is most treasured, because it reminds me of what I'm supposed to be up to when I attend these things. So, just the same as last time, then.

Nope.

It bodes well for Stone Unturned that Giles in uniform is such a draw, and having all the guys in uniform – especially one who looks like that captain bloke in the Next Generation – made for an irresistible image. Not many pictures are as eye-catching as a bunch of Trekkies poised in combat against a hasty assembly of council workers, somehow discovered spraying the paths and shanghaied in the photo-op.

But no matter how much I tugged at my cap and made pitiful mewling sounds, no-one appeared to think that I was a fit subject to appear in the article, or indeed notice. “My blog shall hear of this!” I declared to the surrounds, but to no avail. And no time to set the iPod to the “sorry for myself” playlist.

A surprisingly melancholic moment, then.

Most of Friday's scenes were set on the Intrepid Bridge, the ones that weren't probably constitutes a spoiler alert, and were shot against the greenscreen. One of the 'key' advantages (he he, I just made a digital compositing joke) of using the Abbey Theatre in Abroath is the amount of space available to put up things like greenscreen, at least in comparison with the kitchen which has slightly less than sound-stage status and is full of teapots, irons and other miscellany. We set a small record for ourselves with the amount of material draped at the back of the set.

This is good. Up until now, in Intrepid, I've been using what are called locked-off shots. In other words, the camera doesn't move when it's rolling and any scenes are made by getting another take from a different angle and cutting between them. It works pretty well, though it doesn't stack up well to the modern TV filming method of moving the camera around constantly. In our case it's been through sheer pragmatism. Steve Pasqua over the years has constantly tried to get me to pan the camera, which would be fine if I thought our tripod was up to doing it smoothly. Worse yet, we don't have the technology to move the camera against the greenscreen, since for example the 3D bridge model would have to match the motion and we can't do that... yet. Locking off the shots also means that the limited space in the kitchen can be used effectively.

You'll see some more adventurous camerawork soon, though, be sure of it!

So back in the theatre, we've enough space that – even though I'm not doing pans yet – Giles is able to walk from one side of the bridge to the other! Sounds like a minor thing, but it makes a tremendous difference. In fact there were numerous improvements over our last greenscreen shoot. Ric Forster helpfully arranged the lighting, for example, and we had enough room to illuminate the greenscreen without too many shadows. In fact everything that went smoothly seemed to be down to the extra space. When shooting a side angle on the bridge, where Caed's station is located, all we needed to do was rotate the set around ninety degrees. And since the set was a chair and a rear console, this didn't take long at all.

I can't remember the time that we got finished, sometime late in the evening. All I can remember is that I was too tired to get fish and chips. And when you're in Arbroath, that's pretty tired.

*Actually, I can't remember where I've put them.

The Stone Unturned

I was viciously attacked by a tick a couple of Saturdays ago when I was doing the “Mr Big Shot Director” thing again. Against all common sense,I was lying down in the grass trying to get a good dramatic (too melodramatic!) angle on a couple of the actors. That the grass was above a cave entrance and I have a fear of heights too, meant that I wasn't really doing myself any favours that weekend.

The Stone Unturned is an Intrepid script by Brian Matthews, that despite the gratuitous and unnecessary use of the word 'intergalactic', managed to combine a good old adventure story with the return of an old character from TNG. Naturally, you'd have to pay a negative amount of attention not to notice that it was in fact a certain Picard, played by Giles Aston. Coverage of the event appeared in the Dundee Courier as well as the slightly more widely viewed BBC website.

My task over the weekend was to direct the scenes with Giles in them, as we had a limited amount of time while he was in Dundee. This led to the most intensively scheduled shooting of anything we've done so far. I'll describe the three days in separate posts when I have the chance, but the important thing to note here is that we got the shots we needed and I managed not to lose it to any significant degree.

Shooting the scenes took us to many exotic locales; the magnificent hills outside Dunkeld, the ancient city of Arbroath and Nick's Kitchen. Or perhaps that should be Lucie's Kitchen, depending on which one of them actually prepares the most meals.

“Mr Big Shot Director” is what my girlfriend called me just before we started. I'm almost certain there was no sarcasm involved.

I'm not in SciFiNow!!!

Well, fame was almost mine. I'd been wondering for years if SFX would even pick up on this little movie that we were doing. OK, so I could have got in touch with them at any point, but that would have been a little presumptuous. (Also they might have laughed and that wouldn't have done me any good!) I'd kind of had a long-standing ambition to get the remake of Hired Guns in there as the best SF game of the year, but that didn't happen... So now there's SciFiNow having joined the ranks of SF magazines for almost a year now and, hey, there was a request for an interview! With Nick.

Ah.

So I somehow convinced them to include myself by going something like “Me! Me! Me!” and so that was how I came to be writing a bunch of interview answers. And as happens with these things, the whole lot was compressed and edited down to the point where, as you can see in SciFiNow issue 11, my contribution is entirely invisible. Well, apart from a few photos of mine which were credited under “copyright of their respective owners” and one that I'm actually in, (On the hillside in the distance!)

So rather than let them go to waste, I've included them here. Interview questions are copyright of their respective owners...

How did you get into Star Trek and science fiction in the first place?

The first written science fiction I can remember reading were the Scott Saunders adventures by Patrick Moore and collection of Star Trek episodes in short story form, which utterly failed to capture the spirit of it. Star Trek itself wasn't anything I really 'got into' as such, it was just always an ambient part of the 1970s background when I was growing up, along with Space 1999 and the Gemini Man. I recall first watching TOS on my 4" black and white TV. If there was a moment when I suddenly knew this kind of stuff was important, it was missing the pilot episode of Space 1999 and everyone else in the playground was talking about it! Mainly though, it was written fiction that held my imagination from an early age, such as Arthur C Clarkes Islands in the Sky and a collection of Asimov stories that I found in my Dad's cupboard. I think it wasn't until maybe the third season of TNG that I really counted myself as a Star Trek fan. It's funny that now I'm older I have much more of an appreciation for the original series.

What made you decide to create your own series?

It wasn't my idea in the first place, but I managed to secure a place when we were still at the "wouldn't his be cool" stage by having a fairly modern digital video camera. I wasn't aware of other Star Trek fan films at that point, though I knew of Troops which I very much liked. I had no idea it was possible for a bunch of fans to make something, and it seemed like a fun notion for us to do it because our fan club's turnout was dwindling and we wanted some endeavor that kept the core group socialising.

Originally we'd never planned to make an episode, we were making a short film, and for a long time the format seemed to be fairly fluid. In fact I will still use the phrase 'movie' and 'full length episode' interchangeably. By the time it had solidified, it was effectively a pilot episode.

What’s typically involved in the production of an installment?

I don't think there's anything that's 'typical' about it, since we've changed a lot of things for the new shorts that we're making, based on the experience gained. Nick is always telling me to shoot less takes and I'm always telling him that I want to shoot more takes! I personally love the look of the CG bridge which we placed against greenscreen, but I still have nightmares about the amount of keying I had to do night after night. So one of the changes is that we're trying to shoot against physical sets as much as possible.

What equipment do you use for photography and post production?

It's pretty much off the shelf stuff that you could get in the high-street. We've got some higher-end cameras and mikes now, but the first episode was filmed entirely on my Sony Handycam (a TR330) which I'd fortunately bought a little while before the whole idea for the movie came along. I edited and assembled the whole thing on an HP Pavilion laptop using Adobe Premiere. Most of the special effects were created in LightWave by our CG guys and any digital sets were created in Cinema 4D. I still find it amazing that in principle it's possible to go on the net with a credit card and two days later you've got everything you need to make a movie!

Where do you tend to shoot, and do you have permanent sets like Star Trek Exeter?

We have permanent bits of sets, though some of the panels are looking like they need an overhaul! Most of the original movie is shot against greenscreen in Nick and Lucy's spare room, with some of the later material shot in the kitchen.

Given your experience of making fan series, do you have any advice for anybody thinking of starting their own?

Prepare for anguish. As we discovered, doing this was a lot of work and we experienced a lot of setbacks. Make sure that your cast and crew are people who'll go the distance. Way back at the beginning we were nearly scupped by an actor who decided to quit after his first scene had been filmed - to this day he has not bothered to inform me of his decision.

And so there you have it!

Where there's a Sea

I'm aware that when I write about the Intrepid moviemaking, I've leapt straight in with no preamble. Unless you've checked the links below, you'll probably have no idea what I'm talking about. Where there's a Sea is a short Star Trek fan film which myself and some friends are making as a follow up to Heavy Lies the Crown which we released back in January. Our new one is the first outing for a new (ish) camera and a chance to put into practice everything that we have supposedly learnt over the last few years. A few weeks ago we shot the last of the footage needed to piece the thing together. Last night I got the footage from Nick (writer, producer) on an external hard drive and got it into the computer. I now face the unpleasant prospect of looking at myself for a few months, since for a change I was in front of the camera, and now I'm editing it all together. I swear I will not try to make myself look good at the expense of everyone else!