Carson-Coe-Price Films

Here’s part two of the director’s notes on E V E N T

Design Philosophy:

With this short experiment I wanted to play around with the convention that “the audience expects to, and must, understand”. The late great Alfred Hitchcock said “never confuse you audience as you will lose them” (not his exact words), which I agree with, but part of ‘Event’s’ philosophy is about looking for meaning in things that cannot be understood or explained and therefore having to draw your own conclusion. It was important to me that there would be no final answer to the film and times where the audience would hear but not ‘hear’, and see but not ‘see’.

With such an unconventional film there is always a danger that the audience will come away empty handed or thinking “the quality is crap”, “I couldn’t hear some of it”, “I don’t know what it was about”, but I felt that it was important to undo convention and to try and strive for innovation.

The choices made during editing were always governed by what adheres to the film’s philosophies and themes, rather than what the audience is feeling or expecting.

Changes from the concept to final film:

The script was originally much longer than the current 5 minute running time. Though I had (naively) intended the 5 page script to be about 7-8 mins, in reality it would have been closer to 10-15  mins.

I originally wanted 8 subjects to represent a broad cross section of our population; young, old, male, female, different nationalities etc. But due to the original shoot being sabotaged (see shooting journal) we had to run with the 5 actors who were able to make the new shooting date.

I also wanted to include news footage from disasters, riots and wars that had occurred in recent years to add authenticity to what I surmised would follow the ‘event’. After reviewing the rushes and realising that the film needed to be shorter we abandoned the news footage to reduce the running time and avoid any issues with rights to news/stock footage.

There was also a lot of critical allegory within the script about how we use the news, and how the news reacts during times of tragedy and disaster, but this was cut to reduce the running time and ensure the film did not outstay its welcome.

Further details/rules (mentioned early) about the ‘being’, and people’s interaction with it, and the themes associated, were also lost to the editing room floor.

Final Thoughts:

From the very start this film was an experiment that I expected to fail, with my concerns being:

• Whether the style I was intending to create would be possible or credible under the conditions of the production.
• Whether the message I wanted to convey would ring true or go over the audience’s heads.
• Whether it would be too abstract, and therefore not enjoyable, for anyone kind enough to give it their time.

Even with the hard luck experienced during the shoot, and the subsequent compromises that followed, I’m very pleased with this little short. I can’t say we achieved everything we set out to achieve, but considering it was one of our ‘£50, 1 week of pre-production specials’ (See Spot and Remain) I am happy with the result.

The lessons learnt have been small, but always important. After making a few missteps as a director during The Long Hard Goodbye, with EVENT  I felt I exercised restraint whenever anxiety crept in about the film not making an impact with the audience or functioning.

As much as we relish the challenge of these ‘£50’ Short-shorts, we’re keen to get our teeth into another, much larger, project. We plan to film the pilot for a sitcom set in a art gallery called IMITATING LIFE in May of 2012. Whether we can depends solely on being able to raise the £5,000 budget needed, and we’ll reveal more details about this over the next few months.

Our best films are always in front of us, and we just try not to make the same mistakes twice, or make the same film twice.

Thanks for reading.
 

Production Details:
Budget: £50
Pre-production: 1 week
Shoot: 1 day
Post: 3 weekends of ‘um’ing and ‘ah’ing
Equipment: 3 x £230 Camcorders, 1 x Dictaphone
Crew: 4
Cast: 5
Location: 1
Props: 4 x grey t-shirts (various sizes)

We recently completed and posted our newest short film EVENT. Here the director, David James Coe, explains the background and inspiration for the film.

After Saturday’s debacle we could be forgiven for waking up on Sunday with some trepidation and anxiety about how our hasty rescheduling would come off. But truth be told we were all still fairly calm, perhaps a certain fatalism about the project had come over us. We had done all we could to get it made and prepared all the reasonable contingencies, the rest was up to the gods and beyond our control. If it came off it came off, it it didn’t, it didn’t. C’est la vie.

Once again we were up at 6:30 in the AM, this time accompanied by our assistant saviour Bex Campbell, who had graciously agreed to step in and help us out at super short notice. We would have seriously struggled without her. 

Again we were out of the house by 7:30, but this time the Victoria line was running as well as ever, getting us to Brixton around 8:15. With no one to meet there this morning we all headed to the location, wondering what surprises the day had in store. 

Upon reaching the location (again) some of the nerves showed up (again), as we wondered what state the location would be in (again). We were pleasantly surprised to find it clean and clear and ready to use. We were set up by 9am, did some quick tests, sacrificed a couple of goats to the film-gods, and then waited for our first actor to turn up at 9:30.

Our morning shoot was fairly tight, with three actors coming in, each staying for an hour and a half. That’s a reasonable amount of time to get a few takes that were 8-14 minutes long each, depending on the style of delivery which we wanted to be varied, and enough coverage to help the edit. But considering we hadn’t wielded a camera in anger for some months, there was a question of how slickly we would work as a unit. If there was poor communication between the crew, then those hour and a half slots would quickly dwindle and start to feel a lot tighter, then the pressure would be on.

Thankfully there were no early shooting hiccups to talk of, and with Coe directing, Carson on roaming camera, Price on static camera, and Bex taking care of camera logs and clapper duties, our session with the first actor, Mark, went well. We were able to get three full takes in, and Coe even had enough time to work with Mark and focus on a couple of key sections so we had extra coverage.

After Mark was Miwa, a Japanese-born actress who kindly translated some of the script and did a take in Japanese. Following Miwa was Robin Kirwan, who we had actually met about three years ago (woah, time flies) when we were working on The Long Hard Goodbye, although this was our first opportunity to really work with him. 

We finished the morning session at about 2 o’clock, and with an hour until our next actor arrived we took the opportunity to get out and get some fresh air and lunch. We were in a fairly ebullient mood. The morning had gone about as smoothly as we could have hoped; everyone was on time, the crew were working well together, and most importantly, we had good performances from our first three actors in the can.

The afternoon session kicked off with Jonathan, who continued the run of actors being on-time, prepared and producing good performances. After he left us around 4 we had a three and a half hour wait until our last actor, Luis, was due. This allowed us to relax for a while, although we also used it as an opportunity to work on some sound stuff, including ensuring we had enough coverage of Coe’s dialogue as ‘The Interviewer’, as well as experimenting with some sound effects using an old tape dictaphone and one of the camera mics. 

We didn’t let ourselves slack off and lose focus though, and when Luis arrived at 7:30 we were set up and ready to go. It had been a long day and we didn’t need any unnecessary delays to make it longer. Our experience with the actors over the day meant that our final session with Luis was the best in terms of Coe knowing exactly what he wanted and how best to get it out of Luis as quickly as possible, meaning that no one would get too tired from repeated takes. 

With our last actor’s performance completed we packed up and tidied the venue, then left the place which had been the source of so much frustration and difficulty yesterday but had been the scene of a smooth-as-you-like production today. That’s filmmaking for you; somedays you get the breaks and it all goes for you, somedays you don’t. You’ve just got to do your best and keep on keeping on.

We got back to King’s Cross about 9:30, fourteen hours after we had left. It was a long day for sure, but we were all happy with the day’s work and quietly confident that we had got what we were aiming for. Too tired to do any big celebrating we had a couple of beers each, watched some of ‘Danny Dyer’s Deadliest Men’ (highbrow stuff), then hit the hay, tired but satisfied, the best feeling to have following a shoot.

We’re currently putting the film through post-production, so we’ll give you an update on that soon, and maybe do a bit on ‘lessons learned’. Serious stuff. We should also have some stills from the shoot to post in the next week or so. So much content!