A German Word – APRIL SHORT FILM OF THE MONTH

A short film by Will Webb about hipsters, love and filmmaking!

Whats A German Word about?
It’s a dark comedy about the psychology of hipsters. James, the main character, is a very neurotic guy with a massive crush on one of his best friends, Lucy, who’s this total dreamboat intellectual filmmaker and artist. The problem is that she has a boyfriend, Dean, who’s better looking, more confident, and more intelligent than James. So the movie follows James’ frustration with the situation.

Tell us a little bit more about the production, did it all run smoothly?
We had many problems! In particular arranging casting was a nightmare, because Emily (the producer) and I weren’t living in London at the time so everything had to be arranged from a distance. We also had to procure a location at the very last minute, which involved convincing some security guards of our legitimacy! Those issues aside, the actual production was quite smooth, and the film didn’t suffer.

What’s the best advice another filmmaker has given you?
When I first started films I loved to get multiple takes of everything, all the time. I was once shooting with Owain, one of the best filmmakers I know (and frequently my DOP), and requested another take. He asked ‘Why?’. I explained I just wanted another, ‘just for safety’. He told me that if we didn’t change anything, and if I was happy with the previous take, then there was nothing to make safer, so the take would be superfluous. Since then, I’m sticking to the take I’m happy with, and getting more while changing the shot or blocking or performance in some way. I’ve got a happier set as a result, and the films shoot quicker!

What advice would you pass on to a fellow filmmaker?
If you can do without something in your film, and it won’t affect the quality of the film, then don’t bother with it! I feel like indie filmmaking’s quite a puritanical craft sometimes, because we have to pare everything back to its bare minimums in order to get by. But what this rule shows you is that sometimes, having too much can hurt the film as well, having non-essential stuff in there isn’t good, and if you’re on a very low budget anyway, why push it further?

Why did you decide to crowdfund the film?
I went to one of re:vault’s first events, and it inspired me to look further into crowdfunding my next movie. For A German Word, the decision was easy, because it was a relatively small budget, and we had lots of friends who wanted to help make the movie. It also felt like a good way to engage the audience which the film reflects (other young creative types), because that’s the market where crowdfunding hits best. [Kickstarter Page]

What’s next on the horizon for you?
Emily and I are working with another producer on our next film, thematically quite similar to A German Word, which is called Dalstonian. It’s also about hipsters, but these people are actually nice, and it’s more a drama about funny people instead of a dark comedy. We’re currently looking for funding and developing the script, so keep an eye out!

Facebook
facebook.com/AGermanWord

Follow on Twitter
@AGermanWordFilm
@Willwebbful

 

Indiegogo Reveal “How to Crowdfund”

Following a new look website, Indiegogo are offering everyone a FREE how to manual on crowdfunding!

To download a copy for yourself go to:
landing.indiegogo.com/film-handbook

What can you expect?

On Another Note – January Short Film of the Month

Interview with director Emma Dove

What’s ‘On Another Note’ about in one sentence?
A whimsical sculptor, inventor & performer who has a very creative relationship with bits of acquired junk.

Can you tell us a little bit about what inspired you to make this documentary and how you came to meet Sarah?

I met Sarah through my sister, Katy, who used to rent a caravan on the same patch of land.The caravan sits beside a quiet farm track between a field and the woods and you can’t help but slip in to a more peaceful state of existence on visiting the place. At night, all you can hear is the trickling of the stream beside the caravan and the occasional moo.

We were keen to try and capture the essence of the place and it’s community. On our first recce we had a quick tour lead by Sarah and immediately she became the main subject of our film. Luckily we were filming that first tour, as it formed some of the most important scenes of the final film. We had no explicit ‘motives’ prior to that; we just simply became fascinated by Sarah and her work.

The instruments and music that Sarah makes could be described as an eclectic combination of music and art, how did the music and instruments influence the shooting and editing style for this film?

Sarah’s work and life has the potential to appear completely nuts, but in actual fact she has a very considered and immensely intelligent approach to her inventions. Creating and playing them seems to verge on an obsession, perhaps because the process is akin to solving a complex puzzle – it becomes meditative, even trance-like, and it’s catching. We wanted the tone and pace of the film to mirror this experience and capture both the genius and quirkiness of it without becoming derisive. There are a lot of ways that 13 hours worth of footage can be condensed in to an 11 minute film, but in the end what became key was applying the same underlying respect that Sarah clearly had for her work to our own material.

What’s the best piece advice a fellow filmmaker has given you?
Show, don’t tell.

What advice would you give a fellow documentary maker on how to approach their subject?
With respect and honesty. And show, don’t tell.

What’s next on the horizon for you?
I’m in post-production on “Mirror Lands”, a film and sound installation exploring diverse relationships to place on The Black Isle in the Highlands of Scotland. The work is a collaboration with Visual Artist and Composer Mark Lyken and Ecologists at the University of Aberdeen’s Lighthouse Field Station. It will open at the Centre for Contemporary Art, Glasgow, March 7^th-9^th, presented by Cryptic Glasgow cryptic.org.uk/mirror-lands/  

Find out more about Emma
www.emmadovefilm.com
@EmmaDoveFilm
Facebook Page

HOMEY – December Short Film of the Month

Homey is a short film written and directed by Ben Garfield made for the Virgin Media Shorts competition. Homey was one of thirteen super short 2 minute 20 seconds films shortlisted for the 2013 awards.

Can you tell us a little bit about what inspired you to make this film?
I remember the inspiration coming one day as I was crossing the Holloway Road in London. It’s a busy road and, although I wasn’t actually in any real danger, as I got to the island in the middle I got a rush, a feeling of “I’m safe! I made it!” The sensation triggered a memory of playing British Bulldog in the school playground and the relief of getting to the other side. I got to thinking it could work well as a film and be something others could relate to.

Was Homey intentionally made for the Virgin Media Shorts competition and how difficult was it to come up with an idea that would work in only 2 minutes 20 seconds?
It was made with the competition in mind. I wanted to enter with a story that would fit snugly into the time limit and so when I had the idea that was one of the things that appealed – a round of Bulldog had a clear narrative arc that would suit the 2m20s length.

They say never work with children and animals, how did you go about casting for this film, have you worked with child actors before?
The entire cast were taken from years four and five at Grafton Primary School, where it was shot (about 5 minutes walk from my house In Archway, North London). I had a connection with the school through my time working for the arts charity Rowan Arts, for whom I coordinated a funding bid to help them and two community centres gain funding for a series of film projects.

It was my first time directing children which was a daunting prospect! Though I knew pretending to play a game of bulldog wouldn’t push them too far out of their comfort zone. For Bertie Peacock, who played the main role, I wanted his character to treat the game very seriously, as if it were a war. He told me he had seen Steven Spielberg’s War Horse so I watched that so we could have a common reference point. I asked him to imagine he was standing in the trenches during World War I and tune into what that might feel like.

Whats the best piece advice a fellow filmmaker has given you?
I came across an inspiring piece of advice in an interview with Matt Whitecross which I read just before shooting Homey. It said something like (and I’m paraphrasing from what I can remember here) ‘when you feel like you’re working on a project in which you need to push yourself to the limit and you’re worried you won’t be able to pull it off – that’s when you know you’re working on the right project’.

What advice would you give to someone planning on making a VMS entry for 2014?
I would say to think about how your film is going to suit the 2 minute 20 second timeframe before you start shooting, rather than trying to trim something down dramatically during the edit. That’s the mistake I made the first time I entered the competition a couple of years ago with a film called Benches. It’s about a friendship that develops between two park rangers who work together on Hampstead Heath – from that description alone you can probably appreciate why it was difficult to cut down!

Finally, whats next on the horizon for you?
I’m currently making four short online promo films for children’s charity, The Shakespeare Schools Festival. We’re into the edit stage now and I’m working hard to complete them by Christmas!

In terms of short narrative films, I’ve got a documentary in development which I’d like to shoot early in the New Year and two fiction films written, both of which come in around the 15-minute mark (which would be the longest I’ve made yet). Hopefully I’ll be able to get them off the ground soon…

Find out more…
Twitter @BenGarfieldinho
virginmediashorts.co.uk/film/3848/homey

The Strange Death of Harry Stanley

re:VAULT Short Film of the Month

Interview with Jeremiah Quinn (Writer/Director)

What’s The Strange Death of Harry Stanley about?

It’s a true story about the police killing of Harry Stanley in London in 1999.

How did you come across this story?
At the time, this was a big news story with a lot of public outcry.  But for some reason, it faded away.  It was a story that moved me and made me angry.  I discussed it on many occasions with the screenwriter William Morrissey, and he suggested I should write a short film about it.

In the film you make many references to truths and lies, was it important for you to tell a story that Irene Stanley (the wife of Harry Stanley) would be happy with?
I researched and wrote the script with no permission.  When I was happy with it I got in touch with Terry Stewart of Justice for Harry Stanley and showed him the script.  Terry was very helpful and made several important corrections.  He then introduced me to Harry’s widow Irene Stanley and she looked at the script.  For someone who has never read a script before, this script is a very difficult starting point as it plays with the truth.  Some professional readers had reservations about the titles (which undermine the action).   Irene Stanley was honest about being baffled by the script.  I was very nervous because if she didn’t give her approval I would not have made the film.  We drew her attention to the ending when the titles suddenly shift and become honest about the most important thing in the case.  Terry assured her I had her interests at heart, and she gave her approval.  For the premiere, I invited Irene along so she could see the film before it was shown and ask questions.  She was delighted with it.

Are they any tips or advice you would like to share with fellow filmmakers that you learned while making this film?
Hell, yes.
Don’t go off at half cock.  Don’t treat it as therapy or a jaunt.  Don’t get together with a bunch of mates and say, “Ooh, what larks if we all got together and made a short film”.  Find your passion.  So many short films are empty and leave you wondering ‘Why did anyone want to make that?’  I don’t mean find a political passion like I did for this film, I mean find something you really want to make.  Think of something that always makes you laugh out loud when you think of it and find a way to turn that into a comedy film.  Think of something that really terrifies you and turn it into a film.

After passion, you need polish.  Any passionate short film with polish will find success.  Polish starts with the script.  The script must be very polished.  Like most people, I won’t read scripts with spelling mistakes and grammatical errors.  The nuts and bolts count so much.  Remember that for short films, the script itself is your pitch.  When you hand it to a DP, he will decide whether to do it based mostly on what’s on the page.  Your production will be built around the level of merit in the script.  When I’ve commented negatively on scripts handed to me, sometimes I’ve heard the comeback, “Oh don’t worry, you can’t see the spelling mistakes onscreen”.  True, but the laziness will all be up on the screen.  It’s a craft, so every bit of application ends up on the screen.

I learned a lot about distribution and festivals making this film.  I was very ignorant.  There are things I would do very differently if I could go back and do it again.

I simply hadn’t watched enough short films.  Shooting People have a Film of the Month Competition (which we won in May 2013, still waiting for Dexter Fletcher’s overall winner decision).  Any member can post their film.  Study this if you want to make short films.  You can see the winners, the losers and how it happens.  It goes to a second round with just ten films, and it is very easy to pick the top ten out of a couple of hundred.  You’ll understand very quickly what makes a bad short film.  One of the identifiers of bad short films is that they start with the beginning of the day.  Every month you can see a crop of films with alarm clocks going off, people pushing back covers, sitting up, yawning, showering, breakfasting…  Oh, dear, yes – breakfasting.  Had I watched a couple of months of Shooting People FOTM, I would have known not to start a short film with breakfast.  How many curators saw the opening three shots of my film and ejected it before going any further?  Plenty.

The opening of The Strange Death of Harry Stanley doesn’t have any cinematic touches.  And again, I think you should try very hard for an arresting, cinematic opening shot.  People start short films nervously and they want to be reassured that there is vision and imagination, especially online, where they are unlikely to go past the opening shot if they don’t like what they see.

And your thumbnail image is as important as the film itself.  Study Shooting People, note how often you don’t bother to click on a film to watch it if they haven’t put up a thumbnail.  Note how you are reluctant to watch a film with a poor representative image.  This is how you can differentiate your film from all the others before people have even seen it.  Picture people with thousands of films to watch with the same attitude as you when you scan through Shooting People looking for something exciting, and you’ll soon have some ideas about how to present your film.  We had a great poster made up which is beautiful, but it didn’t work as a thumbnail at all.  For a while, that was our image on Withoutabox.  We then did some fantastic screengrabs from the film and posted those, and things turned around.  Stills are very, very important.

What’s next on the horizon for you?
I have very nearly finished a new short film about lost love, Touched.  I have just successfully funded my next short on Kickstarter. It’s called Incognito, about two fugitive Nazis meeting for coffee, cake and a catch-up in Argentina in 1960.  You can see all the details here.

Thanks Jeremiah

Find out more
Shooting People
Twitter

Crowdfunding Spotlight // The Cross

Kickstarter Update!
The Cross met their target and was fully funded

“The Cross is a tragic love story based on folklore that is concerned with the manifestations of oppression. It’s the winter of 1529. A nun and a monk have fallen in love.”

Siobhan and her producer Emily are currently raising money for their epic short film THE CROSS on Kickstarter. re:VAULT chats to director Siobhan about the concept and crowdfunding

The concept for The Cross sounds really intriguing, can you tell me more?
It’s about fantasy, freedom, love and sex!

What films and filmmakers have influenced ‘The Cross’?
It’s not so much about what other filmmakers have influenced the film but about real experiences and real people. I don’t feel it should be about replicating someone else’s work, that just creates formulae. It should be about what feels right. As Alice Guy Blache says ‘Be Natural’.  Make films from an honest place and an audience will get behind it. Also, it will leave you feeling far more satisfied with your work regardless of whether it’s ‘good’ or not.

You’re currently raising money on Kickstarter to fund the film, why crowdfunding?
Crowdfunding is the start of the future. It offers a new way of thinking about film. People say crowdfunding is on the way out, that doesn’t matter. It’s the fact that things are being discussed. When a system is old, stale and unequal then they have to and will change at some point. What’s important is talking about the change even if things go wrong along the way.

I was really interested in the concept  and plot for this film. Making a low budget period film must be really tight where money is concerned, is this what most of the money raised will go towards?
Yes, EVERYTHING will go towards recreating medieval Yorkshire. Props, costumes, locations -material things. We’re working on such a tight budget that we can’t pay the crew much at all. That’s the thing that sucks a little about doing things this way. On the plus side it encourages creativity. Everyone involved is doing so because they believe in it creatively. I think in times of economic hardship people become more creative because it’s either that or nothing and nothing is way too depressing.

Thanks Siobhan

To find our more about THE CROSS visit their Kickstarter page here
Twitter | @TheCrossFilm
Facebook | /TheCrossFilmUK
Blog | Tumblr

Crowdfunding Spotlight // Sixteen

Kickstarter Update!
Sixteen hit its target and was fully funded

An urban thriller about Jumah, an African former child soldier living in London who is forced to confront his violent past.

re:VAULT speaks to director Rob Brown about his debut feature film ‘Sixteen’, that he is currently crowdfunding on Kickstarter.

Can you start by telling us a little about ‘Sixteen’ and what the film is about? 
‘Sixteen’ is an urban thriller about Jumah, an African former child soldier who is forced to confront his violent past when he witnesses a stabbing. Jumah is about to turn 16 and faces difficult choices about the kind of man he will become as he approaches adulthood. Primarily the film is about Jumah’s relationships with the women in his life, his adoptive mother Laura and girlfriend Chloe, and the difficulties he faces in opening up to them and letting go of his troubled past. ‘Sixteen’ is my first feature film so I wanted to make sure it had a really distinctive lead character and explored complex themes. It’s really difficult to make a feature film stand out amongst the competition but I think we have managed to achieve this with ‘Sixteen’.

Was the film inspired by any true events and what was the writing process like?
The film isn’t based on one particular former child soldier’s story but I did lots of research into the subject. I read all of the former child soldiers memoirs, spoke to Human Rights Watch researchers who work out in the field, other NGOs, charities and I spoke directly to some former child soldiers for my research. Our lead actor Roger Jean Nsengiyumva knows Emmanuel Jal (actor and author of acclaimed memoir ‘War Child’) so he was able to speak to him about his experiences as a child soldier to help him research the character.

The writing process was difficult (it took three years and continues in the edit as we speak) as it was my first feature script and I had picked a difficult subject to explore. I had completely ignored the principle about writing from your own life for your first feature film because I wanted to get an insight into something that was completely outside of my own experience of life. I am glad that I did this now but this is why it took so long.

One thing that really helped the development process of ‘Sixteen’ was being selected from 400 entries for the BAFTA Rocliffe New Writing Forum at Edinburgh Film Festival 2011. The opening 10 pages of ‘Sixteen’ were performed by professional actors in front of an industry audience and the hosts of the event were Nicola Shindler (Red Productions) and Matt Greenhalgh (Writer of Control and Nowhere Boy). I got some invaluable feedback from this process and couldn’t have written a script worth making without the insight and advice offered by the hosts and the industry audience.

So the film has already been shot, can you tell us a little about the process. 18 days doesn’t sound like a lot of time to film a feature, it must have been stressful?
18 days is definitely not long enough to shoot a feature film! Luckily we managed to achieve this and get a great film in the can but this was due to the extraordinary luck of having just the right cast and crew who were wholeheartedly committed to making the film happen in difficult circumstances. For example, we were mostly filming in a derelict block of flats in Dagenham during the coldest Spring since records began! But the cast and crew didn’t complain, they just got on with the job and proved their talent with the end results. However, shooting on such a tight schedule (and tiny £40k budget) wouldn’t usually result in such a great film. The shortest micro budget feature film shoot I have heard of amongst my peers recently is 24 days and that is still a very tight schedule. I feel really proud of what we achieved in 18 days.

You’re currently raising money on Kickstarter to fund the film, why crowdfunding?
I think crowdfunding is about more than just raising money, it’s about building an audience. Having a few thousand likes on facebook is one thing, having hundreds or thousands of people pledging money towards the completion of your film counts for much more as it’s a bigger commitment. It proves to sales agents and distributors that there is an audience out there for your film who are willing to commit their money to a great project that they want to see happen. We are starting to find and reach this audience on Kickstarter and I’m finding it really rewarding, its touching that people I don’t know will back a film I’ve been working on for nearly four years with their wallets. Every single pledge we get makes a massive difference as we can’t finish the film without getting the full £15k we need to complete post production. This is the last hurdle we need to get over to have a fully finished feature film that we’re really proud of and our Kickstarter backers are making this happen.

And what are your hopes for the finished film? 
We’re aiming at using major international film festivals such as London, Sundance, Rotterdam, Berlin and SXSW as a launchpad to getting exposure for the film and securing a distribution deal. Myself and my cast have had our previous work screened at major international film festivals so I strongly believe that we can do this. Our main stumbling block is making sure that we get the Kickstarter money to complete the film in time for us to submit to major festivals that are running towards the end of this year or early 2014.

Where can people find out more
Our Kickstarter page is http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/382223528/sixteen-a-new-british-feature-film and we also have a website with more details www.seizefilms.co.uk

www.twitter.com/rbrowndirector
www.twitter.com/seizefilms
www.instagram.com/seizefilms
www.facebook.com/sixteen.themovie
http://vimeo.com/channels/sixteenfilm