a MIGHTY post!

Well, the holidays are over and I now have three short films under my belt. They were all fun experiences although in different ways and I definitely learnt a great deal with each. The fascinating thing about film-making is how you can learn heaps but still not know much. I guess it is similar to when you first learn a language. You can learn 100 phrases, which is no mean feat, and then still realise how far away you are from actually being able to have a fluent conversation. I feel like I have learnt hundreds of skills and techniques about the process but I still have an astounding amount to learn.

The first film I made was with the super-keen, super-lovely film club students at school. Four enthusiastic youngsters trotted into school in the first week of the holidays and we brainstormed ideas, wrote the script and planned our film within a few hours on the Tuesday. We decided to leave the filming until Wednesday however as the school was, I kid you not, testing out the volume of the bell in every classroom. This meant the bell rang for about 30 seconds every other minute or so. It was probably at least three times as annoying and unsettling as you would imagine*. Our film was an educational film about how to get a date for the school ball. It was meant to be pseudo-50s style so I got to dress up as a grey-haired, cardigan-wearing old school teacher. We filmed my introduction scenes in front of one of the few remaining blackboards at school and I waved a metre long ruler around. Needless to say I was in ham-acting heaven, a place not without a great deal of fun. The students were incredibly impressive with their dedication and willingness to do the ridiculous, embarrassing and fall over and throw themselves off chairs. The positive atmosphere and energy was great and we barrelled our way through many ridiculous gags and numerous costume/scene changes. Matt and I ended up putting the rough cut together that evening and I started to learn about editing. It was probably a good project to start with because each scene was only really one or two shots and editing was just a matter of selecting the best take or part of a take. Unfortunately our rough cut was about 7 minutes so we then had to embark on some pretty ruthless editing which meant cutting out everything that wasn't essential. Some scenes, though funny, were taken out for time and other scenes were abridged to the minimum.

The second film was a small, one day shoot with only 4 people in the group - another teacher from my school, Fraser, Matt and myself. This meant we all had to pitch in with the acting and crew work. Matt made an impressive one man crew but whenever one of the actors wasn't in a scene they had to take over sound or help. Again the sense of dedication and camaraderie was really a great thing to be a part of, the whole experience felt truly collaborative with everyone making suggestions about shots, lighting or ways to play the scenes. Our subject matter was a lot more serious and 'dramatic' but there will still some hilarious moments. At one point when we were recording a scene where Fraser's character listens to all these hateful messages on his answer-phone, Matt broke into this ridiculous Scottish accent in about the third take and everyone lost their focus and fell about the place laughing. On the whole though we were pretty serious and got down to business without much in the way of tom-foolery. It was a really exhausting shoot with so few people and little down time but watching our footage at the end of a tiring day was very cool. Again the shoot left us so buzzing that we edited a rough cut together straight away in spite of our tiredness, and only flying down to Christchurch the following day prevented us from finishing a final edit straight away.

Cut to the last weekend of the holidays. Just over a week has passed but with trips away, days in at school painting flats and props for the school production, it feels like a lot longer. I'm pretty exceedingly exhausted and wondering how I'm going to get the energy to be passionate and enthusiastic about the third film project. Then I get the email with Jenni's film ideas. Superhero. With a twist on the usual heroic ending. There it is. I'm completely smitten with the idea and cannot wait until the weekend. Each new draft of the script increases my enthusiasm. Matt and I start talking and pondering about the cheesy stunt possibilities**. Luke showed us some great B-grade stunts from 'Monkey' and had done some pretty impressive analysis of how to actually shoot them. Saturday morning pounced upon us with voracity of a hungry kitten and I felt hugely excited, a little nervous and completely out-of-my-depth. Matt and I had talked about the order of shooting and had a pretty general shot list but we hadn't had time to prepare the detailed sequence breakdowns or storyboards that I so tell my Media students are 'absolutely essential' if you don't want your film to become a chaotic mess in either the filming or the editing. I think we did pretty well with getting through all the scenes in one day but next time, if there is one***, I would like to have a really detailed plan for the shoot that can be made available to everyone. It is all just a matter of time and planning I suppose.

There were heaps of highlights of the shoot, it is hard to remember them all. I have to say that as well as putting in some excellent performances and looking 'super' in their costumes, Jenni and Lee are tremendously fun and funny people to have in a film. I can't quite remember all of Lee's great Mentor improvised lines but "You must even eat sandwiches mightily" and "I'm a mentor in other things as well (looking suggestively dodgy at Jenni)" were a couple of my favourites. Their playing around between takes ranged between the cute and the hilarious. I think we could easily cut together a 1 hour comedy show based on their antics which is impressive for a one day shoot of a five minute film. I think we could probably also cut together a "Get super-fit with Jenni" video with all the extra footage from the training montage but it would probably just be bought by drooling fan-boys.

I can't really praise the other folks in the group highly enough. Everybody was always there to help out when needed and a really lovely bunch of people to hang out with in what could be a highly stressful situation. I kind of feel like everyone contributed something special to the film and made it more awesome than it would have otherwise been. Our thug and granny gave excellent performances - it was great to see Nick's willingness to throw himself on the ground and get covered in silly string and get beaten by Steph's handbag. Steph's Granny getting outraged with the hero cracks me up in every take I watch and the real sense of old lady indignation is fantastic. Luke was excellent at working out how to film the stunts and the location stuff he did was awesome. Rachel was the super sound girl and did the cool spider artwork. I know she has _the_ superior 'skills of an artist'**** but it's still impressive to watch someone juggle sound gear and then quickly draw a cool-looking spider on someone's hand in a flash. The mighty Sandwich construction was awe-inspiring***** and the sets looked so brightly coloured and great. Sam painted up our great 'Radioactive Natural History Museum' in super speedy time. Our friendly, neighbourhood sage Morgue was there to come up with that great (and now after seeing how the scene plays, really crucial) first line, hold up the other side of Jenni and offer kind words of encouragement. Everyone was around helping out and being fantastic. Nick's behind the scenes interviews and Fraser's duct tape wrangling were also impressive.

Unfortunately, I don't know who did everything so I can't totally praise the right people for all the great stuff that was none but thank you everyone. It was so great to be able to say 'we need the garage scene set up next' when filming one thing and then go straight into the garage and have it look about 10 times better in real life than what I had hoped for in my head, and then better still on the camera. When surrounded with such a talented and lovely collaborative team who kept coming up with great suggestions to make each scene even more awesome, I shouldn't have really had any concerns or worries. However, some fears did creep into my mind throughout the filming. I'll share them with you now.

1. The morbid but not entirely irrational fear that Nick P was going to elope with my hat. Seriously. He wasn't just wearing it, he was bonding with it. He kept saying he was going to keep it and after a while I felt convinced that the hat looked happier with him. Was my newly-purchased black cowboy hat going to leave me for another head?

2. Was Matt going to hijack my film from underneath me? The paranoia started when he took a car-load of 'just the essential' people over to the first location and told me to stay behind to lock up the house! Apparently essential people included the lead actress, a sound tech, and Sam for the set but not the director/wife! Hmmphfff. Fortunately they only did the voiceover recording before I arrived but my ego and confidence in my role was severely bruised. Fortunately shooting the first scene went really well and restored my confidence that Matt wasn't in fact commandeering the production.

3. Were people going to work out that I was clueless? I guess the point of a 'hobbyist' category is so that amateurs who have no real experience beyond student film-making but just love film get to have a go at making films. However, it is hard not to feel the weight of your own inexperience and amateur status. You know what you want to achieve and you're really just guessing about how you're going to get it. The concern though whenever you try something new in a group situation is that your lack of skills will let the others down. If it was just me trying something and it was a complete failure, I'd just chalk it up to experience and not worry too much. But when you have a group of people give up their time and trust you to film their script/performances/design work etc it is really nerve-wracking that you'll make some newbie mistake that ruins everyone's hard work. Then they'll hate you. And hunt you down with pitch forks and other farming implements.

4. The disturbing realisation that my directing persona was not cool. Could it really be that I was the directing equivalent of Tyra Banks? I did, to my horror and dismay, channel a couple of 'Tyraisms'. The first one was the use of the word 'pop' to mean make the colours stand out. I wanted a bright and colourful look with lots of primary colours, the four-colour comic look. Unfortunately, this lead to instructions like 'Use a brighter red - a colour that makes your lips pop' and 'put some contrasting colours in the background to make their clothes pop'. I did also use the word 'fierce' as an adjective for looking hot and really good. There I admit it. I'm not proud but it happened. I guess I should just be thankful that noone physically hurt me as a result of the annoying Tyraisms. I expect that it would have not been entirely without justification if they had.

* School Bell testing is not on my list of careers I would wish to pursue. I guess it is like the modern day equivalent of being a bell-ringer although the guys appeared more muscular and blokey than hunchback.

** Some of which it is probably best that we didn't seriously consider trying to do.

*** I really hope that we do make some more short films whether they are more competitions or not. Hopefully the experience increased people's enthusiasm for making films.

**** To quote the always relevant Trogdor Strongbad email.

***** At least, it was if you feel the same way about giant sandwiches as I do.