Pleased Sheep Films

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The filmmakers essential guide to Cannes
Posted: July 3, 2005

Cannes 05 This year (2005) ‘Diary of a Bad Lad’ was one of the ten British films, including shorts and documentaries, submitted to the Cannes selectors by the British Council in March. We had no idea if we were going to strike it lucky, but we did have ‘official’ backing and there are precedents for similar films not only being selected, but also carrying off prizes in previous years, so we had no alternative other than to start looking for flights and accommodation.

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Michael - September 6, 2005
UPDATE ~ WRITTEN AFTER THE SCREENING:

On Sunday our film Diary of a Bad Lad was shown at the Phoenix cinema in East Finchley. I'd like to say in advance that any disappointment I write about shouldn't reflect how I feel about the organisers of the event, Shooting People, who are great people. Especially Ben Blaine, a filmmaker who saw fit to champion our film to a London audience, and who I respect as a filmmaker.

Early last week the Phoenix cinema was broken into, and the state of the art Christie projector which they used for screenings such as ours was stolen. They burglars also made off with other things, and generally left the place in a mess. Thanks to these burglars, it meant that the screening of our film was also a bit of a mess. Also because the people who run the cinema had a lot to sort out after the break-in, it meant they didn't have time to set the screening up for 5.1 surround sound. However I was told that it had been set up so that the 5.1 surround was converted to 2.0 stereo.

I arrived at the cinema to find that the film wasn't being shown in anamorphic 16:9 and that the colours looked off. I visited the projection booth to find that the stolen projector had been replaced by an old Epson data projector, better suited to showing powerpoint presentations in a classroom. It couldn't handle progressive scan, and couldn't project it in 16:9 widescreen properly. It could only letterbox. This means that image quality was severely compromised. We ended up losing the image altogether at one point, which meant the audience couldn't enter the theatre while we ran more tests. After all the stress of trying to get more out of the projector, myself and the projectionist decided to return to the original settings.

The audience came in. Jon talked about the movie for about five minutes, then the movie started. Ten minutes later I realised another big problem. The speakers were only playing out the front two channels of audio, which meant that the other four channels of audio were missing. Most of the incidental music, sound effects and bass rumble were missing. It was like watching Jaws without the music, but worse because this was our movie. All of the tension built up by music, or ambient sound was gone. We purposely designed parts of the sound to cover up inconsistencies with the location audio. Because these cover-ups were missing, it simply sounded like we hadn't bothered.

The upside is that people still laughed in all of the right places and that people came up to me at the end of the film to say they liked it. The downside is that for me a lot of our hard work was missing and I know that if the audience had seen it properly, they would be coming out saying 'wow', just as they did at the Manchester preview, instead of simply saying they liked it.

The big downside to this is that people obviously thought our film was supposed to be like that with awful sound quality. This could be damaging as there were some press in the audience and we did invite some distributors. I just hope they know about the technical problems, and they realise that they only saw 50% of our movie on Sunday. The sound when the movie was shown at the AMC cinema in Manchester was fantastic, pristine and most importantly, it put the viewer in the middle of the action. The movie is designed to put the audience in as another character. It's pure 3D sound. This couldn't be said about the screening on Sunday where lots of technical problems provided an experience far short of what we know. Also because of the nature of the film - it's in a documentary style with deliberately degraded visuals mostly - the sound is important, and we took our cue from Steven Soderbergh. When Soderbergh made his feature Full Frontal, he decided to make the visuals purposely bad to see how far the audience would take it. To make this easier, they paid extra special attention to the sound. They found that audiences will pretty much watch any kind of image quality, as long as the sound is great.

You make the sound bad, and the movie falls apart technically.

The other problem was that the film was listed on the cinemas flyers as starting at 4.35pm, which was an error as it started at 2pm. A heck of a lot of people flooded into that theatre at 4.30.

We must be strict on screenings in the future. For a film like this, optimum quality is essential, as a bad screening may put off potential distributors which could be disastrous. Though none of this could have been foreseen and if the cinema hadn't been burgled I believe it would have been a much better screening. I'd like to thank Ben Blaine for his support and to basically say to him that his apology wasn't necessary afterwards. It was basically a bad day at the office, and the only people to blame are the people who raided the cinema a few days before the screening.

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The HD Future - The Present is already the Past
Posted: July 1, 2005

High Definition is going to be around for a very long time. It’s not the future of the film industry, it’s the future of consumer electronics. How long will it be before HD is the only format available on the high street with HD camcorders being sold in Argos? Filmmaking will no longer require hiring cameras costing as much money as a Ferrari... Read More...

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Jon Williams' top ten tips on producing on ‘no budget.’
Posted: December 18, 2003

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1. Always be realistic... 2. You need to have a really good story... 3. Make sure the story is feasible... 4. Accept the fact that, if you have no budget then you have to fit everything around peoples availability... 5. Don't bite off more than you can chew... 6. Money has to be what you ultimately want to make... 7. Don't form a committee... Read More...

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2 + 2 Doesn't Make Film Four
Posted: August 5, 1997

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Originally published in Raindance's Reelscene newsletter of independent filmmaking.
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