I feel inspired to write this article after recently watching a documentary called "Zombie girl the movie". It was about how a 12 year old girl went about making her first feature film with her mum, here's the link.
(http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1278480/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1).
Her film was a zombie tale and was shot and finished over a two year period. This rang a lot of bells for me as my production went on for about that time.
So here goes.....I first tried to make a feature film way back in 2002/3, i thought i knew enough to be able to act, direct, film and edit a feature film. However i found out that this wasn't quite the case.
I had shot a ton of shortfilms since i'd first discovered it was possible and had painstakingly edited them onto VHS tapes. I was starting to get some experience with digital editing software, but my computer couldn't keep up. Ironically it wasn't until i'd pulled the plug on the project that i had a basic system that could handle the job.
The film was called "Reality Check" and was going to be about a gamer who finds himself trapped in a zombie shoot em up. A Cool idea and would have made a decent short, but i was sure i could make it much longer. I pitched the idea to my film-maker buddy Richard Bayliss and he was eager to get started. Also i told friends and some of my coworkers at Staples, where i worked at the time , if they wanted to help. I got a load of yes's and was feeling sure of everything. It was my time to do something major...so i thought.
We shot the film whenever we could, i abandoned any other shortfilm projects because i didn't want to be distracted or put off from this one. Myself and Bayl were shooting loads of stuff on our own, as we were used to doing. We got some great sequences 'in the can'. We wanted gore in the film, so i had to get covered in fake blood for most of the shoots. This alone was a nightmare as it's impossible to keep up the continuity of 'make-up', especially sticky fake blood
(most of the time we used ketchup with food colouring).
I would shoot whenever my parents were away for the weekend or if they had planned to go out somewhere. I shot large portions on my own with my trusty tripod and handheld for close-ups. I was obsessed (still am).
I would look at the footage after and see what was missing from the scenes and what we could re-shoot next time. The problem was that in some cases we wouldn't shoot anything for months at all. I even remember one night where i abandoned all shooting because we couldn't get the shots we needed. This was, in part, due to none of my zombie extras showing up....at all. Although it's mainly my fault for not planning something else in it's place.
The time flew by and i was getting extremely stressed about the project. It was taking that long that i was re-filming sequences that didn't match at all and changing scenes/events in the movie. Bad planning is the kiss of death for filmmaking. To top it off i hadn't storyboarded any sequences besides a few doodles on my script copy.
I remember saying to Bayl, i wanted to start again from scratch. He wasn't having any of it, i could see his point of view. We'd been shooting loads of stuff for ages and now i turn round and say "let's start again", he must have thought i was crazy. I think Bayl was losing interest in the project at this point and it became harder to get him back for shoots (not impossible however, he even suffered some problems as a result of swallowing a fake blood pill by accident, thats showbiz).
Other friends who had said they'd help were backing off since the whole thing was like a pipe dream explosion. My friend Robert Thornton helped me by being every other zombie in the film on a few occasions but i think he was unsure what i was going to achieve.
In the end after filming on and off for over 2 years, in 2005 i decided that i'd had enough. I told everyone i was done with it and that was that. The biggest side effect of this was that i didn't create a shortfilm again until Spirit Trap in 2009. I had tried to start a few things in between but i lacked conviction, i kept remembering how hard it was to make something and finish it.
I have shared this story, even though i consider it quite personal, because i want people to not have to learn the hard way like i did. Plan things before hand better and work fast. If you have ambition to be a filmmaker or artist in whatever capacity, DO NOT LET ANYTHING STOP YOU.
I thought i could turn my back on my "hobby" and just not worry about it. I found it was quite the opposite, when i wasn't making films i wasn't happy. I considered myself a failure in some ways and saw a bleak run ahead. After working at several crappy jobs i knew i had to follow my heart so i picked up my camera again and started 'from scratch'. This was the best decision i ever made!
I still make shortfilms regularly and enjoy the process of imagining and then making them solid/real. I have written a feature film script which i now feel i can achieve by keeping it simple and shooting fast.
I suppose filmmaking for me was never a 'hobby' but is infact some sort of obsession, survival in a way. I know i'll always soldier on even through the hard times. I learned a valuable lesson on this one and i won't make the same mistakes again (new one's maybe but not the same).
So in the words of Sea Sick Steve
"I can't stop what i'm doing, it's the life blood of me, I can't stop what i'm doing, it be the death of me"
Thanks for reading
