Another quick post, just to let the world know that On the Train will be at the Guerilla Filmmakers’ Masterclass in London tomorrow and Sunday. Hoping to learn new things and meet new people! I’ll post a review of the masterclass early next week.
Coming soon… Your chance to Rescue Donna
This is just a quick post to let everyone know that we will soon be launching an international appeal. Yes, that’s right. Just like Médécins sans frontières, only without the medicine bit. Or the frontières bit.
Watch this space (and Twitter) for more information about #rescueDonna. Coming in the next week or so…
Tentacles… clinging to my body…
“There was always somebody – a man – standing by one of the firs. This was in daylight, you know. He was never in front of me. I always saw him with the tail of my eye on the left or the right, and he was never there when I looked straight for him. […] Sometimes, you know, you see him, and sometimes you don’t, just as he pleases, I think: he’s there, but he has some power over your eyes.” (M. R. James, ‘A Warning to the Curious’)
M. R. James, scholar and ghost-story writer (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
M.R. James needs no introduction. His famous stories, constantly reprinted, tell – at great and wordy length – of scholarly, rational men in ancient houses and lonely hills menaced by disturbed spirits, things of diabolical and malevolent intent with the power to inflict death and terror by little more than the fact that they are nearby. A James story typically consists of a pseudo-academic introduction, followed by an unremarkable and very long-winded exposition of events … and then something changes. Over maybe just a few paragraphs, and with the minimum of information, we begin to feel the presence of a mortal threat. Through suggestion and hint, this threat grows and grows until it overcomes the protagonist. We are rarely shown the moment of demise, and the hellish creature is usually described only in elements. Continue reading
Someone give me a hand to start this thing…
Hello? Sheena, are you there? Hello? Blimey, what’s happened to the lights in here? Where are…. OW, MY KNEE!!!
<Click>
Ah, that’s better, I can see now. Ow, that hurt.
Good grief, it’s dusty in here. <Blows dust off something, sneezes.> Ugh. Right, I can see no one’s been in this blog for a long time. Not surprising, with the winter we’ve had. There’s been no shooting activity on the production over the long cold spell, and is it any wonder when it’s a completely outdoor shoot? In the meantime we’ve been off doing other things:
- Sheena’s been working with the Drunken Chorus company on the very exciting and challenging ‘La Noche Oscura del Alma’, a radical attempt to fuse theatre and film, which is currently in development with Arts Council backing.
- Henry has been shooting music videos, including one for the launch of the new album ‘River Man’ by popular artist Anna Neale (see the video here).
- And Stephen has been finishing post-production on the material that’s been shot so far for The Ditch. Continue reading
WordPress’s 2012 in review
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog. I’m sharing it with you, not because it says anything remarkable (it doesn’t, except why did we have so many visitors from Australia?), but just to keep the wheels of the blog oiled and turning before we have something to report again. Won’t be long – I have an interesting article approaching about ghost stories on film!
Here’s an excerpt:
The new Boeing 787 Dreamliner can carry about 250 passengers. This blog was viewed about 1,600 times in 2012. If it were a Dreamliner, it would take about 6 trips to carry that many people.
Production Diary No. 6 – why it takes a year to shoot a 15-minute film
We’ve gone a bit quiet, haven’t we?
There’s a reason for that. Several reasons, in fact. The first is that we’re exhausted – me, in particular. Running an underfunded but fully professional operation (single-handedly for some stretches) isn’t something you can do on a regular basis unless you’re an exceptional human being, or you’re being assisted by regular inhalations of a by-product of a crop found prevalently in Colombia (so I’ve read… Anyway, as a chronic sinusitis sufferer I don’t ever plan on inhaling anything stronger than the scent of pine candles this Christmas).
The second reason is that we’re in an unusual limbo. Normally short films are shot over a weekend or a few days, all the material is captured and then the post-production is swiftly (or slowly) processed and the finished product is shown to a grateful cast and crew over beer and nibbles in a Soho screening house or a specially hired movie theatre, before being bunged up on Vimeo and (all too often) forgotten about. We’re not making that sort of film. Continue reading
Behind the scenes at The Ditch (2)
Here’s another look at the shooting of The Ditch. Donna (Katie Pattinson) gets splashed with fake blood by our specialist makeup artist, Bunny Stanway-Mayers. What can Donna have done to get in this state? Whose blood is it? And – most importantly – what does stage blood taste like?
