I’ve also been shortlisted for the GFF trailer competition for which I’m so grateful as it’s going to kick my butt back into the short film making world. I moved up to Glasgow from Manchester after university and whilst working as a camera assistant up and down the country never had time to find the same contacts and wealth of skilled collaborators to call upon up here, yet seeing constant amazing work come out of every corner of Scotland.

I enjoyed listening to the other 3 proposals yesterday in our first meeting with GFF. All ideas I’d love to help out on when they get through to the making stage (if they need the help!) Also hearing about all the different disciplines they choose to work in and how it differs to my approach.

I learnt in the meeting that GFF actually shortlisted me for my 10 second sting idea rather than my original pitch for the 30 trailer, and would prefer if I worked the idea into the full length trailer. So I’m going to put up my original proposal then add a few further ideas I’m preparing for our meetings with Mark and Clyde, two senior designers at ISO, to help develop the ideas.

Original Proposal:

Straight on, symmetrical shot of a traditional Glasgow tenement building.

The square formation windows, characteristic of Glasgow tenements can be seen.

Within a flat a figure walks towards the window on the bottom left and draws the blind down, filling the frame with a flat purple colour. The same happens in the window diagonally above right to the first window, this time the blind is pink. Another is closed to show a letter.

This process continues until the Glasgow Film Festival logo is complete.

Ta-daaa

The idea was influenced by Avril Paton’s “Windows in the West”, (thanks Kim for reminding me of the actual name!) paintings of tenement building exteriors, where each window has it’s own separate life happening within.

(see the image here:
http://www.avrilpaton.com/paintings/glasgow/windowsinthewest.html)

The evolved idea is going to happen along these lines where the camera is moving between and coming up close to each window. The action that is happening inside was influenced by the Stella Artois ad campaign that came out a couple of years ago that they called the “cinema sudoku”, where there was a normal looking scene of a park or a beach but iconic film images were added into the scene.

(You can find them here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2005/jul/17/davidsmith.theobserver)

Each window will have a reference to a classic film, such as a the boy with the red hoodie bringing his bike in the house so it doesn’t get nicked or a man in a wheel chair and a broken leg spying with binoculars. Each character pull down their window blind and the camera zooms out it see the GFF logo made up by the blinds.

This is a brief version of the idea so far, once I’ve spoken to Mark and Clyde about it tomorrow I’ll update me blog on ways that the idea can be achieved.

Check out the other shortlisters yo!:

Kim Stewart, paddymac and Alburt

This is my first blog post for the Glasgow Film Festival Trailer Competition. We had our first meeting yesterday and it was exciting to meet everyone and hear all the great ideas for the trailer! I’m looking forward to my first meeting with Mark and Clyde at ISO Design tomorrow morning!

My idea involves a literal play on the Glasgow Film Festival’s ever expanding presence and growth. With the GFF winning multiple awards (including Best Large Event at The Scottish Event Awards 2009 and the GAGA Audience Development Award), the amount of screened films and events increasing every year, along with rising attendance figures, it seemed appropriate to portray this in my trailer idea.

SYNOPSIS
A young couple walk through Glasgow and enter Glasgow Film Theatre. They reach their cinema seats and are astounded as they look up towards the colossal-sized seats. They strain to sit on them.
Line reads “GFF10… Now Even Bigger.”

SCRIPT

SCENE 1

EXT. GLASGOW SQUINTY BRIDGE – EARLY EVENING

Amazing view of Glasgow’s squinty bridge looking towards the city centre from the Southside of the river. WOMAN and MAN enter screen from bottom left. They walk across the bridge holding hands.

CUT TO:
Side view, WOMAN and MAN walk across screen. Finnieston Crane and Armadillo can be seen in the background.

CUT TO:
WOMAN and MAN walk down Sauchiehall Street. Art Deco Beresford Building seen in this shot.

CUT TO:
WOMAN and MAN enter Glasgow Film Theatre.

SCENE 2

INT. GLASGOW FILM THEATRE – SAME EVENING

WOMAN’S face engulfs screen. She looks up at the camera above her and drops her jaw. She looks utterly bewildered.

CAMERA pans around from her face to reveal enormous cinema seats. The seats are three times the size of the MAN and WOMAN. MAN stands next to WOMAN and both stare up at the seats in amazement.

CUT TO:
MAN assists WOMAN with a leg up. WOMAN struggles and clambers onto giant cinema seat.

CUT TO:
MAN and WOMAN sit on the huge cinema seats and look exhausted.

SCENE 3

TITLE: GLASGOW FILM FESTIVAL 2010

CUT TO:
TITLE: NOW EVEN BIGGER!

Overall Look & Style:

Fun, vibrant colours to reflect GFF10’s style.

Preferably filmed in full high definition quality.

Strong, well-composed shots to advertise and promote Glasgow.

MAN & WOMAN to wear casual stylish clothes.

NOTE:
The 30 second sting will include all 3 scenes.
The 10 second sting will only include scenes 2 and 3.

If you have any suggestions for this idea, please feel free to comment.

No project would be complete without a last minute clash of opinions and technical complications, and this one was no exception. Dispite these, I think the end reuslt holds together well. Ofcourse there are a few things I would have liked to do differently or spend more time on to improve the technical quality, but unfortunately there just wasn’t the time available.

I have to say I was blown away by the musical composition Charlie from “Eardrum Productions” put together for the trailer. I think it really enhances the visuals and will sound great when the great unwashed get to experience it in theatres around the country. I met up with Jen from GFF and Charlie (Charlie’s partner in crime) down at Savalas to produce the 5.1 Dolby stereo mix. What a treat! Over 5k of surround soundsystem and a very nice technician, Chris, pulling all sorts of nuance out of the music to achieve maximum impact in the theatre.

Well, it’s been a fun ride, but it’s finally over. Now I just can’t wait to see how the 35mm print will look on the big screen!

I’ll leave it to the cSta guys and GFF to release the full trailer, so I’m afraid this blog post is just a tease…. All I can show is a collection of frame captures.

First off; the launch weekend! By the time I’d gone to my office to pick up my camera and trudge along Argyle Street in the pouring rain, I was generally soggy all over with a fully water-logged foot curtesy of the hole in my shoe. To add to my woes the coffee machine in Mono was out of order! Not the best start to what turned out to be a fascinating, entertaining,worthwhile weekend.

I really enjoyed Saturday, with it’s mixture of arts and crafts (in the true meaning of the word); I discovered a few gems I’d not been aware of before. I was particularly moved by the photographic exhibition in the Street Level Gallery which depicted the life of the photographer’s parents before and after his mother’s stroke and subsequent death. Not sure how I feel about the fact that the artist posed his parents for alot of the images, but guess it shows the level of trust between himself and his parents that this didn’t seem an uncomfortable thing to do.

Sunday was the business end of the launch weekend with some great presentations by artists and designers from an eclectic mix of backgrounds. I saw a good number of familiar faces at the drinks after as well as meeting many new people. Great stuff.

Congratulations to the cSta team for a successful implimentation of a what could have been a logistical nightmare! Just as their logo promised, the events ran like clockwork!I look forward to future events like this and hope it can become a bi-yearly, or more frequent, event.

The trailer is taking shape; the gods looked kindly on me and gave me two days of good weather to coincide with my filming the various sites. As usual, I had to waste a fair bit of time battling the inevitable tecnhical difficulties of transferring HD footage to my workstation, but in the end all is well and the results look good. As for the music, I’ve met up with Matty to discuss the approach I am looking for and we made some good progress developing the idea. I’m quite excited to hear what he and Charlie can rustle up!

And for my links of the week….
some incredible vfx and particle work with “Fire”

http://motionographer.com/media/sehsucht/sehsucht_fire.mov

Not particularly new, but this is a sweet piece of stop-motion animation to music.
http://www.maxhattler.com/aanaatt/

This is just nice and weird :-
http://motionographer.com/2008/05/27/koichiro-tsujikawa-cornelius-omstart/

I want to make something like these ! all paint on plywood …
http://www.artbbq.nl/ron/menu-eng.htm

Enjoy yer weekends….

p.

At my last meeting with Iso, my treatment was met with much head scratching and an uncomfortable silence. I left it resigned to the fact I’d blown it, becoming bogged down in narrative and losing touch with the graphic approach that got me shortlisted in the first place. Dispite this, there were some interesting suggestions that were worth persuing. Stripping the idea back to its core and throwing out any visual complexity seemed to be the only way I could put my proposal into a workable form. Thanks are due to the guys at Iso for leading me in this direction.

In the end my trailer is all about the history of cinema in glasgow. The forgotten screens that used to shine across the city. The sad loss of so many venues that entertained thousands, and the lasting legacy of film in the minds of the city’s inhabitants. It’s alot to ask from 25 seconds of film I know!

Thanks to all the other shortlisters for their support and to those who offered to help with the audio. I will be gettings in touch with the musician I’ve chosen shortly and look forward to hopefully developing a kick-arse soundtrack to test the soundsystems of cinemas across the country!

So, I’ve got a busy few weeks ahead… I’ll be keeping you posted with how the trailer is progressing, so watch this space

This is a bit late as was meant to go up on Friday but I thought I’d shove it up just to complete the GFF trailer competition experience! So here’s the material of my final submission with treatment and storyboards and stuff yo!

TREATMENT

The trailer involves a classic Glasgow tenement building and its inhabitants. The first shot begins by looking straight at the exterior the ground floor flat; it’s night time with orange street lamps illuminating the dark windows. To the beat of the music the lights in the flats turn on in sequence. This reveals the people inside carrying out an array of activities. These activities hint at stereotypical and iconic shots, scenes and concepts from famous films. One example is a red hoodie clad man pedalling furiously on an exercise bike with a large circular lantern behind him. The camera journeys at a constant speed up the tenement building staying locked straight on. More dark windows come into view and the lights come on to the beat. The hints become more abstract and some don’t involve people at all. The camera reaches the roof of the building carrying on to reveal the streets of Glasgow behind finally coming to a rest as the GFF logo appears.

The tenement building itself will either be a layered photo or a photographed and lit miniature model, similar to the technique used in my previous film Grandma & the Monster all the while keeping in mind Avril Paton’s iconic paintings of Glasgow’s tenements. The camera movement up the building will be achieved using After Effects. Rather than being filmed the action sequences will be created using looped photographs, forming gifs, a jolting style of animation. The people will be shot against a green screen and the sitting room sets slipped in behind them. The gifs will be animated to the beat of the music coherently fusing the audio-visual elements. The overall feel will be that of an automata sculpture; a multitude of miniature interlacing cogs, springs mechanisms working as one to create the rudimentary yet pleasing action.

Susan Boyle (of local band Vendor Defender) has agreed to collaborate to make the track for the piece. She has made a very rough mock up which hasn’t been mixed that she is thinking about using.

Window 1
A man wearing a red hoodie and sports gear peddling on an exercise bike in front of a round lantern lamp shade on his light – E.T.

Window 2
A woman watching a exercise video, one of the moves is to move your arms with fingers in ‘V’s across her eyes – Pulp Fiction

Window 3
Birds in a birdcage and birds hanging out – The Birds

Window 4
A man stands at the back of the room while in the foreground is a silhouette of a woman putting on her tights – The Graduate

Window 5
A shadow of a giant rabbit crosses the floor – Harvey

Window 6
3 People in red tracksuits – The Royal Tenenbaums

Window 7
This window is underwater, a squid floats by – 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

Window 8
A flashing television with static on it – Poltergeist

Window 9
The blind is down and there is a faint, distorted shadow of a hand holding a knife – Psycho

Window 10
This window is entirely bricked up – Brick

Window 11
A man wearing pyjamas with banages on his leg looking out with binoculars
– Rear Window

Window 12
A man taking off his glasses and ripping open his shirt – Superman

Cheers my dears

So I’ve been frantically trying to get everything together for the final submission by noon today. (Not an easy task considering I’m currently in Sheffield for the Doc/Fest!)

I’ve managed to get a studio space for filming in Film City Glasgow! Also managed to source a green screen and lights and a great rate! I’ve met my three actors who all seem brilliant! Below is a revised script (not too much changed here)…

SCENE 1

INT. GLASGOW FILM THEATRE – EVENING

Everything is in darkness. A beam of light suddenly reveals glimpses of ambiguous shapes and details. The stark contrasts of light and dark create an eerie atmosphere amongst the forests of gigantic cinema seats.

Another light flickers sporadically. This flickering cinema screen light shows the silhouette of a COUPLE holding hands. An USHER, whose torch emits a strong beam of light, leads them.

SCENE 2

INT. GLASGOW FILM THEATRE – EVENING (CONT.)

The COUPLE pass what appears to be a giant piece of paper crumpled on the ground. The USHER impatiently signals to the COUPLE to keep following him. The COUPLE appear worried and look back uncertainly towards the paper. They meet one another’s eyes and their mutual anxiety is clearly demonstrated.

The USHER continues, walking underneath the giant cinema seats, with the COUPLE following, until he abruptly stops. He checks the two tickets in his hand, looks up and nods to the COUPLE.

SCENE 3

INT. GLASGOW FILM THEATRE – EVENING (CONT.)

The COUPLE reach the USHER and look up in astonished confusion. The USHER looks very irritated, sighs and rapidly signals for them to climb onto their seat.

The MAN helps the WOMAN by offering a leg up. The WOMAN groans, removes her high heels and struggles to climb up onto the seat.

The COUPLE are seated comfortably and the MAN attempts to put his arm around the WOMAN. She pushes him away almost instantaneously and the line reads: “GFF10… Now Even Bigger!”

NOTES ON STYLE OF TRAILER

The trailer will be in black and white with a film noir feel. The music score will build up the suspense and eeriness of the unknown giant landscape the COUPLE are in. A rough scale of 1:10 will be used for shrinking the actors in After Effects. (Think ‘Honey I Shrunk the Kids’ and ‘The Incredible Shrinking Man’).

The trailer will be a combination of wide and tight locked shots (with a couple of moving point of view shots from the actors looking up at the chairs). The action will be filmed on a green screen and superimposed on pre-specified detailed stills of cinema seats. The whole sequence will include a continuous flickering light source to emulate light from the cinema screen.

ACTORS:

Actress Role: WOMAN – Vivien Louise Taylor

Actor Role: MAN – Jonny Boag

Actor Role: USHER – Alfie Wellcoat
Venue: Film City Glasgow

I have managed to arrange payment in kind through an arrangement with Glasgow Film Theatre for the hire of this venue. I visited the space on Tuesday evening and it’s perfect for what I require. It has a stage which will help when it comes to filming the shots from above the actors.

Equipment Hire: Progressive Hire

I have provisionally booked lights and a big green screen from Donald at Progressive Hire. I got a really great deal (thanks Yvonne!) and they are going to deliver the equipment on Wednesday 11th November for filming. I have also arranged separate insurance for this equipment.

Taster Images

Nothing agreed yet though, so if anyone else is interested in collaborating,  should my idea get picked, then please get in touch. Sound/ music producers of magic especially required – I think by all four shortlisted guys.

The GFT are offering to provide free advertising in their brochure to assisting companies as part of a bartering system which is pretty cool. [check it out here]

I’ve made a bit of a rough animation test of some of my ideas and I’ll try to add to this post tonight when I get a chance. I know the other guys have changed their ideas a bit since the initial pitch but mine hasn’t altered. Not sure if thats a good thing or not but I kinda like it the way my idea is so don’t want to change for changes sake. Hopefully the people making the decision like it too.

Its a funny process this – not like any other pitching I’ve done. The four shortlisted people are technically in competition with each other and yet are going about that process in complete transparency, are using some of the same resources and are even trying to help each other out if they can. Feels quite odd but is very friendly.

Quite a crazy fast timescale aswell and thanks to everyone for their patience with us as we hurriedly chuck out these calls for help. Anyone needing help with any illustration/ graphics or film in the future, give me a shout.

Cheers to all

Alburt

Other than this, we’ve been reading your posts about the development of your trailer ideas and are very excited to see how things are coming together. Can’t wait to hear more…

I’ve been working away on a new script for my next meeting with Mark and Clyde on Monday morning. Please let me know what you think…

SCENE 1

INT. GLASGOW FILM THEATRE – EVENING

Everything is in darkness. A beam of light suddenly reveals glimpses of ambiguous shapes and details. The stark contrasts of light and dark create an eerie atmosphere amongst the forests of gigantic cinema seats.

Another light flickers sporadically. This flickering cinema screen light shows the silhouette of a COUPLE holding hands. An USHER, whose torch emits a strong beam of light, leads them.

SCENE 2

INT. GLASGOW FILM THEATRE – EVENING (CONT.)

The COUPLE pass what appears to be a giant piece of paper crumpled on the ground. The USHER impatiently signals to the COUPLE to keep following him. The COUPLE appear worried and look back uncertainly towards the paper. They meet one another’s eyes and their mutual anxiety is clearly demonstrated.

The USHER continues walking underneath the giant cinema seats and abruptly stops. He checks the two tickets in his hand, looks up and nods to the COUPLE.

SCENE 3

INT. GLASGOW FILM THEATRE – EVENING (CONT.)

The USHER pulls a long rope from underneath a giant cinema seat. He reels the rope in quickly. This action pulls the cinema seat down.

The COUPLE look up in astonished confusion. The USHER looks very irritated, sighs and rapidly signals for them to climb onto their seat.

The MAN helps the WOMAN by offering a leg up. The WOMAN groans, removes her high heels and struggles to climb up onto the seat.

The COUPLE are seated comfortably and signal to the USHER. The USHER acknowledges this and releases the rope. The seat immediately collapses back into itself. Just before the COUPLE are squashed by it, cut to line which reads: “GFF10… Now Even Bigger!”

Notes

The trailer will be in black and white with a film noir feel. The music score will build up the suspense and eeriness of the unknown giant landscape the COUPLE are in.

The trailer will be a combination of wide and tight locked shots. The action will be filmed on a green screen and superimposed on particular detailed stills of cinema seats.

ALSO…

Still seeking a lighting technician with their own equipment if anyone knows of anyone?… And if anyone happens to own a green screen (which they’re willing to loan out preferably for free) that’d be awesome!