Dance With Me

Sasha Damjanovski's film Dance With Me, starring Folie's Adam Napier, goes on general release today. The poor souls at The Grauniad haven't been able to make sense of the film, but then again, if it doesn't fit into their politically correct Islingtonian view of the world, they can't tell arses from elbows. It's a paper I stopped reading years ago. Anyway, I hope to catch the film in Glasgow. 

Meanwhile, Happy St George's Day! Be Falstaffian. You know it makes sense.

OMFs and Other Noises

Sound mixing continnues. Several scenes have atrocious sound, so we're going to have to try and create a new OMF file from the Avid Project folder and see if that does the trick. If not, it's down to London to do some ADR, which will further tax the purse strings but, without doing it, will mean we have an unreleasable film. I think the problems were caused by shooting with two cameras which, while it sped things up during the shoot, has caused no end of trouble in post, as one camera had good sound, while the other one was the bad one (two different mixers, I seem to remember). We should have sent both radio mic feeds into the good mixer. (I'm assuming we didn't do this during the shoot but, to be honest, I can't remember.)

Apart from the further funding required, it also means yet more delays. We probably have a month's work left to do on the film but, as we're all working part-time on it as ever, God knows how long that month's work will take. I think I forgot to mention that since September I've been doing a part-time Masters in Creative Writing, so that usually takes up about half my time at the moment. I decided that it would be unwise to put all my eggs in the basket of filmmaking, and have something else to fall back on once Folie is finally finished. At the moment, I honestly can't see me having a career as a director, and feel that renewing my Directors' Guild of Great Britain membership is probably a symbolic gesture and nothing more.

What, though, is a career as a director? About the only way I can think this through in a positive way is to recall either Eric Rohmer who, when faced with hardships early on (after the failure of his first featute, The Sign of Leo), went back to making shorts (the first of the Six Moral Tales) and didn't actually becomes successful as a director until he was pushing 50. Or I think of Margaret Tait, up in Orkney, making her own films, funding them herself, doing everything herself and generally just doing her own thing, world go to hell. And she made some wonderful things (have you seen Where I Am Is Here? Or Ariel? Or Hugh MacDiarmid: A Portrait?) I've got a few years to go before hitting 50, and maybe moving to Orkney, or Lewis or Harris is the answer. It's impossible to make a film over the length of time we've been stuck in the mire with Folie and not become increasingly introspective, apprehensive about one's future and generally questioning what lead you to be where you are at the moment.

Perhaps the only way to carry on is to do one's own thing and just not care too much. I hope to get started on a novel over the summer, something to take my mind off Folie and its never-ending problems. 'Who speaks of victory?' Rilke once wrote. 'To survive is all.'

Journeying to Cannes Also

I've explained the film's sound problems to our sales agent, and he wants a DVD of the film as it is to take to Cannes. He will see if he can try and raise some money to get the problems sorted out. All we effectively need is enough money to do a day's ADR in London, so we're not talking huge amounts of money. That gives us about a month to ignore the appalling sound in the pub and cafe scenes, and get on with some creative work, which I think Ali, our sound designer, is keen to do. He's had enough of dodgy OMFs, and I don't blame him. The key to surviving your own film is, I think, learning the art of hiding the bodges, which is something Ali and I talked about yesterday in our crisis meeting. So some of the sound design decisions will be dictated entirely by the fact that we have bad sync sound that needs papering over. It's like trying to wallpaper a house that is almost falling down.

Journey We More into the Nightmare

Yes, I know, it's a quote from Jim Morrison's poem An American Prayer (also set to music by the the Doors). It also sums up just how bad things are with Folie, the sound in particular. The cafe and pubs scenes are almost unusable, as are one or two other scenes. We are now looking at having to go on bended knee to those kind souls in ADR land and ask for free time in their studios, otherwise the film will never be finished. I don't know if this is due to a fault in the sound files, or a fault in the sound recordist. And if it's the latter, and he doesn't have a fault in him at the moment, he bloody well will have once I've finished with him. This problem could sink the entire film, and it will mean I've wasted the last 4 years of my life. Maybe I will become the first independent filmmaker to commit suicide live on the internet.

Steve Dineen's New Blog

That mostly non-mustachioed chap, Steve Dineen - who plays Paul the tie salesman in Folie (and superbly at that, I must add), has recently started a blog, Dispatches from the Frontline of Mid-scale Touring. You can read it here whilst waiting for us to finish the film. You may even have time read it more than once.... Seriously, folks, we progress on the sound mix. I am strongly tempted to make a silent film next, as postproduction seems to be nothing but trouble with the sound... One of life's little imponderables, I guess.

New Adam Napier Movie

Just a quick missive from Folie towers to let you know that our most excellent leading man, Adam Napier, is soon to be gracing select cinema screens across the UK in Sasha C. Damjanovksi's feature film Dance With Me. The film opens in London's West End on St George's Day/Shakespeare's Birthday (look it up on Wikipedia), and will then play in Glasgow. I will post more details when I have them. Hopefully by then Folie itself will be finished and about to start it's life on the festival ciricuit, before making us all fabulously rich... (That was a joke, btw.)

Back to the coal face

It's been a while since there was anything to report, but I can now announce that we are back at work on the soundtrack. The film will be ready in time for Cannes, although I doubt if we will have a screening there (except on someone's laptop!). A UK screening before the year is out would be could (in addition to the traditional cast and crew piss-up. Sorry, I meant 'industry screening':-))

Birthday Party!

My memory is a bit vague, but I think the project is 4 years old today (give or take a day). I can't recall the date, but it all really began one evening on the M5 (southbound, somewhere south of Taunton). Realising how beautifully simple the story is, and how it could be shot easily for little money, and also in a style that I could really call my own (a first!) were the deciding things.

Of course, none of us could have realised at the time that, although it was a relatively smooth shoot, post-production would drag on and on and on. And on. And on. Until you forget why you started working on it in the first place, and decide that you really should be doing something else with your life. But then have second thoughts about that as well, and then confusion sets in. And it generally doesn't plan to move out any time soon.

One of the few things that's kept me going over the past year is knowing that other films are in the same boat. Hearing of films that have been in post for 2 or 3 years has not been uncommon. Peter Strickland's Katalin Varga is a good case in point, and a good example of what can be achieved completely outside of the system, provided you're prepared to stick at it for years, rather than months, if that's what it's going to take to get it finished and out there. (For my money, Katalin Varga is easily the best 'British' film of the year. Another link about how the film got made here.)

So I would like to wish you all a happy new year, especially to those of you who are still in post yourselves. We may, Elder Gods willing, have Folie finished soon. (But how long is soon?)

J. U. O. F.

That's 'Join Us On Facebook' - as the saying goes, rather than something rude. (Can you rearrange the letters, kids?) Yes, Folie now has its own FB group, where you can see a few clips and stills.

Go here and sign up.

Although, given the nature of the story, perhaps we really should put on a page on Bebo...

(And the nature of the story will become central to our marketing campaign - i.e. how much do we give away? "Oh Michael, I'm telling you the plot." - Kenny Everett (as Cupid Stunt)

Waiting for the (new) Man (or Woman)

Owing to various circumstances, most of which are beyond our control, we are now looking for a fresh pair of hands/ears/Mac to complete the sound mix on Folie. If you have ProTools and live in Edinburgh, get in touch!

Put Money in Thy Purse

One of the routes one has to take making a film with a very small budget is that one frequently has to use friends and friends of friends to fill certain crew roles. (In the case of Folie, I also had friends in the cast, but that would be a disservice to their professionalism; they are also professional actors and I wanted to work with them again after an earlier collaboration.) The advantage of this is that they are usually willing to work for much less than the going rate - which is nothing other than the tried and tested 'Corman Method', in which the great Roger Corman used to say 'get students, they're cheap'. This has mainly paid off with Folie, and we have gotten this far with our rather limited funds, but no film is ever made without unexpected problems arising.

Hence the current post. Most of the postproduction team have been brought onto the project by my co-producer, and they have done a great job so far. It's exciting to see the final layers being added to the film, in particular the subtleties of the soundtrack. We're adding a lot of non-diegetic sound (look it up on Wikipedia, kids), and I hope that we can also add a few sequences where there is almost no sound at all. (The Italian gangster film Gomorrah uses episodes of near silence to great effect, as did Edgar Reitz in Heimat II.) I've always had a silence fetish, and I hope this will be in evidence in Folie. But, as with all such budgetarily challenged projects, people have to go off and earn money on real jobs. Heck, I've even done it myself and am looking for paying jobs as I write. So we are at a standstill once more whilst a key player in the operation does properly paying work, and I am left waiting and sending emails which rarely receive a reply. It's a bit like making a film with Lord Lucan. But, if you're going this route to make a film, then it's something you have to live with, and get through. I don't want to begrudge anyone the right to earn some cash. Speaking of such things, the film itself needs cash...

Perhaps we should rechristen this not the Corman Method, but the Orson Method, as a homage to the great man's production techniques. I'm thinking in particular of the Othello shoot, in which, when the money ran out, cast and crew were left stranded in hotels whilst Orson went off to act in other people's films. It took him four years to make the film. I can recommend Michael MacLiammoir's Put Money in thy Purse, which is a great book about the making of the film. He was Iago to Welles's Moor, and therefore had firsthand experience of what it's like to make a film piecemeal. At least they were holed up in decent hotels. But as a motto, Put Money in Thy Purse both explains the current impasse on Folie, and also sums up the need for me to raise some more money to get the film finished. Like the Lord Our God, I will no doubt be paying for the rest of Folie myself, as investors seem to have gone bankrupt. Or joined Lord Lucan in darkest Africa...

The End is Nigh!

I don't want to make any definite statement at the moment, but it seems that we are now finally very close to finishing, after a rather long period of postproduciton, one that could be safely described as a fucking nightmare. (What film isn't, though?) A cast and crew screening will probably take place at some point before the end of the year, although it's a bit early at the moment to start thinking about anything as organised as a festival strategy...

And the News Is...

Well, there isn't any. Still trying to get the final mixing sessions set up, without a great deal of success so far. We could easily have the film finished by Christmas, but it all depends on what - if anything - we can get done either this month or next. It's extremely frustrating to have gotten so far only to have the film still unfinished, especially when festivals are starting to show an interest in it. Memo to self: give up filmmaking as soon as possible...

Funding Appeal - Only £1,000 Now Needed!

OK chaps, with few other ideas in my befuddled head about how to secure the measly £1,000 now needed to finish the film, I thought I would post here on the offchance a reader or readers of this blog might be going to the cashpoint this evening... Seriously, folks, we do need the cash to get it done as we're now finally very close to the end of the line.

We could have finished it a lot earlier, had we had the cash. In fact, I've worked out that so far this year, we have spent approximately 4 weeks working on Folie. The rest of the time has been spent waiting for money or downtime to use the necessary equipment (online suites etc). And of course the usual amount of worrying, cursing and setting the world to rights over a pink gin or two...

Drop me a line if you're able to help the Widow's Son...

Mixing - In Progress

We started mixing at the end of June, and are now about halfway through. We've had another lay-off, although this one wasn't due to lack of funding, but due to the fact that our brilliant sound wizard, Hamish, went on holiday for two weeks, as did I myself. Louise and I spent a fortnight in Manhattan, never the most restful of places, schlepping around art galleries and applying copious amounts of foot cream to worn-down paws afterwards. We saw a great Chris Marker show and also had the unexpected pleasure of meeting the great documentary maker Albert Maysles. It was quite a trip, but I now need another holiday to get over it!

Now that we are all back in the UK, mixing will re-commence within the next week or so. It hopefully will be finished 'soon'. (I've given up announcing completion dates.) We are aiming to complete as soon as possible, as there is interest in the film, and it really is high time to get the beast out into the world.

In the meanwhile, our documentary about Scottish filmmaking genius Bill Douglas, Lanterna Magicka, has just been released on DVD. The film appears on disc 2 of the BFI's release of Comrades, Bill's legendary film about the Tolpuddle Martyrs. The disc has already had two very good reviews, which also give the thumbs up to our documentary. (See the Lanterna blog for more details.) Very nice to have such a positive response after three years' work. But the main reason for buying the DVD/Blu-Ray is, of course, Comrades. One of the greatest British films of all time, and something I have never really recovered from seeing. Yes - one of those films you can say changed your life. For the better, of course - as all good things do.

The Beatles Rock

And this is the same rock the Beatles sat on, nearly 46 years later, taken yesterday after yet another depressing visit to the bank. Lack of money and absence: strange things.

Music History Part the Second

This is a bit OT, but as a Beatles fan and Weston historian, I thought I would post this link, which has plenty of Fabs-in-Weston photos, including one of those telescopes that you'll see in Folie... And if you scroll down, you'll see two home movie clips.

Location Burns Down

One of the locations we used in Folie has mysteriously burnt down. The Royal Pier Hotel in Weston-super-Mare, which appears at the end of the Chekhov scene, was gutted last night. It also appears in my short film Genius Loci, which was one of the episodes in Super-8 Cities. It's yet another Weston landmark to either be destroyed - as the Grand Pier was last summer, another fire - or let fall into decay - such as the nearby Birnbeck Pier, which is slowly falling into the sea. If Weston had a town council that had an ounce of imagination and moral fibre, these things wouldn't happen.

To go back to the fire at the Royal Pier Hotel, it sounds as though it was burnt down for the insurance, but the owners, who at one point were interested in investing in Folie, claim they don't have any insurance. The waters get murkier and murkier... It'll be interesting to see who they arrest.

The hotel is also part of music history: the gentlemen in the photo stayed at the Royal Pier Hotel when they played a week-long residency at the Odeon in Weston in 1963.

The End is Nigh!

No, I don't mean the end of the world is at hand, although I'm pleased to see that capitalism and (British) democracy are in dire straits. (And I'm a bit concerned about the bees disappearing... maybe they're leaving the planet like the dolphins did in Hitchhiker's.)

The news is, of course, that we are now in the home stretch on Folie. Sound mixing begins in Edinburgh on 22nd June. We have had a two month enforced lay-off, as the facility we have been using has been totally booked up and, as we're dependent on their downtime, had no option but to wait. This initially felt like one more delay - a delay too far, at that - but I've been so busy with the book and Cannes, that two months have gone by in a blur.

We hope to have the sound done by the end of June, and we'll then export back to tape in early July. I'm still hoping that it will all hang together. From what I've seen so far, it looks good, but, as Bresson once said, 'You will never know if the mountain range of efforts you are putting into your film will be worth it.' And if Bresson didn't know how his films would turn out, there's not much hope for anyone else...

And in the news for parrotts: I've just set up a new blog, which will detail other projects, although Folie updates will continue to be posted here.

Lanterna Magicka Trailer

A quick plug for our other film, Lanterna Magicka: Bill Douglas & the Secret History of Cinema. The film is being released on DVD next month, and the trailer is now online here and also here.

It's a relief to actually have something finished at last! Making two films at the same time is not recommended; making one is bad enough. I'm continually reminded of Noel Coward's line, 'Don't put your daughter on the stage, Mrs Worthington.'