Urban Endings- The Final Push

In 24 hours time I will be filming the first part of my Urban Endings project. "Panic" is an understatement. My work have rota'd me in to work tonight and I am desperately trying to get it covered or else I WILL spend the whole night on the verge of either bursting into tears or just staring blankly. I feel like I've done so much, but it's nowhere near enough, and feel completely underprepared despite doing nothing but try to organise the shoot.

My seemingly-perfect plan of asking a friend who studies Musical Theatre to be my leading actress now seems like the worst plan ever... trying to get her to reply to my messages is proving a bit impossible, I'm not entirely she realises how much is actually riding on it. Also, my never-ending lead actor problem just won't resolve itself... I was feeling particularly proud of myself on Friday; not only had I had a lengthy discussion with Galina about the location/look and what I wanted from the script, but I'd managed to hear back from not one but TWO locations for my second date. I opted for the latter, the Scottish Youth Hostel at the top of Kelvingrove Park, because we'd filmed there before, they were more than accomodating and also offered a really great rate on the room. As their check-in time is 2pm, they said we could use a room from 10-2 for £19, rather than charge us the full price for the room. It's only a short scene so we wouldn't need it for any longer than this.

It all seemed to be going swimmingly, especially after a successful prop hunting mission. My boyfriend and I went for a trek around the Barras (I needed him in case there was any heavy lifting involved), and we stumbled across a treasure trove of an antiques junkyard. I saw the perfect wooden travel case... thingie... and we carried it about the labyrinth of antiques looking for someone to give money to. I was all ready for some top-class bartering, and we eventually found a woman manning a jewellery stall. She told us to go across the courtyard and find a "man with a beard... that or just take it". We wandered into the courtyard, saw no sign of Man With Beard, and opted for the latter... and took it. Hardly the stuff of master criminals, but it felt like a coup anyway. And the best part was, I didn't even need to trundle it home as Thoughtful Boyfriend even took it back home to the west end with him.

So far, so good... until I tried to contact my already-on-a-shaky-nail actor and inform him of the new date. Unfortunately he can't do the 7th, so I tried to contact my friend who'd also promised me a leading man if I couldn't find another. Eventually I managed to get an answer via Facebook (how I loathe relying on flaky social networking), and so far all I've heard is "I'll text him and ask!"... Oh. Come. ON!!!!!!!! I'm battering through as much as I can today, although I'm not sure what else I can do. In all honesty, in as much as I'm looking forward to it, I just want it to be over so the stress will be over too. I can't wait to sit with my headphones on and edit away to my heart's content.

On the plus side, I did make the best use of the one afternoon of procrastination I allowed myself. I managed to scoop a second commission to write a film review for 'Trisickle', and not only went to see said film, but wrote the review for it and sent it in a whole week before the deadline. Hey, if all else fails, I can be a professional... I don't know... unpaid blogger?

Urban Endings- New Developments

The last couple of days have seen alot of progress on my Urban Endings shoot- a) hurrah! and b) FINALLY!. After a failed attempt at crewing from my own class, I managed to get Galina and possibly Ross from 3rd year on board to be my camera crew. Also, I have a data wrangler in the form of Scott which means I can use the 5D (and not the 570 like I thought; I had worried I wasn't going to be able to get someone to DIT which would've meant I'd have had to do it the old fashioned tape/log & capture way).

Despite the new breakthroughs I'm still swaying about my lead actor. Me being me, I sent my request for 'Actors Wanted' around the Academy with the wrong date- rather than May 30th, I'd requested cast for a month later. D'oh! I didn't realise my mistake until an acting volunteer notified me on it. Apparently the end of the month changeover from one til the next confuses me. Alas, this means that my Academy volunteer (who is also in the opera) is not available until the evening of the 7th- which I think may be his only free day- although this means I might have to use to my second choice, a friend-of-a-friend who is hopefully free for both.

I've been furiously emailing and scribbling down numbers for hostels to use on this date, including one which we've filmed in before, so hopefully this will yield some positive results. The prop store is currently unavailable so I'm having to source props & costumes myself... I'm going to be flying super-close to the deadline, but hey, I've always done well working at the last minute... I spent this morning discussing the script with Galina, and this afternoon will mostly be trying to arrange actors and buying props. Thankfully I have Saturday and Sunday off work, and was paid a small fortune (well... my bank balance is in the black anyway) and so my weekend will be traipsing around charity and junk shops seeing what I can find.

On the plus side, I've managed to score a few sound recording jobs on other shoots (although I may have to drop one if I can't secure the filming dates I have free for my own) plus an external shoot with Julie from last year's 4th years (again, as sound recordist- who knew they were in such high demand?). Then it's all edit, edit, edit until June 17th... Which, when you think about it, isn't so far away... The end is in sight! I just need to get through this weekend...

The Eyes Have It

It's been so long since I saw an English language horror film that properly scared me. I watched Orphan on TV recently. I wanted to rinse my eyes out afterwards. It was cheap, shlocky and heavy-handed, with missing, unexplained plot points and a twist so ludicrous that I was almost angry when the film ended. "THAT was my payoff?", I scoffed, "I feel so cheated, I demand to see more of this shitty movie just for some closure!". You know what I watched afterwards to rectify it? HELLRAISER. Compared to Orphan, it was like a lost Orson Welles masterpiece.

By comparison, I've been consistently falling more and more in love with horrors of the Spanish/Latin American variety. I was introduced to it by Guillermo Del Toro, then watched the likes of [REC], The Orphanage and a series of Spanish horrors on BBC4, shamefully none of which I can remember the names of. The Orphanage, produced by Del Toro, is a beautifully shot, classic ghost story, held together largely by a storming central performance from Belen Rueda. I've never seen her in anything else, so when I heard of her new film Julia's Eyes (Los Ojos de Julia), I was very much intrigued.

Another Del Toro produced horror/thriller, Julia's Eyes concerns itself with the seen and unseen, what is there and what isn't, and well as the fallibility of our own physical sense of sight. Julia (Rueda) suffers from degenerative sight loss, which she is struggling to battle while investigating the apparent suicide of her twin sister Sara, who suffered the same disease. The mystery deepens with news of Sara's mysterious boyfriend, whom no one seems to recall. He is literally the 'invisible man'. A shadow. A blur on the radar. Which, naturally, makes him a little tricky to track down.

Rueda's central performance is commanding, believable and utterly compelling: the despair in her eyes as she loses her sight is palpable and I really felt her desperation as she races against time to solve the mystery. There were genuine scares, and the whole film is as tense as a knife-edge. Alot of shots from her point of view made it easy to literally 'see' through her eyes, and at other times the camera never lets her out of its sight.
There are twists and turns aplenty, but with anything, the pay-off feels a little less deserved than what it had been built to be. The 'monster revelation' is out of nowhere and the tenuous connection to the other characters seems a little forced. It's easy to join the dots between the characters once the reveal has been made, and the film does seem a little overlong after a certain point. There's alot of 'bumping around in the dark', and the climactic showdown lacks the ironic twist I was sure would come.
The journey to the end is what really matters, I felt, and there are properly genuine scares. The 'failing sight' angle means there are plenty of opportunities to make us believe that all is not as it appears, and that things can be mistaken. The film is beautifully shot, yet bleak, as confined in its vision as its central character and creeps along menacingly as the threat from the 'shadow man' could come out of anywhere. It didn't help that I recently had to get glasses for my manual-focus eyesight... I think this affected me on a more personal level. Overall though, this is a genuinely taught, creepy thriller, brilliantly acted and wonderfully constrained. As it's Spanish with subtitles, it may worryingly be a 'blink and you'll miss it' affair... it's a genuine shame, as for all its Hollywood-hokey trappings, this film deserves to be seen.

Look, I Is Published Now!

Here's a link to a review I wrote of the movie Howl... who'd have thought that working away at my little blog would finally have payoff, huh?

http://www.trisickle.co.uk/2011/05/23/949/

My First Spellbook, Or Musings Of A Sound Guy

This morning marked the end of my foray into this year's grad films. The kit was returned (after some confusion over who was meant to be returning it and when), whatever wasn't put back was given to the next group and my work was done. Sort of. It's been a strange couple of weeks, during which I've taken on roles I normally wouldn't have, angsted at what it is I'm supposed to be doing, discovered I have better upper-arm strength than I originally though and thought alot about what it'll be like when it's our turn next year.

I've often wondered if there's a certain 'formula' or type of film which is likely to get chosen over another script, but Gavin Laing's My First Spellbook completely disproved all of this. Children? Check. Filming in a school during school hours? Check. Special effects wizardry? Check. Giant hairy tarantula? Check and check again. When I first read the script I thought, if this can get chosen, nothing me and my slightly smaller imagination can write will seem outlandish at all.

In all honesty, I'm not entirely sure how much I was looking forward to the shoot. I've been feeling a little disheartened lately with regards to the course and feeling as though I haven't developed or gotten what I should have out of it. Whether that's just my own paranoia, I don't know, but my original choice of specialism was camera and I don't feel anywhere as up to speed on it as the others who are choosing it too. We'd all been assigned roles based on our specialist choices, and my original role was 'B' camera clapper/loader. I was ready to take it on head on, and even volunteered to go and muck out one of the locations, a derelict flat in Anniesland.

The next week, however, I was informed that the camera crew had swollen to nine people and there was a chance that some roles might be cut. I was offered the choice to stay on the camera crew, where my role was quite shaky, or boom op/sound assist, which no one else had volunteered to do, and they were apparently struggling for someone to fill the role. The 'A' camera clapper/loader was Amelie. If anyone was getting cut, it was going to be me. I opted for sound.

I thought I was going to be on set for the full two weeks, but then found out that I was only on 5/8 days. The boom op for the first week was there when I turned up on the Saturday, and there wasn't really anything for me to do. It was pretty disappointing, but hey, I picked myself up and threw myself into it on Monday. I wanted to show there was more I could do than stand outside in the rain and protect lights with an umbrella.

I'd camera opped on the scenes that half the class had shot with Peter Mackie Burns the week before, and it had re-invigorated my fondness for camera, so I wasn't entirely sure that I'd made the right decision, but there was nothing I could do about it. I was all ready for a camera job too- I'd even went and got my eyes tested and got glasses and everything, so that whatever I captured wouldn't be all blurry and soft. I couldn't wait for the chance to say "LOOK! It wasn't just me being incompetent! It was a disability all along!". Alas, the chance never came.

On Monday, the first scene was a musical number. I turned up with my own cans- Sennheiser ones, no less- and prepared myself for a baptism of fire. In the end, it wasn't too difficult. Like camera, you just have to follow the actors, but unlike camera, you have to be very careful not to get yourself in shot for even a second. Holding a boom in the air for extended periods of time was quite difficult at first but I got used to it. In the end, I even kind of enjoyed it. I don't take to things naturally and have to work hard to keep up, but I do work hard, and if there's anything needing done, I'll ask what I can do to help with it. By the second day, I was hoisting the boom mic above my head like I'd been doing it the whole time, relieed that I'd finally found a use of my gangly, overly-long arms. I knew I couldn't have spent my whole life trying to find sleeves that fit for nothing.

I liked the way the shoot was organised in terms of its timeframe. When children are involved, guidelines are much stricter and schedules must be adhered to alot more strictly. We were filming in a primary school while classes were on too, which put further constraints on our time. Last year, a typical day would involve waking up at 6 and crawling into bed round about 1am, for an intense but brief time period. This time around, we started at 10:30 and would wrap for the day around 5 o'clock, and it was stretched over 8 days. I found this alot more relaxing and a far better way to worl. I understand that shoots cost money, as do time and mistakes, but I don''t think a producer or AD barking about needing a shot before lunch is going to get it done any better. It's not going to get the best performance out of your actors, and it brings down the morale of everyone involved. It was nicer to feel like a human being working in a team, than a functioning mechanical part who was considered useless for not being able to capture a particularly tricky shot in record time.

Working with children wasn't as difficult as I'd anticipated too. The lead actress was a little chatterbox and often got quite easily distracted, but that's part of being a kid. I'd be the same if I had a week off school to go and make a film at that age! I was amazed at how naturally the kids took to being on set and took direction without too many major problems. I even managed to mind my language, go for most of the day without a cigarette or coffee and found out I have alot more patience than I thought I did- no mean feat

Before I knew it, the week was over. It's strange, how the first day is spent getting used to how everyone works, and it quickly becomes the norm, then before you know it, you're thrown back into real life again. I almost felt a twinge of sadness before realising this meant I had to start working on actual coursework again! I felt like a learned alot about a different section of film making I hadn't worked on before. It was tiring, and my arms were aching after the first couple of days, but it was good experience. While I may not have had the most 'creative' role, I did the job I was asked to do as best as I could. And I can't do much more than that really, can I?

Summative Statement (Term 2)

This is the final statement we had to make about our blogs from 2nd year of uni... If I've taken nothing else away from the whole experience (and most of the time, I feel like I haven't), at least I've shown I can write a little bit.



I thought I’d heard it all before with cinema history, domestic and foreign, silent and talkie. I dreaded having to see films like Metropolis again because my slightly-younger self hadn’t liked them. However, this term I’ve learned that I knew nowhere near as much as I thought.

Keeping up with blogging has been one area in which I’ve noticed a real difference. My blogs from this year read so differently to earlier posts: I know that I wasn’t looking at what was important in forming a good critical opinion.

Our assignment on production values really helped me to think more like this. We had to choose any film nominated for a 2008 Best Art Direction Oscar. I chose The Dark Knight, a much-viewed favourite. For once though, I had to look at it constructively. By taking it all apart and looking at components individually, I feel like I got a better understanding of the whole film.


It was also really good preparation for our research assignment. I didn’t feel as daunted by the prospect of research as I might have, because I knew what to look for (eventually). After changing from my question, I chose to analyse the opening scene of Natural Born Killers with relation to cinematography. It was by far the most challenging thing we’ve done this year. I even went to Glasgow University library on a few occasions, whereas before I’d have probably just researched online. I’m not saying that’ll be something I keep up, but I felt like I’d actually put the work in.


I tried to keep writing more thoroughly about what I watched at home, and one in particular was Inglourious Basterds. While I was researching it, I read about the influence of the French New Wave (or Nouvelle Vague) on Quentin Tarantino. Coincidentally, we’d gotten to post-war Europe in our classes on ‘world cinema’, which included watching Rome Open City and 400 Blows. Stylistically they’re so different to anything that had come out of Hollywood, and I noticed similarities in Tarantino’s work.

Another facet was British New Wave, something which really struck a chord. The films which came from it, like The Loneliness of The Long Distance Runner, aren’t as ’famous’ as Godard or Truffaut. However, they have an urgency and vitality of their own. Or I imagine they would have, at the time.

The echoes of the final film, The Lives of Others, are still ringing in my ears. It was a beautiful example of modern German cinema: it proved there is no language barrier when a film is truly great. I’d previously watched Goodbye Lenin and Downfall, and I think there are a lot of really interesting films coming from the country now. Watching this film was, for me, the best note to end on. It put similar films into context, and having learning the history- of where they came from and what they represent- made the eventual viewing so much more satisfying

This Film Is Bleak, Above All Things

I vaguely recall when I was in school, and following the publication of A Child Called It there was a brief 'boom' in the trend for 'professional victim' stories. In all honesty, they never really appealed to me. I didn't fancy the idea of reading about someone else's tragedy, or the horrific ordeals a young child had gone through at the hands of people who were supposed to care for them. There's enough of that all around us, I thought, why would I willingly read a book about it?

About five years ago, though, in my (cough) Kerrang!-reading days, there was one story which really struck me. I don't know if it was the story itself, or the enigmatic figure behind it. JT Leroy had become something of a cult celebrity victim, befriending alternative icons like Courtney Love, Billy Corgan, Shirley Manson and film maker Asia Argento. He was never seen in public without a blonde wig and dark glasses, and rarely spoke in public. His childhood was one of unimaginable suffering, but he'd come through it, writing about his experiences in both counter-culture and well-known magazines and winning over the celeb world with his triumph over adversity.
I found Leroy's story fascinating, especially as I'd just watched Gus van Sant's Elephant; the screenplay for which was accredited to Leroy. His books Sarah and The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things were added to my Must Read list. I then found out that the latter had been adapted into a film by Asia Argento, with whom I was a teeny bit obsessed at the time. It didn't have a huge run in cinemas- somewhat understandably, I guess- and I couldn't track down the DVD, and in the time it took me to hunt it down, JT Leroy had been exposed as a hoax. He was actually Laura Albert, and his story was in fact pure fiction. It had kind of soured the idea of watching the film for me- but after watching it, I'm glad for the character's sake that it wasn't real.

The film never relents in its depiction of the abuse suffered by 'Jeremiah'. The first scene shows him being ripped from the arms of his foster parents, who want to adopt him. His mother Sarah, a drug-addicted truck-stop prostitute, had him when she was 15, and has decided she wants him back. She bounces from one abusive relationship to the next, temporarily losing her son to her fundamentalist Christian parents after he is raped by her latest boyfriend. Drug abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse and vagrancy all become normal for Jeremiah, especially once he's back with Sarah. She forces him to grow his hair and dress as a girl, calling him Babydoll. Jeremiah apes his mothers' actions, turning tricks and seducing her boyfriends.
It sounds like grim viewing, and yeah, it's a hard slog. In as much as I was glad that the story was made up after all, I couldn't understand why someone would write a story like this. The characters fall into increasingly worsening circumstances and there is no hope, not even in the traditional 'drive into the horizon' ending. The cast is a jaw-dropping array of names and faces, who float in and out as the nomadic leads move from one lot to the next. Jeremy Renner, Peter Fonda, Marilyn Manson (!), Winona Ryder, Ben Foster, Michael Pitt all make an appearance. Not all huge names, but recognisable enough to know that the story must have had some clout. The performances are all good, with some outstanding. Peter Fonda's tyrannous Grandfather is religiously terrifying, Argento as Sarah is a hopelessly lost girl in the body of a snarling, feral junkie. The real revelation(s) though, are twins Cole and Dylan Sprouse. As 11-year-old Jeremiah, they portray him accepting his life as normal, emotionally detatched on the outside but with occasional flashes that show that there's still a sad little boy in there somewhere. And all this from the wee boys from Big Daddy and Friends? It's quite something.

The film's look is as ferocious and visceral as its subject matter, and there's no Hollywood sheen to it at all. Argento is clearly unafraid of taking risks, unsurprising given her pedigree. She is unflinching in how she portrays Sarah and Jeremiah's lives, and doesn't cave into smoothing out the rough hewn edges of the story. It is fast paced and characters are introduced with little to no backstory, although this isn't a criticism- in Jeremiah's eyes, this is how they appear. The editing, direction and story move along with speed, but they manage to cram in alot in its relatively short running time. At the same time, it doesn't feel forced, or rushed, and the pain in the leads' eyes show that there is a tragically emotional undertone to it after all. There is a pulpish trashiness to the look of the film, and although the at times it feels exploitative, it's does so as it is devoted to its source material.

Harrowing, relentless, nasty and cheap but with Hollywood clout that belies its relative obscurity, this is a film not to be taken lightly. I watched it after Dead Man's Shoes and I still felt a bit 'funny' the next day. It's rare I feel so affected by a film, but this one is a lingerer. Despite it being a hoax, it made me wonder. What with A Child Called It and other books of its ilk, it's worth remembering that there are probably real-life Jeremiahs out there. Ones who will never get the chance to be 'professional victims', because they have no way of escaping their lifestyles. And it's the ones without a voice, I think, that are the saddest of all.

Blogging About Blogging, Or It's Been A While And I'm A Bit Rusty At It

It's been a good long while since I last sat down to blog properly. We've been assessed formally on them, and so they've sort of (shamefully) fallen by the wayside. What's strange, though, is that I've actually sort of... missed it? I don't know whether it's the sort-of catharsis I feel when I've written something I think is good, or whether it's sharing what I think about films I like. Or don't like. I don't even know if it's the instant gratification of constructing something, decorating it with little pictures, captions, whatever, clicking 'publish' and- WHOOP!- there it is.

It's a bit of a mix of them all, really. They're all valid enough reasons. In all honesty though, the real reason is probablty one I wouldn't ever say out loud because I'm not entirely sure how true it is- and it's not something I say very often, if at all. I like blogging- and in fact, any kind of writing, even handwriting- is because I'm... gasp!... not terrible at it....?! I have been having somewhat of crisis these past couple of terms in uni. We have a year left and I don't really have all that much to show for it, in a practical film making sense. It started off innocently enough- there'd be the odd weekend shoot or some such that I couldn't make because I was off earning a not-so-pretty penny as a soul-whore for G1 (God, I hate them so much). After a while, it seemed to my paranoid head that I was falling behind.

As our course started spiralling towards specialisms, I just couldn't pick one- I'm still not sure. There isn't one where I feel I've had a huge amount of practise to confidently say "I can do this, and I can hold my own with everyone else". I've grown to love camera, but before discovering I needed glasses, my confidence was knocked slightly by horrible, out-of-focus footage and it taking me a little while longer than the rest to actually 'get' everything. But when it came to sitting down and writing stuff, it came easily to me. It's not that I was necessarily good at it, it just seemed easy. Ish. Sure, it takes me a while to sit down and actually write anything, but when I do, I do it until it's done. I can write at home, or on endless bus journeys, or if I have time to while away between uni and work. I was a teensy bit rattled by a pretty poor overall mark for my research assignment for uni, and my blog in general. After all, if I didn't get good marks for that, what did I have a chance at getting good marks for?!

I suppose I only really have myself to blame for my rubbish final essay, especially after an extended deadline. And another extended deadline. I feel like I let myself fall behind alot, and let stupid things from my outside life affect things in my academic life. Maybe it would've helped to write about it, rather than wallow and wait anxiously for my phone to beep. Who knows. I'm trying to catch up, so here's a first-in-a-while attempt... a comeback attempt? Does that work?! Whatever. I'm not even proof reading it. I think that's the point.