The White Feather ascends

I figured that if I already had a blog I might as well keep using it - even though the subject of the blog is now changing to my new film: The White Feather. Set in October, 1914, it is a sweeping tale of betrayal and heroism using love and the first world war as thematic pivots. Two Australian brothers love two sisters; men are volunteering for war, but one brother does not want to go to war for a country he knows nothing about. He gets a white feather - the sign of cowardice -and thinks it is from his girlfriend. Off he goes to war. But it wasn't her at all... tune in for the next installment. What we need now in money - as usual. I will accept cheques, gold dust and promissory notes.

Update: did a comprehensive budget for Feather today - scarey stuff. Not to be intimidated I also started a film studio today. Seeking capitalisation of 4 million dollars. Roll up, roll up, people, best five bucks you ever spent.

Vindication of sorts

Yowie has just won Best Cinematography and An Award of Merit at the Los Angeles Cinema Film Festival of Hollywood! Of course I'm very chuffed. Overseas vindication means so much more in Australia where the cultural cringe means we don''t value anything that has not had the stamp of approval from a northern hemisphere big brother - usually the UK or the US. At the same time I'm a little down because we realise we can't take up the offer from the UK channel to show Yowie for seven years in ten countries because of the Chewbakka problem and Lukasfilm. Still film festivals will have to do - which is OK. Today I'm off to a funding meeting which may result in some money for The White Feather.

Just finishing off a 700 page novel and tried to get it to an agent who seemed keen till she realised its length. Oh no, she said, can't look at anything over 100000 words! Well, mine is 250000, lady. Size matters. Maybe I'll have to go the dreaded route of.. self-publishing (Aaaargh!). Not that desperate yet. we shall see. These things all act synergistically: If Yowie and White Feather are successful then an agent is more likely to look at prose. Methinks.

Halfway along life's path I found myself in a dark wood

The Yowie seems to have moved into a new phase. As soon as she poked her hairy nose from behind the curtain the public and others have responded. A UK short film TV channel has picked up Yowie and wants to run it for up to seven years in all sorts of countries. Excellent. We took no money for this, but ask for donations to breast cancer research both explicitly and in the run-off credits of the movie. The dilemma is whether to put it on the social networking internet: Youtube, Vimeo, Twitter, and so on. I have heard amazing stories of people putting stuff on Youtube and getting offers from Hollywood. Maybe they're just stories. Still, there are some fantastic short films on Youtube: check out Butterfly Circus if haven't already.
Last week we went to scope out Bungendore railway station: about 1850, stuck forlornly on a plain. Getting closer i could see it was pretty dilapidated: great holes in the platform and piles of pigeon poo everywhere. Still, it may do well as our 1914 location for the next film, to be shot on a Canon 5-D. While we were there a 1903 steam engine turned up with two carriages! Fantastic! They said they'd love to be in the film. Definitely a sign. Snake-handling follows. I feel like Dante being chased by a leopard up a falling scree.

The Yowie emerges...

So this is how it goes: a film festival is advertised, we send off the Yowie and hope for the best. Well it's working, people! There is a short film festival broking site called withoutabox and they tell me of all the upcoming film festivals. For the privilege of pressing a few buttons on my computer the Yowie is entered online. Disadvantages are the quite onerous sign-up process (lots of info needed) and the fact that every time you enter your credit card is stung between 30 and 50 dollars US. Ouch! My credit card is squealing and covered in stings. But onwards and upwards: the Yowie has been selected for the finals of the The Canberra Short Film Festival. My home town! Yes, I know it's not Tribeca but it's a start. There may even be a prize. I'm holding thumbs, and so is the yowie herself. She is also entered in Whistler, Hollywood, Beverley Hills, European, Sundance and good old Flickerfest in Bondi beach! Should score at least one of those. All the potential kudos may help generate funds for The White Feather next year.
?...continued/ - We've just come from the finals. What can I say without it sounding like a joke? So, with a straight face, here goes: the winner of the open national category was about a guy torturing another guy in a Tasmanian swamp. Not kidding. Winner of the Canberra section (ours) was a guy who writes angry letters to people who misspell his name on envelopes of junk mail. Go figure. Any, enough sour grapes. One thing I can say is I enjoyed the People's Choice awards in all three categories - what a relief, I was beginning to think I was weird. The people have spoken....

A Yowie dawn

After finally getting everyone together in one place and in time sequential order the final editing was done, including the audio striping, and the offline version 'put in the can.' However, this is really only the start of another process: getting the movie into different formats and out into the big world to film festivals and government bodies: to use it as leverage for the next movie. That's right, folks, the next movie! What, are you mad, man - after what you've been through??!? Yes, but this time it's going to be different (that's what they all say). I have been toying with an idea for a short film for ages: to be done mostly in flashback, as part of an 'interview' that runs the whole movie. With a few twists along the way. It's a script and some costume designs at the moment. Watch this space.

Back to "The Yowie." I heard that Cannes only does premiers, and it seems we've missed it for this year anyway. So I really would prefer to premier it here in Australia instead - forget Cannes - and see what the reaction is. There is a short film festival in Canberra soon and I'm trying to get everything done before the final entry date, which closes really soon. So there is no destination, only a journey -(other sententious claptrap coming soon). Seriously, there is always something new to be done or thought about in the world of movie making, resting on the laurels is not possible, especially when there are none to rest on. But people who've seen the film seem to like it, so there's hope. Thanks to all the team.

We entered The Yowie on a sort of central hub site called withoutabox; their job then is to inform you of upcoming film festivals and then farm out your details and your film to the convenors of the festivals. This is really convenient as it saves you having to laboriously apply to each and every one. There is only one problem: It seems to be impossible to upload the film to their site. I tried for three days to do it: after hours of 'loading' nothing appeared in the progress bar and the site informed me my 'video box' is empty. "Contact us for support" they say: I did and was told they could not help me, but someone else who'd had the same trouble was able to do it after converting their film to an MP4 in iTunes (!!). So I tried. I converted it to mobile phone format called m4V (the only option on my mac) Did it work? NO! I tried sending a hard copy DVD to Whistler - they told me it's region 4 and they can't view it - they need region 0 apparently, and they won't go and look at the film online at www.definitionfilms.com/yowie. Their excuse? Oh we have too many films to look at. Very unhelpful. And so we persist, frogs against the dawn (or is that boats against the stream??)

Two forward, one back

The weather in the Sydney area starts to cool in late March. With this cooling comes the rain - on and off and fairly unpredictable. I started to get anxious as March dragged on. Then J called and said 'we're on for March 13th' and I had to rearrange my life again to get up there and do my Yowie thing, as well as pay for everything and coordinate with the others. I was starting to run out of friends to stay with, but my old friend and colleague A, a fellow artist and doctor, said sure there's a bed available as one of my daughter's has left home and the other is about to, so come on down. A is a very interesting guy, apart from his medical work he also has a masters in film and is an innovative and dynamic artist. He goes up to Bali with sketches and gets local craftsmen there to carve big statues for him in what looks like Paulonia wood, then brings them back to Australia and exhibits them. They are very zany and post-modern, drawing on everything from ancient greek mythology to pop culture. I have one.

Back to the shoot: I had to drag out the Chewbacca suit and the Yowie suit and repair them both; the Yowie suit in particular had split all over the place and was covered in bits of bracken and gum leaves. the fur was very matted and I found to my shock that a bottle of glue had spilled on the trip home from the main shoot and leaked all over the face area, requiring lots of cutting of big chunks of hair out of the head. Potentially disastrous, and lots more work. Luckily I had saved a lot of fur and got to work with thinning scissors (my best friends) and glue. The crossbow also needed serious repair. After a speedy trip on Friday after work in the general practice, I got to A's place quite early and we interrogated a bottle of wine and the movie world fairly closely (joined by several mosquitoes) before a marvellous dinner with A and his wife. I didn't sleep very well, worried about the shoot, and got up quite early. A had already taken off for work so I met his wife (also A) at the coffee shop over the road, ate some Bircher muesli, and got going. I had to be in Bondi junction by 8.30 to meet the star, young Kevin in the movie, who was about to go on a state-wide drama tour to high schools. We met up fairly quickly using cell phones and then I turned on the GPS and got up into the Blue Mountains via the Lane Cove tunnel quite quickly.

It felt good to see the main crew again: J, C the DOP and D the Ist AD. The usual suspects. Luckily there was no rain, though the scattered clouds threatened to dump on us and the light played havoc with shooting. But we got it all done: lots of punching on the ground (kevin attacks the thugs) rushing through the bush and punching (the Yowie attacks the thugs) and then the Yowie holding the Chewie head at the very end and getting all excited. Took all day, though we took a long break at lunch and all went to the Kurrajong hotel for a 'slap-up lunch' and beers. The 1st had persuaded his attractive son-and-girlfriend up, and they were troopers; doing a new scene in which Chewie pulls a tent off the two of them. Also J the director was a man peeing behind a tree - the acting left a lot to be desired.

I dropped K off in Bellevue hill where he was staying with a friend, then turned the car for home. Got home pretty late. The drive to Canberra is not attractive at night: featureless except for very big trucks. In daylight it's a lot better, especially in early winter mornings when the mist lifts off the cow-mooching fields.

It now became a process, almost of attrition, but certainly lengthy, of ingesting the new footage (taken on C's still camera which had a movie function), then re-editing it into the old stuff and then checking for pace, arcs of change, and so on. J did a splendid job on this with n the editor at Deepend. I got very alarmed when the people who'd agreed to do the music said they'd not been told I was doing songs for the piece. I couldn't get hold of J for several days and my paranoia took hold, suspecting that my music was being edged out of the movie. This was intolerable for me: my vision of the piece was so strongly bound up with the songs that I could not envision it any other way. I worked out the production could be finished off in Canberra, where I'd located lots of skilled people. I also spoke to a top entertainment lawyer who is a personal friend. The result was me sending a nasty email, and then immediately regretting it. But once you've pressed that 'send' button! It upset J a lot - he'd had no intention of excluding my little songs. The reason I hadn't been able to contact him was that he'd been on a remote shoot - this info had been passed on to a producer but I was never told!

After several weeks a final visual cut was ready. With some scepticism and worry I logged into the production house's dropbox and watched it. I was delighted: it was all there now and the story was far clearer than before. Still no Yowie breasts, but on reflection I think that's OK - the gender of the beast is in doubt, and that sort of adds to the mystery. The Yowie looked suitably wild and chunky and capable of beating up the thugs. Its tail also took it away from a Chewbacca clone, which is important, as the face was still only seen fragmented and momentarily. My songs were there and added an original feel to the atmosphere. Credits look good, and I don't think we've left anyone out. My weird ska song goes well over these and gives a sort of funky energy to the end of the film.

Then another minor disaster: somehow the sound files had been buggered - I think it can only have been during the production house's ingestion originally. the poor editor will now have to synchronise sound from some other files for the whole movie (I don't understand the technical details). this will take two weeks or more. Then the whole thing goes somewhere else for colour grading and final audio striping. I'm going around trying to get quotes for DVD reproduction now.

A week or so ago I had another thought: what about Chewbacca? He is the property of Lucas film, and we haven't got permission! I had thought, in my vague way, that he had become a sort of generic part of popular culture and so anyone could use him. Well they can, but not for commercial gain - you can hire a Chewbacca suit from a licensed fancy dress place and go to a party, but you can't make a film showing him and then charge money for people to see it. So I wrote to them, explaining we were essentially an amateur and unpaid crew who'd made a little 15 minute film, and could we please get permission to use Chewie? No, came the reply, they wanted more details. I explained the story. Well, the upshot is that we now have an agreement from Lucas to use the film, but only for film festivals. This stymies any sale to TV and so on. Bad news for the investors, but it can't be helped. The possessor of intellectual rights, though they have millions and millions of dollars, have to be protected, I suppose, from penniless amateurs like us. I can see their point.. sort of. I am reading Michael Palin's wonderful diaries and he describes taking a food company on for using the Lumberjack song, so I can understand the feelings of the original artist in wanting their work protected, and not abused, either for banal and inappropriate use (such as breakfast cereal ads) or for direct commercial gain.

So where are we at? We have a final visual, with credits locked off. We have a balls-up in the sound, but that is getting fixed. we have a wonderful offer of free music, but the poor muso's will have to wait for the sound to get fixed. Now nearly five months after principal photography, I am a little impatient. Production houses, understandably, view our work as minor and so scheduling gets squeezed in between their bigger jobs. On the other hand, i can't wait. I've written two more short films and quarter of a novel since January - during my yearly manic phase, and will reconsider them and judge them as rubbish during my winter depression phase. With any luck, the highs and lows will cancel each other out to produce something reasoned and gutsy by next spring.

Not to bore you, but... we need Pickups!

I won't laboriously detail every aspect of the shoot. It went pretty well, but we ran out of time and money. Some sponsors didn't really come through for us and the resort wanted us out by Friday noon. So that put the kybosh on shooting there all Friday. Anyway we found a bracken-filled valley and did most of we had to on the last day. Plus an absolutely splendid golden rock shelf above a classic Blue Mountains vista - the hero rock! I suddenly conceived the idea that one of the characters needs to hold up a large grey fish at some point, so the runner went off to the nearest town with $50 to get a fish. She returned with a large mullet, but I never saw any change. Never saw her again either. Fair enough, though she did get a petrol voucher! Anyway, we shot until it was pretty dark, then scooted back up the fire trail to a stack of pizza boxes delivered by some intrepid pizza company. We all said our goodbyes and swore to meet again on the red carpet. My family stayed on overnight and packed up the paraphernalia - huge amounts of stuff/My trailer was almost as loaded for the trip back to Canberra as it had been going up! Then I think most of us went and had some sort of Xmas holiday. I took my family to NZ for 10 days and that was very nice. On returning I contacted J the director - yes the files had all been 'ingested' into the computer and the post-production house and the editor was about to start. two weeks later and nothing had happened. He was holiday, he was ill, he was in Fiji. I wasn't clear what the story was. Eventually he turned up and by some miracle got together with the very busy director (now back at his real job). They put together 12 minutes of footage. I was disappointed. Story points had not been nailed, in my opinion. I went up to Sydney and sat in on another editing session. Pace was variable - we cut a lot of stuff out. The rough cut looked OK but we were still lacking some vital shots. Pickups are needed! Groan. This means going back up to the mountains and shooting some more stuff. Luckily not much. But the costumes are badly damaged (the Yowie needs new nipples for one thing)and continuity might be a problem. Also we can't afford to get most of the actors back. Compromises are made and we're on for the first dry weekend we can find.