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.