The skin of our teeth

We have been talking to some experts in the industry, and according to them we probably do not have to conform with the onerous demands of a big production because we are under 15 minutes. We had been told we needed all sorts of documentation and contracts and so on. Anyway, it now feels like a threshold has been crossed and the rest is a done deal. Though we still haven't cast our major Aboriginal Actress - she's a pivotal part so we're getting worried. I went up Red Hill with my daughter Rose today looking for a kangaroo carcase to pose the Yowie over for a new Youtube video. Saw live roo's but no dead ones. As we came off the hill a security guard gave us a hard look because we had parked at the back of Telstra - so we gave him a little wave. Made a fake bottle of Yowie oil ('the good oil') today for a funny new montage that J the director has come up with. At least the coffee cups, Tshirts, hats, costumes, crossbows, whiskey bottles, (and so on) are all done. I am exhausted. But of course I can't afford to be; nothing's happened yet! There are some creative tensions which are quite understandable. Naturally the visual people want the most spectacular golden vista's imaginable - the dramatic types want darkness and tension - the producers want everything set in concrete and time-limited - the director and writer are still tweaking the script - and so on. Watch this space.

UPDATE: We've cast our Geraldine character. This is a breakthrough. And everyone's now fixed up for insurances, we think. Accommodation is more or less arranged and food is allocated for a week. My friend N is flying over form NZ to help with the vittles. He'll be ably assisted by another NZ friend and by my wife and daughters. My daughters originally had speaking parts in the movie and were each going to be clutching a toy. That was several years ago, and the eldest is now a teenager. So much for toys and the passage of time!

Bigger than Ben who?

I started by trying to get a few good people together to make this movie. They in turn have attracted their friends, and suddenly there's a crack team to take this project to a very high level indeed. I'm not exactly sidelined but I've definitely been given my own little niche - which suits me fine - and let the knowledgeable people do their thing. For weeks it was: F900 or Red camera? do we have the budget for Red? probably not - OK, whose arm can we twist? leg can we pull? back can we scratch? (strange how these are all anatomic terms!) - to get the best deal on the best gear. Various favours and friends are called upon, and suddenly it's all done - we have the Red camera and the award winning team clustered around it. Super. Now what? Well, it's more production meetings and tying up of loose ends. Accommodation is arranged and sandwiches galore are planned, along with barbecues and salads. A beer sponsor is on the counter - yippee! and even a wine sponsor. Most people have waived their fees, which is great - all for the love of film and a week in the Blue mountains spinning yarns over a few red wines.

In the last few weeks I have made: two crossbows, about 15 Tshirts; ten coffee cups; three facial wounds; an orbital contusion (an early black eye), various envelopes, cards and photo's, and refined two monkey suits. Next week I'm going to get contact lenses - Yowies generally don't wear glasses. I saw a wonderful Yeti suit by Weta studios (check out 'NZ rescue yeti' on Youtube) and asked if I could hire it - a mere $15000 a week. I said thanks, I'll do my own. So far the Yowie suit's cost me about $1000.

Deejax voox, mes amis

Summer has rolled around again - we are promised thunderstorms this evening but it's absolutely cloudless right now in Canberra. Packed up my studio today - slight feelings of regret, but its purpose as far as Yowie goes is over - I've used it to do all of 'Kevin's artwork'. I was sent an art props spreadsheet by Kylie and looking at it I realise I still have a lot to get done - tomorrow I will go searching the Kingston markets from an old cricket bat and transistor radio. These are getting hard to find! Today the producer, production manager, DOP and Director are all going in a car together up the Blue Mountains to do location scouting. Hmm, hasn't this sort of thing happened before?? About a year ago!? Anyway, hope they don't fight! Marie paid the deposit on the accommodation today; a grand's worth, so the whole thing better not fall over again. Producers and directors seem to have radically different personalities. This evening I will go with my children up Red Hill and do another fake Yowie video - we'll see if we can find a kangaroo carcase and do a 'vicious Yowie eats innocent kangaroo' scenario - then put it on Youtube. I am afraid it will be extremely hot when we film; with me in a yowie suit now heavily padded with extra fur to make it look more convincing. Probably we'll do it early in the morning, and I think the yowie scenes can all be done in one day.

The script is now tighter and more inclusive - every character gets a payoff, including the poor female Yowie, and the whole thing is now 14 minutes. Considering it was once 47 minutes I think I've done pretty well, though the audience will have to pay attention to get every segue and nuance, whereas before it was quite leisurely. Too leisurely. A lot of people have rallied round and offered cheap deals or free work on the raw footage, which is very generous of them. Last week I met with the head of screen australia ACT division, and she suggested we may be able to get money from the government for post-production marketing. We'll see. I'm not holding my breath, having had no help from government ever, for anything. In fact you have to really successful before they give you any money - when in fact you don't need support any more. Still, she was very positive and energetic and something good might happen this time.

I had a brief look at their website. As an example take 'permission for shooting on location.' For this you need to approach three groups right off the bat: the land owner, the local council and the ACT government. Then of course there are fees, deposits, local council officer on the shoot, traffic management plan, waste management plan, health and safety plan, evidence of vast public liability insurance, etc, etc. This is before you actually get permission, which is always conditional. It's enough to drive you mad. This is why there are only two kinds of films: crappy short films (needing no permission 'cause they're filmed on a rainy afternoon in your granny's bedroom) and features, in which a vast army of people within your film company's structure can take on the vast army of bureaucrats opposing them. Nothing in between. Very sad. Mustn't harp on (I always say that after I've been harping on). But we're closer than ever now: actors, DOP, accommodation, some permissions, props and script. What more could a first-time filmmaker want? Footage in the can, that's what.

the knife edge

Today I think I finished the script. That is, I listened to the director's comments this morning on the phone and immediately made the suggested changes. I always do this - probably because I like to react to comments by changing the script before I forget my thoughts! Producer is upset because director has lagged behind with assessment and comment on the script. Fair enough. He's a busy bloke. I still regard this project as being on a knife edge, and I feel pretty awful for my faithful sponsors (shareholders!) because they've been waiting three years or more to see this thing done. If it's not done by end of 2009 I'm going to give the money back. I'm sick of being let down.

I've redone the headgear - doesn't actually look that different but it's a lot cooler to wear and fits more tightly. We are going to computer graphic (CG) in some eyes and maybe some other stuff to make the Yowie look better. I've finalised the Tshirt and the coffee cup designs: lots of work for me but every dollar saved means better production value on the digital stock itself. So I'm making a lot of the props myself. Now I have to make a convincing looking crossbow! We're ramping up every element; bad guys more badder; monkey more monkier; funky more funkier.

The author of the definitive book on Yowies, Tony Healy, is coming round tomorrow to check out the costume. Hope he's pleased. We have had to come clean on youtube and admit that our little video's are faked. There are heaps of fake Bigfoot, Yeti and Yowie vids on Youtube - some of them pretty convincing and others just plain laughable.

Meanwhile, as usual, I'm advancing on all fronts slowly. My third kids' book is in press and I'm thinking of pitching them as an animation series to producers.

yowie rising

I am cautiously optimistic - like a duck on the last day of the hunting season. I added two (natch) large breasts to the Yowie costume a few days ago. Splendid they look, if a little yellow. Nipples are of liquorice. Moreover, I found some wonderful furry foxtails in a leather shop in Bungendore and had to have one for the yowie costume. Mounted low down it gives the illusion of really short legs and a long back in true anthropoid fashion. Not happy with the head though. It still looks essentially like Chewbacca in overall shape and the flowing mullet hairdo (though the face is now truly terrifying). I might just ditch the hair and make a sort of gorilla crewcut instead in salty grey. This would look really authentic and unique. I am enjoying working with fur (Hmm, does that say something about me?). I am inspired to make other costumes and am getting the inklings of some interesting designs. I really was not looking forward to being the Yowie in the heat of December - but my wife suggested we get instead a young friend of ours (same height as me but about 30kg lighter!) who wants to break into movies. Ok, so ya' wanna' break into moviesh, eh? Well, put on the monkey suit and let's see whatya got, kid! And so it goes.

Not shaped for sportive tricks

Well, another disaster averted - or postponed. J the director wanted to recce in Sept and film in January 2010; which would make it eight years since writing the script. We wrote and said not acceptable - so the dates are now: filming in December (the hottest time of the year - exactly when I did not want to be prancing around in the bush wearing a Yowie costume) and pre and post production either side of that. Well it must be, then. Es muss sein. I found an interesting thing on the internet: Vincent Van Gogh's letter of July, 1890 (just before he shot himself - wonder why) mentions an Australian artist named Walpole Brooke with whom he would go out - whether painting or not Vincent doesn't say, though we can infer it was probably painting, as Walpole Brooke was an artist.

Vincent thinks he has potential and mentions that he was brought up in Japan. Intrigued, I google further. In Van Gogh's sketchbook no. 7 is found a visiting card: E Walpole Brooke. Aha. I google E W Brooke in Australian webpages only and come up with an entry saying that not much is known about him (they didn't know of the Vincent connection) but that he did exhibit in Yokohama and study in Europe. Also that he was the son of a minister of lands in the Victorian state government. More Aha. I googled the MP's in the government archive and found the father: John Henry Brooke, MP for Geelong in 1956, who went to Yokohama of all places in 1867 and set up the first foreign language newspaper there: the Japan Daily Herald. Further fascinating things on the internet from the Japan Daily Herald - which in its day was very influential. So I'm on the track on E Walpole Brown, another forgotten artist. On a personal note - I have resigned from the military doctor's post I held - this will leave me more time for creative work. The number of times I've tried this sort of thing before is upwards of five or six. And every time I've been driven back into the arms of general practice by the need to pay the bills. Sigh. I'm getting tired of this process. Still, in a week I'll be freer than I've been for years. Watch this space - but no breath-holding, you might just die... laughing.

This resonates with me...

Walter Pater wrote (The Renaissance):
"At first sight experience seems to bury us under a flood of external objects, pressing upon us with a sharp and importunate reality, calling us out of ourselves in a thousand forms of action. But when reflexion begins to play upon these objects they are dissipated under its influence; the cohesive force seems suspended like some trick of magic; each object is loosed into a group of impressions—colour, odour, texture—in the mind of the observer. And if we continue to dwell in thought on this world, not of objects in the solidity with which language invests them, but of impressions, unstable, flickering, inconsistent, which burn and are extinguished with our consciousness of them, it contracts still further: the whole scope of observation is dwarfed into the narrow chamber of the individual mind. Experience, already reduced to a group of impressions, is ringed round for each one of us by that thick wall of personality through which no real voice has ever pierced on its way to us, or from us to that which we can only conjecture to be without. Every one of those impressions is the impression of the individual in his isolation, each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world."

This is like the process of creativity: an impression from without or within leads to a time of reflection - without effort the whole entity is passed through the massive filter of the personality and a new being springs up. Then this new thing must come forth: I disagree with Pater's last sentence - the creation is not kept as a prisoner but displayed. Does it sing, is it both familiar and strange - does it augment the world? If yes, it might be worth something. Films, paintings, poems and other writing - they all fall into this category. I am gearing up for the final acceleration into the period of preproduction on this project. I will keep you posted...