2 Days Later and BSSC

Had a bit of feedback from competitions I was involved in recently.

First the British Short Screenplay Competition: I entered this back in June with my first ever screenplay attempt. Visiting their website the other week I had a pleasant surprise to see that my screenplay was on a list of those that had made it through to the 2nd round of judging, dodging at least two cuts I believe. Hurray. Not bad for my first try, a screenplay that quite a few reviewers on Urbis had said was very much a retread on a well explored concept (what isn’t nowadays?). Though sadly when I looked again more recently I found that I had not made it through to the 3rd round. I’ll definitely try again next year. And my writing self has been awoken a little by this small success. I’m now pretty sure that I’ll try to do NaNoWriMo again this year – despite the demands of my C&G course. I’ll just have to not have a social life in November.

2 Days Later Competition: Dan and I, and three of our friends had a crack at making a 10 minute horror movie for this competition. I wrote the script – comprising a massive 4 lines of dialogue and much stage direction. Dan did the camera work. Our friends Scott and Wen starred, and Scott produced. The film was directed by our other friend Matt. For almost all of us it was our first film. Scott had worked on a few short videos for work previously. We learned an awful lot. Our film wasn’t good enough to make it into the evening showing for the competition, but we’re getting screened at the matinee showing instead with the rest of the less lucky entrants. It will be a good chance to go meet up with people further down the filmmaking road than we are now and get to watch some awesome lowbudget short films.

Project: 2 Days Later – Finished! (4 days late)

Well the film’s finally finished, and looking pretty cool. Not as awesome as I’d hoped – but I had unrealistic standards.

A huge effort was put in by our editor and director on the final weekend. Dan and I contributed music, opinions and sound effects.

Stay tuned to see how we fare in the competition.

Project: 2 Days Later – 75% filming done

With the deadline looming just over a week away we’ve completed about 75% of the filming required and hope to finish principal photography tonight.

This will leave us a week (and about 15 hours remaining out of our 48) to edit, add any effects and mix sound for those scenes which require it.  The editing task is made more difficult by the fact that the camera we borrowed to do the recording on is a Sony and hence records to horribly proprietary format files, which take a great deal of processing to make them editable.

Project: 2 days later, in progress

This is the first update on the 2 days later film project. And that’s because not much has happened so far.  We’ve had a few chats/planning meetings (~3 hours), I wrote a basic script (~2 hours), Matt’s done some storyboarding, Dan’s constructed a steadycam rig (??? hours). I don’t know exactly how we’re supposed to do our accounting of hours but it’s getting slightly flaky already – are we allowed to count seperate people’s hours on small side projects as having happened consecutively (for those tasks that don’t gate on earlier tasks’ completion at least). Who knows.

We were supposed to start filming last weekend, after Dan and I got back from holiday, but everyone kind of forgot – which is a bit rubbish. Now we’re on schedule to start filming on Sunday – but the deadline is drawing nearer and I’m starting to feel nervous.