TOTAL TEMPORAL DISPLACEMENT

THE MAKING OF PARADOX
By Paul Williams

I'm migrating articles over from the EHP website to this blog. This piece was originally written on 26 February 2004.

What is a paradox? According to the battered old dictionary at home a paradox is ‘that which is apparently absurd but is or may be really true.’ And I think that just about covers it.

Paradox is a love story/time travel/horror film.

In short: Back in 1999 Ben gets struck by lightning and starts to see visions of the past, namely vision of a murder know as the Tube Killer who stalked the underground in 1949. The flat Ben lives in was the Tube Killers lair. He also meets a girl who lives in the flat in the future. He is warned by two time guardians to stop mucking about with time as it has serious consequences. Ben doesn’t listen and uses information from the future to meet the girl from the future in the present but this ends the future. The Tube Killer escapes out of the psychic scar that Ben has been using to travel through time and starts killing again in the present. Ben ends up an apocalyptic future, infested with the soulless corpses of the Tube Killers victims. Then Ben helps kill an older version of himself and finds that his friends have turned into freedom fighters in a zombie city. And then things get really complicated...

A MULTI-LAYERED, MIXED-GENRE MISH-MASH

Paradox started life as a horror film idea I had after wondering around in the cold after a clearly mad tour guide on a Jack The Ripper walk. It was bitter, it was dark, it was a part of East London you wouldn’t want your worst enemy to be caught alone in, especially in the dead of the night. But the mad tour guide (with hair far too curly for his own good, and a bright yellow puffer jack far too puffy than was clearly necessary) made the tour come alive and made the biting wind not seem to matter. It was the birth of Norris and the germ of an idea that would grow into Paradox.

It started as a simple ghost story/slasher film. Tourists on a ghost walk around the capital were slowly being taken and killed by the very killer they thought had died decades ago. The killer started with the stragglers at the back, the shadows taking them. They disappeared unnoticed by the rest of the crowd, all of them hypnotised by the over-enthusiastic tour guide. More and more go missing and finally the crowd realise they are all in mortal danger and run for there lives – but it’s too late. The tour guide laughs manically as he feeds his master, the hungry ghost of the Tube Killer. As a result, what starts to appear? Zombies! Hurrah!

There’s something about zombies – no, scratch that – there’s something about zombie films that just lends itself to a low budget. I have never seen a big budget zombie fest (I’m ignoring Resident Evil on purpose because it stunk more than a room full of decomposing skunks). The Evil Dead, Bad Taste, 28 Days Later, Dawn Of The Dead all low budget gore films that use zombies to great effect. There’s something inherently fun about dressing your mates up as decomposing corpses then slicing their heads off with a spade – or is that just me

That was the initial idea a nutshell. Meanwhile, in my clogged head, many ideas

clashed and bled into one another and as I worked on the Tube Killer other stories wove themselves in.
The big issue we here at EHP face on a daily basis is the lack of that papery thing most people call money. We need it and have none of it. To make a film, even a short, is an expensive endeavour and EHP has dipped into overdrafts, credit cards, other peoples wallets to scrape together the cash to make the films we have. With this in mind I started to think how we could make a low budget film with a large scope? Gladiator in a shoe box. The idea was to set a story in one place, but at three different times – past, present and future. One set – big story – low budget. This lead onto the prickly problem of time travel!

Films and TV series that have attempted time travel or messing around with time: Back To The Future 1, 2 & 3, The Time Machine (duh!), When Peggy Sue Got Married, Minority Report, Twelve Monkeys, Time Bandits, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, The Terminator, Timecop, Donnie Darko, Star Trek 4 – The Voyage Home, Groundhog Day, Quantum Leap and, of course, Doctor Who. This is by no means all of them, this is just a selection; some good, some bad, some spectacularly awful; I’ll let you decide which category each of the above fall into. They all do one thing though, and that’s prove how difficult time travel is to handle. There are many rules and time travel can easily get away from you and get very complicated and covered in paradoxes before you can scream ‘88 MILES PER HOUR!’ A classic example of this is Terminator and you can read how in our web-only scene from the forthcoming improbable marathon that is Paradox (oh, the shameless plugging).

With time travel it’s easy to slip up, to suddenly have a gap in your plot the size of a black hole that is sucking the audience in and leaving them with an expression of total bafflement – remember the expression you had after watching the Architect scene in The Matrix Reloaded? Same one. How did I manage to avoid the Black Hole Suck (official term)? I ignored it. In fact I went even further, I made it part of the story. As a twisted result of this Paradox, with all its time travel, alternate versions of the future and people killing older incarnations of themselves it sort of makes sense. Sense in its own improbable, inexplicable, mind-bending way.

So, that explains the time travel and the zombie bits, what about the romance? Now, I’m a romantic at heart. Forget all the selling your soul, possessed pens, and the living dead stuff, I want to make romantic comedies. In all seriousness as I have said before, we as an audience, watching film, always need to relate or root for someone on screen. The audience needs to see something and say to themselves ‘I know exactly what you mean’ or ‘I know someone like that’ or ‘I’m like that’, and when your dealing with the realms of Sci-Fi and fantasy you have to anchor your story to reality. The love story and the friendships in Paradox have to work otherwise the story falls apart. No-one’s going to watch zombies devour a screaming victim and tutt to themselves thinking ‘The same thing happened to me only last week’. But everyone’s been in love, been in a friendship, been dumped, been the dumper, been hurt, been infatuated, been drunk, been struck by lightning. In order for the audience to come on this journey with you, through a zombie infested, time-twisting adventure, they have to believe. That’s were the love story comes in.

So, that’s how to write a time travel/horror/comedy. Now, how about filming it? In 2003 we made a trailer and some completed scenes... just got to film and edit the other two hours and we're laughing!

MERELY IMPROBABLE

From page to screen: the creation of a promo trailer.

‘How do we make this thing?’ we thought to ourselves. If we were just selling the script we would hock it around film production companies and funders until someone said ‘Kid, let’s make a movie!’ – to complete this picture the character should be chopping on a fat cigar. However, we don’t just want to sell the script, we want to make it – that’s a whole different approach.
We are selling not only the Paradox script, but also the idea that we are the ideal people to make it – future filmmakers! We have to make funders believe in EHP as much as we do. So, to accompany the script, we made a promotional trailer and here’s a short summary of how.

‘OH SHIT INDEED, MY BOY!’

Back in the cold January of 2003 we gathered a group of friends, family and actors and shot a selection of scenes from the script of Paradox. PT and I pulled out of the scripts key scenes, pivotal moments, and anything we thought was funny and, with the help of Scott Charnick, ordered them into a shooting schedule.
Now, it's known that a film is written three times: once when you write it and redraft, redraft and redraft; second when you shoot it, and compromise, improve upon and rewrite; and thirdly when you edit, re-shoot, test screen and re-edit. The upshot of this is that the focus of the film, over time, should become sharper and sharper until it could fry an ant. Sometimes this works – sometimes it doesn’t. Also, the main point to remember is that a film is never finished – it’s just left. You could go on refining, re-editing and re-shooting forever, but you have to reach a point where you are happy (the catch 22 is that you are never happy).

The point I am trying to reach is that filming a script is usually more an exercise in preparation and orgainsation. It’s easy to get lost and forget what you have filmed and what needs to be filmed – this is were the strict preparation comes in. So, while PT, Scott and I bashed the scenes we were going to film into a few days shooting, we were also trying to assemble a cast!

A few months before shooting EHP had arranged a read-through of the Paradox script, gathering a group of actors with the help of EHP regular and superstar Amanda Liberman (who later went on to play Florence). The read-through produced a mixed bag, but the two wonderful things it did produce was the beautiful Karen Fisher-Pollard (who played Laura) and the faultless Chris Courtney (Norris). The role of Steve I’d written specifically for Stuart ‘The Man’ Mangan, a fact he still can’t believe today. That was half the cast, but we still needed more and, most importantly, we needed a leading man!

The trailer was going to be very crash, bang, wallop, and I knew in my head that it was more important for the people to look the part because of the short amount of screen time they were going to have. They had to convey a lot in a short space of time and, in my minds eye, I had a clear vision of them - I only had to find them in real life. PT found Keith and Emma when he looked up from his desk at work and saw Toby Wiedmann and Sharon Gosling (Keith and Emma). We were almost there, but still no leading man!

Ben was the pivotal character, the man the whole story revolved around, the linchpin, the keystone, the – the leading man. We searched high and low and finally found that the answer and the person was staring me in the face. Phil Thomas and I worked at the Science Museum to make ends meet, me with the film company and Phil with his design work. He was the only man who spent hours sculpting his hair to make it look messy – I’m sure this is a contradiction. He looked the part, he was the part, he didn’t want the part!
It took a while to convince Phil he was the ideal man for the role, and even days before the shoot he was convinced I’d find someone else – he always considered himself an alternative. Truth is when it comes to using non-actors there’s a little rule I follow: actor can play any role you give them, non-actor can play themselves or a heightened version of themselves. Phil was Ben, he just didn’t know it yet.

The cast had been cast, the best bits of the script picked, the locations prepped (PT’s flat and Amanda and Karen’s flat) – we were ready to film.

We had ten days to film selected scenes and it all went very smoothly thanks to a fantastic cast and, of course, PT and Scott. Sure lights blew, cast forgot their lines (Phil was the main offender), things went missing or weren’t there, but it didn’t matter. There was such a good feeling about the project that everyone gave 1000% (yes, I know that’s not a percentage).

Some of the highlights included:

Phil’s First Day. It would seem simple – walk down the hall, stop, drop the comics you’re holding, pick up an iron, CUT! It took 12 takes.

Tim and Wenzie. Kissing is never an easy thing to do, but kissing in front of two men, one of which is shoving a camera in your face, is next to impossible. Tim and Wenzie came through and Wenzie didn’t even flinch when PT flicked fake blood in her face.

Toby Wiedmann. I write some impossible speeches sometimes – ok, most of the time. The character of Keith had some tough dialogue to wade through, but Toby nailed them all.

Make-up. Thanks to the talents of Catherine McAuliffe and PT the zombies never looked so dead.

The Zombie Horde. Ah, the power of film. Before the shoot EHP went on a recruiting drive for zombies. We needed one shot of a few of zombies walking towards the camera, at night, down a dark alley. What we got was 30 people stumbling down a rain soaked cobble street. I will remember that moment for the rest of my life.

Norris. Chris Courtney got the character of Norris more than even I did, and I created him (Norris that is, I can’t take credit for Chris). He breathed life into my words and made acting look easy (which, trust me, it isn’t).

My Dad. Look, my dad can not act! He delivers his lines in this strange flat tone and when the camera’s on him he goes as stiff as a board. However, after the premiere, the one character everyone remembered was Trevor played by my dad. I wish I never wrote that ‘pretzel’ line.

Karen and Phil’s Bedroom Scene. It took us a couple of hours, the room was as smoky as a jazz club once we’d finished, but they worked so well together the scene came out great.

Amanda’s Monologue. Last shot of the ten days; 10.30pm, one of my stupid long monologues, Amanda trying to get her head round it, me wanting it in one shot. It took a few attempts but we got it, and my dad has comic-timing in his blood.

Bubble Bath Burst. Phil bursting out from under the suds was a great moment – and he did it three times.

The Whole Damn Experience. Each time I get behind a camera I forget how much I enjoyed it the last time. After a shoot your always worried about the shots you didn’t get, the converge you forgot, that the days of filming become a distant memory. But when your back behind the camera you remember why you're doing it. Why you spend all the time writing, preparing, organising. The film had an amazing bonding experience for cast and crew. You have such an intense time you feel like you’ve know everyone forever and are sad when the film is wrapped. I guess that’s why, soon after it’s all over, my fingers are dancing over the keyboard again, coming up with a new way of getting everyone together again.

WHAT WOULD YOU GIVE IF YOU COULD GIVE SOMETHING?

THE MAKING OF EHP's FIRST SHORT 'SOLD'

By Paul Williams

I am migrating articles over from the EHP website to this blog. This piece was originally written on 23 October 2003.

Where did it all begin? Way back in the autumn of 1999 that’s where! The erstwhile brothers of film Paul Williams and Paul Terry met at University after sharing make-up. What? Isn’t that how all male chums meet; over a half-used lipstick? Ok, I will explain:

After a year on a Palaeontology course (don’t ask, that’s a whole other story) I switched to English and Creative Studies at Portsmouth University. Portsmouth – the gateway to the Isle of Wight and basically a town that suddenly stops and the sea starts, like someone forgot to put the coastline in and just added the sea. The course was a mixture of English (that’s reading lots of books and philosophising over the meaning of art and reality to those of you who took Sports Science) and Creative Studies, which covered the whole, writing, drama, theatre, film thing.

It was a great three years, a time when you could experiment with all different styles of writing and theatre and hair colour and not have to worry about anyone wondering what the hell you were doing. Our first task for the theatre element of the course was to write and perform a four minute monologue, in an actual theatre, to an audience of actual living and breathing people. We all cacked our collective pants.

Being the cheery fellow’s that we are I wrote a comedy monologue about Death and Paul Terry explored his tortured artistic soul with a monologue about a tortured man tied to a chair. We portrayed pale characters and both wore white face paint (and you all thought we met at a Rocky Horror Show performance). We shared make up and fast became firm friends, sharing that passion to be creative and fly in the face of convention – or at the very least sneak up to it and trip convention up when it wasn’t looking.

Over the next two years we worked on projects at University which accumulated in our final piece, the short film Sold. We had a choice at the end of our course: you could either write a long and boring dissertation that would only be read once and then filed away under ‘collect dust’ or you could create a short theatre piece. It took us a month or so to convince our lectures that a film was a theatre piece – only on a tape rather than a stage. After fighting hard and making a two minute film that involved my then flatmate Alex pretending to slit his wrists and dying in a bath (I am a cheery person, I swear) they allowed us to make Sold.

So, in the autumn of 1999 the Evil Hypnotist was born and Sold was made.

SOLD

“Terribly sorry, Maynard. So embarrassing having company when the flat’s such a mess.”

Have you ever been so drunk that you can’t remember what you did the night before? What if you did something terrible in that lost time – and I don’t mean sleep with someone you shouldn’t have – I mean something horrifying.

This was the basic premise for Sold. A group of housemates, Sarah, Lenny, Stuart and Kate, have a drunken night of swearing and, well, drinking and wake in the morning feeling more than a little worse for wear. That day they are each individually visited by Richard Maynard who claims to be a lawyer and further claims that they have each sold there mortal soul to his client and he wishes to collect by 11.15pm that night, 24 hours after the signing of the contract.

Naturally each housemate freaks out, not remembering any of this and not believing a word Maynard is saying. The lawyer demonstrates his clients seriousness by being able to stop their life for a few seconds. Upon being revived each housemate believes Maynard and desperately beg for their lives, at which point Maynard informs them of a loop hole in the contract. If they take someone else’s life before 11.15pm their place would be forfeit – a soul for a soul.

Each housemate returns home that evening knowing that they will have to kill or be killed.

Hell breaks loose. Knives, stiletto shoes, ashtrays, frying pans, and cookies all become murder weapons as the house descends into chaos. When the dust settles everyone is dead and as the bell strikes 11.15 one of the housemates returns from the dead to thank Maynard for a job well done.

The last shot we see is the only remaining housemate moving into a new house and a whole new set of souls.

Sold was a very steep learning curve. It took an intense week to film and an even intenser month to edit. With the help of another English and Creative Studies student, Jake Dovey, we shot on Digital 8 and edited on an ancient analogue SVHS machine.

Because we were an English course, the arts department wouldn’t let us use any of their equipment or new edit suites, so we ended up in a drafty old room using a machine that had been cobbled together with parts the technicians in the Languages department had stolen.

The filming went smoothly, we used a lot of first year students to fill out the cast (so sweet and innocent) and covered my friends bedroom in chocolate sauce. Before you all go and get the wrong idea – we decided early on the film should be in black and white, to have a noir feel, and as Hitchcock knew the best substitute for blood in B&W is good old chocolate sauce. In fact we covered the house in it. By the end of the shoot I think my housemates wished I had sold my soul and been dispatched at the end of the film along with my unlucky cast.

While Jake and I struggled with the ancient editing machine Paul Terry had a nightmare of his own recording the music for Sold. The film was too long, but we didn’t have the time or the right equipment to make a re-edit so it stayed at thirty minutes with what has to be the longest slo-mo fight sequence ever to grace the silver screen. We had to re-do the sound the afternoon before the premiere because it was too quiet and we were all suffering from lack of sleep and being malnourished. All that said, it was a sign of things to come and for the first EHP film it went down a storm.

We asked if we could have an evening to ourselves – all the other final year pieces were shown on another night – this was not us thinking we were better, it's just through our cunning teaser poster campaign which asked ‘What has been sold?’, the expectation and word of mouth had ripped through Pompey like wild fire, or at least a cosy log fire.

The night arrived and the evening kicked off with a Hollywood style trailer, complete with deep, hammed-up voice over. Then there was a live set by Paul and star bassist Nick Jones performing songs from the soundtrack. Finally, the lights dimmed and Sold played to a packed audience in the small, cold Wiltshire studios, where you could hear the traffic humming by through the walls.

The opening credits rolled and the rest is history.

THE CHRONICLES OF A TRUE WYRM HUNTER

By Paul Williams Photos: Santiago Arribas Peña

I am migrating articles over from The EHP website to this blog. This was originally written in 2009.

Way back in the mists of time, in January 2004, I wrote a script called The Wake. Little did I know back then that it would take over two years of my life and become Evil Hypnotist Productions’ first feature film.

Having completed five shorts, I wanted to move into the area of feature film production. I always found shorts very restrictive. Whereas some people thrive under these constraints, I always seemed to end up trying to compress a feature into a short. I wanted to see if I could tell a story over a broader canvas, explore character development and, most importantly, tell a good story.

The inspiration for The Wake came out of two events that changed my life and affected me deeply. In the space of a year I lost my mum to cancer and a close friend to illness. Before that year I’d never been to a funeral – let alone a funeral of somebody I cared about and loved. After being to two I saw the effect death had on people and on myself. The damage, the scarring – but also the hope. Death makes you seriously look at life. What you are doing? Where you are going? My mum and my friend Phil were both inspirational people and they will forever push me to keep going and stretch myself.

When I sat down to write The Wake I wanted to talk about death, but not in a depressing way. We all know death is painful, but I wanted to explore the other side of the coin. How death can change you in a positive way.

I came up with the idea of the figure of Donald Jacobs, a man who spends his life providing for his family, working every hour to keep his wife and kids in the lifestyle to which they’d grown accustomed. However, by doing so he’d lost contact with his family – alienated himself from them and himself. So, he decides to change his life. Not in a small way, but in a dramatic, mythical way. He tears up his office and makes himself a suit of armour – dressing like his favourite fictional character Sir John Greystone. He then mounts his steed (office chair) and heads out onto the streets of London to perform heroic deeds.

I wanted to explore how his actions affected people even after his death. How, just because somebody has stopped breathing, they don't stop influencing and inspiring people. At his wake the people that seem to know Donald best are not his friends and family, but the people who encountered him in his eventful last few months. They know him as an urban hero, a man of wise words and powerful actions.

When a lonely man, Callum, accidentally stumbles into the wake, he becomes embroiled in the families lives and in particular the life of another lonely woman, Hannah. I wanted the characters of Callum and Hannah to portray the opposite ends of the theme I was exploring in The Wake. In broad terms Callum represented cupid and Hannah represented death. They are the light and dark of the story, but also the grey in-between when we learn that they are very similar to each other. The Wake script told the story of these three characters, intertwined around Donald’s wake.

Once a few drafts had been hammered out, with the help of the editing skills of Paul Terry, the script was ready to be sent out to see if we could drum up enough interest to get it made. I wrote the script knowing we were going to produce the film ourselves, without a big budget – or a budget, so I made sure all the scenes were sent in places I knew we could shoot in. So the huge final shoot out on the International Space Station had to be cut. We secured a great cast and crew who committed themselves on the strength of the script and the story we were trying to tell.

The role of Donald Jacobs was taken by my old lecturer, and supporter of EHP since its formation, Stuart Olesker. The difficult role of Hannah was snapped up by Brigitte Jarvis, who relished the prospect of getting her teeth into such a twisted sister. Callum was harder to cast – we needed someone to carry the film, someone to act as the audience inside the world of the story. Dan Carter-Hope was a friend and actor who physically resembled Callum, but he was more of a comedic actor - Callum was very much the straight man. We considered other actors, but no-one seemed to fit as well as Dan. I gave him a copy of the script and talked him through the character. Dan came onboard with great enthusiasm and didn’t mind playing it straight (only while the cameras were rolling though).

The rest of the cast fell into place thanks mainly to the help of two of the cast members Kathleen Kimi (Miss Musgrove) and EHP regular Chris Courtenay (Dave the dentist).

I sent the script to my friend Johanna Thalmann who, at the time, was in her final year at the European Film College in Denmark. She was looking for projects to work on after she graduated, but I didn’t expect her to pick mine – or to bring three colleges from the film school (Eugen Gritschneder, Liatte Miller and Elina Kokkonen) to help make The Wake.

In an ideal world we would have had a longer pre-production period, but when you have no budget you have to make do. So a month before the August shoot we got the actors together and did script read-throughs and, picking out key scenes, we got certain actors together to develop their onscreen relationships. While this was happening we were finalising locations. In the end we used my dad’s house, offices in the Science Museum (were I worked part-time), Brigitte’s flat, Dave Adeane’s flat, a mini, and a small scout hall in Essex.

I met my crew the day before we started shooting. Not ideal. If you can’t form a good relationship with the crew then the film is doomed – especially one they are doing for the love of the script and coffee and cookies. The good news was that after a awful first day’s shooting (nothing to do with the cast or crew just the heavens above for raining and raining and raining), we all fast became friends and those friendships drove us on to make The Wake the best film we could with all the limits we had.

The very short three week shoot was divided up into three sections. First was Hannah and Dave’s story – which we shot in the first week. At the weekend we started to shoot Callum’s story. The second week was the wake itself. We shot the principal characters and the speeches during the week and then on a crazy Saturday that I will never forget we got in all the extras we could muster and shot with the background action. It had to match in the edit to make the audience believe that it was all shot at the same time, that the hall was always full of people. We had no time to stop and think if it would work, we just had to trust that we had shot it right. During the hall week we also spent two days in a cramped toilet, with two actors, a director of photography, a sound person, a director and a very hot light. The final week was Donald’s story, finishing Callum’s and any pick ups we could do. After a exhausting, inspiring, caffeine driven month principal photography for 'The Wake' was finished.

Everyone went home and the core of EHP (myself, Paul Terry and Scott Charnick) sat down to watch the hours and hours of footage we had to see if we had a film. What we had was a lot of footage. By Christmas 2004 we assembled a rough cut that came in close to two hours and, most frightening of all, had bits missing! The main part that was not in the first cut was the important Donald Jacobs documentary, which would provide this urban hero with a past. All we had filmed during the shoot was the hilarious Dave Adeane playing Terry Adams waxing lyrical about his adventures with Donald. We needed more – more Donald stories and they had to be in colour.

I had decided very early on that The Wake was a black and white film; the main colours of a wake after all are black and white. But I wanted Donald’s story to standout, to slightly jar against the main flow of the story. We achieved this by doing two things – one, we shot it in a documentary style and two, we shot these sequences in colour. This gave Donald’s story a mythical air – the stuff of chatter by the water cooler or coffee machine. What was true and what was over-blown hysteria? The audience would decide.

Over the next few months I gathered together the missing pieces, shooting the documentary segments myself. We had the help of the EHP elite, like Stuart Mangan playing Terry Adams fan Brodie Smith and of course our very own Scott Charnick playing literary agent Alexander Quentin. Also new victims who filled out the roles of D.I. Curtis, Professor Trussell, Tracy and Kylie, and most memorably The Dancer. Another cut was finished by June and the story and film was starting to take shape.

The score was another challenge all together and one faced not by me, but by EHP co-founder Paul Terry. Paul has put music to every film EHP has produced, but he had never composed a feature score before. The Wake had many themes running through it and a tone that shifted from comic to emotional – the score had to tie all these themes together, ride the changing tones – make the film a whole. It was a huge task.

While Paul was holed away in his home studio scoring The Wake, we had a preview screening fast approaching as part of the Portsmouth Film Festival. We continued to hone the edit, but it became clear that the music wasn’t going to be ready for the November preview so we called in the help of another master musician, Hamish McGhie.

Hamish was not only in the film, but EHP had also shot a music video for his band Fourthwall. Hamish and I worked on a preview score for The Wake and ended up with nine songs for the film. These, combined with some old Paul Terry classics, formed the music for the preview copy of The Wake screened in Portsmouth.

When you make a film, or any piece of work to that matter, you become so involved in it, so close to it, that you stop seeing the work as a whole. You only see the parts that make it up. In the films case you only see the edits, the sound pops, the clunky dialogue – you don’t watch the film as a film. The Portsmouth preview screening was an eye opener, the first time we watched the film with an audience. We saw the film in a whole new light and from the reaction of the audience could tell where the film worked and where the pace dropped, where the plot was clear and where it was baffling. After the screening we cut ten minutes out of the film and that was the best edit we had done during the whole year of post-production.

The final, final cut was locked by Christmas 2005 and February 24th 2006 had been booked for the premiere. The heat was well and truly on. Paul was still working hard on the score, that would turn out to be the best work he had done for EHP so far. It was a rollercoaster of a score matching the films emotions punch for punch. It was jazzy, sexy, funny, heart-warming, tragic and epic. Over a year’s work fitted onto the film like a glove and one of the proudest moments of the whole two year production was laying the music onto the finished film. After countless hours of filming, editing, rendering and scoring, it only took us a few hours to marry score and screen.

Two years. One film. A lifetime of memories and firm friends.

My only regret is that my biggest fan and friend never got to see the film. I like to think that somewhere my mum is sitting down with a big tub of sweet popcorn and waiting for the opening credits to roll.

For Susan Williams.

HELLO BLOG

This is a new blog which will cover every crazy project that comes into my head. By reading this blog you'll be able to follow these ideas from inception all the way through to finished product (in whatever form that takes) - at least that's the idea.