"Dislocation" Horror/Thriller Film: An (Almost Completed) Evaluation.

Like the documentary, even though the process isn't exactly over, I wanted to write about my experience and what I have learned throughout.

Hearing Andy's idea from the start was interesting: it wasn't something I completely understood at first but I think if you understand something the first time, it doesn't give you time for it to grow on you and develop into something much more. I was surprised but happy when Andy asked me to be his producer, he trusted me to help him carry his project from beginning to end which was quite a big responsibility but it helped my confidence massively because I had done a number of things that I hadn't done before, in quite this capacity. I organized meetings with the crew, I posted the advertisement online and communicated with a large amount of people about auditioning and in this, I set up auditions giving the actors the time and a place to turn up and audition for us. We had over twenty people email us altogether and had around eight people turn up for auditions, which anyone else would think was quite poor but when you get people telling you they will be at the audition, not many decide to show up, so eight was a large number for us and Andy and I were very impressed with everyone that came.

Andy is a very creative guy so when he came to me with his pitch idea (which I have written about before), I was over the moon because it was so fantastic. Again, like my documentary, we were going for a pitch that would stand out and would be memorable, and we achieved that. Everyone knows "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire" and I feel because we did a pitch that was out there, that gave our tutor the confidence that we would pull off this film off. If we were able to make the pitch fun, our idea for the film would blossom just as the pitch did too.

Our shooting days went well in my opinion. The first day we did run out of battery which wasn't the best thing to happen and we didn't end up shooting as much as we wanted that day. It was my responsibility to make sure we had at least two batteries and I didn't deliver on the first day but before we went to shoot on the second day, I went to our college technician to pick up another battery to be on the safe side, and while we missed out on a few shots towards the end of the day, another battery would have been good, but we thought two batteries would have been good enough. The shots we did get on the first day however, were great thanks to our camera man who specializes in getting beautiful shots. All the actors got on great, and cast and crew got on well too. There was a lot of standing about on the second day for a few of the actors so I made sure I was with them for the majority of the time (when I wasn't doing sound) just to be there and make sure they weren't on their own, but there was always someone talking to someone, so the waiting around didn't seem like too long.

This was my first true experience of being a producer and taking control on certain aspects, it was scary and out of my comfort zone but looking back, I'm glad I done it because it's given me the confidence to do more things like this. When Andy and Conor tried to get the contact information for the man that owned the house that we wanted to shoot in, I finally got through the man's wife the next day and I tried to explain to her what we wanted to do. This meant explaining the situation a number of times, she didn't seem suspicious of us but I would have felt a little strange if I got a random phone call out of the blue from students wanting to film in my other property too. She gave us her husband's mobile number and I explained who we were, where we were from, what we were doing and what we wanted to do and he was completely fine with it. He came up to see us filming along with his wife and they were totally at ease with the situation because they could see we were doing no harm and I made sure to let them know that we wouldn't be there too long and we would clean up and obviously be respectful of the property. I'm usually the person standing behind the person giving other people information, just there as a backup so to be the person asking to use this place and reassuring this couple, was a big step for me.

Being producer, sometimes you do have to balance on a fine line and some may think I have crossed this line when communication with the camera man had almost been cut completely. We couldn't get through to him, no number of Facebook messages, text messages or phone calls we made to him where going to get him into class. I had asked for a shot list weeks before we shot, and still on this very day, I do not have one. I understand that everyone works differently and sometimes people don't use them, but when you're on someone else's production and you are asked to make a shot list and give it to the producer even just for the production folder, I don't think it's too much to ask and should been done because it will help both the director and producer, in this case. I have had to send a few messages over Facebook to the camera man to get him to send me this list but it still hasn't appeared. It may not seem like a big deal but I asked him to do a job and not a particularly large one at that, it still wasn't done. The same can be said for the edit and when I sent another message about the edit, we were told by the camera man that he wasn't editing and why did the director think this, even though Andy has proof that he would do a rough cut for him. There was a brief deadline for the rough cut last week and Conor did not deliver, or even come in to explain. I understand completely that he has his own film to do; if I didn't understand, I would have to be very unreasonable, and I'm not. But to completely not reply to us both, then tell us when the director isn't in the country that he didn't know he was doing that, I personally think is unreasonable. I would rather that he had told us that he couldn't do it because he had too much on his plate or he didn't want to, rather than leave us in the lurch and only give us information when we had to badger him for it. It is my job to get information out of both my cast and crew and I don't think Andy or I were unreasonable, but we have both learnt a valuable reason from this experience.


Overall, like my documentary, this has also been an exciting but stressful experience but I am quite happy with how this production went, despite the problems. We had the majority of our actors nailed down quite early and we only had to get one person last minute but she turned out great. We had been organized from the start with sending out the advertisements online, sending scripts out, setting up casting calls and talking with the actors throughout the pre and actual filming process. The footage that Conor shot was fantastic, and that's why Andy chose him because he is so good at cinematography and bringing the right tone and visuals on screen. Andy knew what he wanted from the start and sometimes things just happen; most of the time you yourself can't control them and that's how the film and television industry works, so I don't believe that the things went wrong could have been controlled 100% but I'm very happy with how Andy held the production together. He didn't lose his cool, he has kept a calm and cool mind throughout even if he did feel frustrated at times, it is a real testament to how he works and I would happily work with him again.

Editing problems and a sneak peek!

For 'Dislocation' Andy had planned to go home over the May Day break and edit for a few days while we were off, making good use of some much needed time off before we go back to mayhem. Unfortunately the hard drive that we use to store the footage on only works on the college Mac computers and with college not being open over May Day weekend, this left Andy not being able to edit at all. He also lost time when the camera man failed to bring in the footage the day after the shoot.

However, Andy wasn't at a loss completely; he made a mini trailer for the film which I'm very impressed with, so even though we don't have a rough cut in (which we were promised for the deadline, but that didn't happen despite Facebook messages, numerous phone calls and texts) we have a mini trailer to show for the time being (which is shown below).

Starting to edit (again!).

Last Tuesday (6th May) began the editing process again. I imported the clips onto Premiere Pro which took longer than expected, then I sorted the interview into bins, so when I was going back to each clip, it would be a lot easier to find it. So Tuesday was more of a logging and organizing day for me.

Wednesday afternoon (7th May) after another class was when Caoimhe joined me and we started clipping and cutting pieces together. We're both really happy with the footage and the way it's visually told on screen that it sometimes kills me having to cut something up, even though I know I have to do it due to time constraints.

We have a lot of information from Richard's interview that we can't all possibly fit in to five minutes which is a shame but as we were editing, we decided to try and keep in the information about parmesan cheese in because we are assuming that most of our audience don't know that this particular cheese isn't actually vegetarian, despite restaurants serving it as vegetarian. We want our audience to walk out of the audience finding out something new, and we think this will do the trick.

We also have some really nice shots of Richard talking about the Vegetarian Society and labels on food and as I was shooting this on the day, I moved in to see the labels and it auto-focused for me. We're using these shots because the audience will be aware of the different types of labelling in stores and we think it's something that some people may not be aware of.

On the Thursday (8th May), we showed Sharron our rough edit and I would say she was quite pleased with it. Caoimhe and I came up with some other titles because we personally didn't feel like "Green Beans and Everything In Between" fitted the documentary anymore. These titles were "Suitable for Vegetarians", "Vegetarian Options Available" and "A Vegeducation". However, talking with our tutor, she thought the title added quirkiness to the film and if we made the start quite quirky too, it would fit in quite well. We also had a lot of footage of Richard talking about the cheese which I didn't really mind but after our tutor telling us that the audience may start to think the film is about cheese, we thought it was best to cut it down but still have an appropriate amount of information still in there so the audience can understand why it's not vegetarian. 

Because of other on going projects during the week, we know from Thursday, we will not get any time to do another edit or go out filming apart from possibly next Wednesday afternoon so we do intend on editing more next Thursday (15th May) during class while the tutor is going over other people's work. 

Richard's interview.

On Saturday 3rd May, we finally had Richard's long awaited interview. I went to Tesco the night before and bought quite a lot of food to have in the background including pineapple, apples, coconut bites, peppers and almond milk as well as having bananas, strawberries, pasta and melon in the house already.

In the picture above, we set everything out on the cooker to have in the background of Richard but once we actually had Richard sit down, we realized that the food would look much better on the right side of the counter, so everything was moved to there and then Richard was re positioned.

Both Caoimhe and I think the interview went really well, much better than Lindsey's had went before. We took our tutor's advice and changed angles every few questions so when we came to editing, we had a number of different shot variations enabling us to cut in between different questions if a certain answer was spread out within other questions. 

We're both really happy with the day and we can't wait to start editing!

Cutaway Time! (Photographs to be added!)

The next Wednesday (23rd April) had filmed some cutaways at the place I named in the previous blog post.

(Outside the stationary and book store, Eason's)

(Some of the healthy eating and vegetarian books in Eason's)

(More of the vegetable and healthy eating books in Eason's)

(Outside the book store, Waterstone's)

(Some healthy eating and books about vegetarianism in Waterstone's)

(More books about being vegetarian in Waterstone's)

(Outside the health food shop, Holland and Barrett)

(Outside one of my favourite stores, LUSH, where every single product is vegetarian)

(Outside The Nutmeg, another health food store, slightly
more under the radar than Holland and Barrett)

Scheduled Easter Meeting.

Caoimhe and I had scheduled to meet over Easter to film cutaways but unfortunately something had happened to the camera, so we were unable to do so. We still had our meeting, we just didn't get to film anything that day which I didn't mind too much anyway.

We sat down in a coffee shop to discuss more thoroughly what cutaways we wanted. We made out a list of shops we wanted to go to:

• Holland and Barrett.
• LUSH.
• Easons.
• Waterstones.
• Tesco/ASDA.
• Alley Cat.
• Restaurants in Victoria Square and St. Anne's Square.

We had a small number of concerns about these places. Firstly with Easons and Waterstones, it had been suggested to go into these book stores and look at their vegetarian book range but because of the internet, internet prices are much cheaper than in store places like both Easons and Waterstones. We didn't want anyone to see us in case they thought we were filming or taking pictures of the prices of books and going to buy them online instead. It sounds silly, but I feel like it is a huge concern for these shops and they could have thrown us out at anytime, even if we explain what we were doing.

The same type of thing we had concerns about for Tesco and ASDA. Obviously both these stores are much bigger than the book stores, so they have more security cameras and more people in store. Customers could report us or a member of staff could see us.

We were also worried about going around to restaurants and filming the menus. Again, the same price-comparison concerns were our worry, because I'm sure a lot of people go from restaurant to restaurant looking for the cheapest prices. 

The negatives and positives.

On Thursday 10th April, we had our weekly meeting with our tutor and I felt really silly if I'm being honest. She asked us how shooting went and I said it went well, the lighting wasn't great afterwards, but overall we were happy with how it went.

For this post, I'll post the negatives and positives of the meeting.

Negatives
She sat us down and told us that she thought it would be best if we didn't use the interview footage we had used. There's no doubt that the answers Lindsey gave us were very interesting and I was excited to explore them more throughout cutaways.

She listed her reasons and in the end, both Caoimhe and I agreed with her and why it would be best not to use it. One of the reasons was the lighting and we had tried out best to change it in the editing programme we were using, but after an hour, we weren't getting anywhere with it. I am very disappointed and I can understand why we can't use it, but I felt so optimistic about it all that even though I get the reasoning why, it's still a little disappointing.

Seeing that we were quite down about this conclusion, Sharon got in contact with her friend Julie who lives quite close to me, who is also a vegetarian. She seemed really up for being in our documentary so we got quite excited by it. Unfortunately we knew that she was very busy and it was coming up to Easter so we felt the dates she was available up to her and she never got back to us; and because of it, I didn't want to be on her back because she had a family and was generally very busy.

Positives
We still have Richard scheduled to let us interview him for Saturday 3rd May which we are very excited about because when we met with him for the first time, we was really looking forward to answering the questions because he'd never been able to have an outlet to talk about being a vegetarian.

We still plan to use Lindsey's interview but as research only. She gave us some fantastic answers and had a great story to tell, so we're hoping to look back on her interview as research for Richard's to help us improve in lighting techniques, camera angles as well as changes to questions.

Starting the editing process.

The next week I stayed in college after class to look over footage and to do a quick little edit on the smoothie and LUSH pot cutaways. But before doing that, I split up the interview to make it easier to edit later on. The lighting was a huge problem unfortunately and looking back on the day, I don't understand why I thought it would be a good idea to place her in front of the window. Maybe I just got over excited that I was finally starting the filming process for the documentary, but I tried to change it in Premiere Pro but it wasn't really working. The framing was just slightly off, I thought I had picked a tighter shot so when I seen the back door in shot, I was annoyed because on the camera on the day, I hadn't been able to see it at all.

I was really happy with the sequences I had filmed though, but whether or not I use them in the final film had yet to be decided.

The production meeting before filming!

On Thursday 3rd April, we had a small production meeting to discuss further details of our interview happening on Saturday 5th April with Lindsey.

We discussed where the interview would be and because of location constraints at Caoimhe's house, we decided that it would be easier to use my house since it would be free and no-one but us would be in. We made plans where I would pick Caoimhe and Lindsey up in Belfast and bring them to mine too. We also talked about possible cutaway locations, but these aren't nailed down until Lindsey answers the questions obviously.

Who Wants To See An Amazing Pitch?

Our second pitch for 'Dislocation' (on Thursday 27th March), Andy and I played a short version of "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?" and this answered questions that related to the pitch. It gave us what the genre was, the title of the film, the setting and time period and would audiences like to see the film.

After our fun teaser, we spoke about more details about the film including the actors and their head shots, the locations, the crew and shooting dates, to name a few. This information can be found below:

Title: "Dislocation"

Genre: Comedy Horror, Magic Realism

Time/Setting: Present day Northern Ireland

Theme: Satire battles redemption. Two Geocaching friends search for an evasive cache deep in the forest. Will they find their surreptitious reward, or will it find them?

Actors:
Josh Sugar - Richard Andrews
Dan Groves - Ryan Sloan
Groundskeeper - Dave McCaughey
Chelsea (Dead Girl) - Hannah Gallagher
Old Man - Patrick Allen

Locations:
Car - Andy's Car
Road Cutaways - Hillsborough
Forest Scene - Hillsborough Forest Park
Graveyard - Blaris Cemetery
Open Field - Hillsborough
Cabin Int - TV Studio (BMC Millfield)
Cabin Ext - Hillsborough

Props:
Binoculars, backpacks (x2), costumes, fake wounds, blood pellets, make-up, fake gun, metal box, cigars (x2) and shovel.

Provisional Shooting Dates: 
7th and 8th April

Intended Audience:
Young adults over the age of 15 that enjoy comedies such as "The Inbetweeners" and "How Not To Live Your Life".

How does it fit into 'Dislocation'?
Set in the middle of nowhere, Dan is a hero; he is cool, slick and adventurous. Josh is a lesser version, always in the shadow of his best friend. He tries to be like him so much but always ends up getting it wrong. When Dan is killed, the spotlight is thrust onto Josh, he is being forced to become the hero that the audience expected Dan to be. Josh is in uncharted territory in this front and centre role; scared, determined and dislocated.

Overall, I'm really happy with how our pitch turned out. Andy had a great idea and I'm so glad that we went with it because it was creative and no-one else had an idea like it. It was memorable and fun with a twist, as well as our tutor liking it because it had an edge but we also gave the relevant information.

Pitching Time!

Thursday (27th March) was pitching time! We had briefly gone over what we were going to talk about in the pitch on the day, just to keep it fresh in our memory. Below is a photograph of Caoimhe and I after our pitch and you can see our t-shirts.

On Caoimhe's t-shirt, I wrote "Vegetarians Do Eat..." because a lot of people think vegetables just eat vegetables so I listed a number of different foods (including vegetables) below this and on the back of the t-shirt, I drew and coloured in a few foods.

On my t-shirt, I wrote in big letters "What is a Vegetarian?". This was my first idea for the documentary; I wanted to dispel the myths and find out from vegetarians themselves what others think when they hear they are vegetarians. So on the front and back, I wrote questions and phases that vegetarians are likely to hear when people ask them about being vegetarian. 

For our pitch we talked about a number of different topics:

The title: "Green Beans and Everything Inbetween", I actually give credit to Pearse for this quirky name because he came up with it and we thought it wasn't a generic name for a vegetarian documentary but it was enough for people to be interested, just by the name.

Subjects: Lindsey Mitchell and Richard Andrews. We spoke very briefly about how we were glad to have a man and a woman involved so we could get two different perspectives. Richard has been a vegetarian since he was born, so he didn't choose the choice to be vegetarian, whereas Lindsey did make the choice so it will be nice getting those two different sides too.

Audience: We want these to go out to a wide range of audiences. We want people to watch this who are skeptical of the vegetarian lifestyle or don't know much about it. We want people who are interested in getting involved in becoming a vegetarian. We want vegetarians to watch and feel like they're not dislocated from society like a select few make them feel.

Research: I feel our research has been strong; we watched a film called "Vegan Love" about a guy who wanted to make a documentary about his best friend who was vegan, and trying to find a vegan girlfriend. I also ordered a lot of resources from the Vegetarian Society including leaflets, pamphlets and posters which I had posted about before. 

Themes: Both our themes and locations are heavily dependent on our questions and our subjects answers. Our themes include whether it is their choice to be vegetarian or not, their lifestyle, the reaction of friends and family, common myths and their experiences eating out and shopping.

Locations: As I previously mentioned, this will be dependent on our subjects answers. For example if Lindsey said to us, she did it for the animals, we would go somewhere like Streamvale Farm and get a few shots of the baby animals. However, if she said she did it for the health benefits, we would get shots of health food shops. A few examples of locations are; Holland and Barrett, St. George's Market, Streamvale Farm, supermarkets.

Interview locations at this point are depending on shooting dates; we have Caoimhe's house and my house down as possibilities but when we know when both subjects can film, a decision on interview locations can be confirmed.

Shooting Dates: We were thinking the 4th or 5th April for Lindsey's interview and 8th April or 12th April for Richard's interview and then going on the 13th April for cutaway shots once we watch the interviews back. We feel this will be much more productive due to time restraints, instead of going to get a lot of cutaways at all different places, at least if we know their answers, we can base locations off them.

I was really happy with how our pitch went; we had an innovative idea with the t-shirts and no-one had the same idea. It stood out, it was memorable and we were able to explain how our original idea started in a more colourful way.

Pitching Ideas for our Pitch.

Tying in with our morning meeting; after lunch Caoimhe and I sat and discussed possible ideas for our pitch next Thursday (Thursday 27th March). We're working around the vegetarian ideas and because real food is fruit and vegetables, this displays lots of bright colours and we wanted our pitch to be creative as possible. We found it difficult at first trying to think of ideas, but we came up with some good suggestions as to what we could plan.

With the pitch being next Thursday, we don't want to spoil what we will be in our pitch because then the judging panel (two of our tutors) wouldn't be surprised because they may have read our blog. We plan to post photographs of what will be involved in the pitching process and how we intend to grab their audience, once we have actually completed it.

Our Fourth Meeting.

Myself and Caoimhe had another very successful meeting yesterday morning (Thursday 20th March). We first had a meeting with our tutor to discuss how we have progressed throughout the week; we spoke about meeting up with Lindsey and how she was excited to talk about all the various aspects of being a vegetarian, not just the food side of things. We also said how we were planning on meeting up with Richard (another person who said they would like to be involved) on Monday morning.

Our tutor gave us the idea of just concentrating on Lindsey and learning more about her life and her hobbies. While I think this is a great idea, this would change the whole dynamic of the documentary and possibly become unlinked to our 'dislocation' theme. My original plan was to interview people and get their views on why do they think they are being judged for choosing this lifestyle, what problems with people have they encountered, do they think being vegetarian gets easier, why did they start and how did they start. These would just be a few of the questions but I was stream lining it on the fact that we were learning about the vegetarian lifestyle and that anyone who had had reservations about vegetarians or didn't actually know about the lifestyle, would watch the documentary and find out that it's not just about eating vegetables. However, if we just concentrate on one person and their life outside vegetarianism, I start to question what our documentary would even be about. I'm really passionate about learning more about the lifestyle because it's something I have wanted to learn about for a few years and if I can help even a little on reducing the stigma on it, then I will be happy and feel like I have created a successful documentary.

My producing role.

I don't know whether I have actually said this yet but I am producing Andy's film, "Dislocation" as well as making my own. His blog can be found here and he is creating a fictional story, rather than a documentary. His short film is both comedy and horror based that sees two best friends 'geo-caching' (For anyone that doesn't know what geo-caching is, it is an international treasure community) for a rare mysterious cache. As the cache draws closer, find or did not find, re-establishes itself with live or die.

Tonight we wrote up advertisements for the three roles that need to be filled, and stuck them on the Studio NI Daily email newsletter, Studio NI Facebook page, Gum Tree and over the next few days we will be tweeting it with the appropriate hash tags so people and actors from Belfast will find it easily.

Our Third Meeting.

Our third meeting happened the very next day (Thursday 13th March) with our tutor. We updated up on the interest we had had so far, and that we had already planned to meet up with one of the subjects the following week.

We also discussed our idea of the opening of the documentary having us look online and typing in "vegetarian" onto various search engines, and all that comes up is vegetables. This is to lead in to what I wanted to know, is vegetarianism just about vegetables? Our tutor gave us an idea though; she said to use photographs or video that we take ourselves with markets and shops and to create a montage using my original "is it all about vegetables" idea.

Overall, I'm really pleased with our progress so far. We were a little worried we would come to class with no one interested but that quickly changed on Wednesday and I couldn't be happier.

Second Meeting.

In our second meeting (Wednesday 12th March) we looked over the research resources I had received the week before as well as reply to two responses we had received that morning. We also wrote up a short letter to politician Jim Wells because we found out that he is vegetarian himself. We haven't currently sent the letter yet because we have had quite a few responses so we were using that as a back up plan but we thought it was a good idea to write it up anyway.

The start of scheduling!

My producer Caoimhe and I sat down this Thursday (6th March) and started talking about a production schedule. We drew up a brief schedule (below) and later on that day Caoimhe made up a more professional looking schedule on Word. We made up this smaller schedules just so we could have the set tasks in front of us for each production meeting then we can update it later on that day on the more professional one (which will then go in the production folder).