How to shoot a film for free

For a blog whose blurb claims to be about a "Mastering engineer and DVD Author" there's been very little about DVD and films here! Here's a post to redress that balance slightly.

One of my favourite DVD projects of recent years is Greg Hall's magnificent cult triumph "The Plague". SRT created a new 5.1 upmix and re-master of the original stereo soundtrack, plus a new upscaled master tape for the film's digital cinema debut in Covent Garden, and later the authoring of the DVD, all under the watchful eye of Tom Swanston from WYSIWYG Films.

Originally shot on mini-DV for only £3500 (!!!), "The Plague" is a fantastic mix of black humour, social commentary and improvised drama, and has won awards and garnered praise from all corners, not least none other than Mike Leigh, who said

"It's anarchic, crazy, kind of rough-edged and raw, but it's got an amazing energy, and it embraces white kids, black kids, Asian kids, kids up to no good, boys and girls out on the street. It's a full length film, made low budget, so it's absolutely a gang of people getting together with great imagination and wit, and a bunch of talented actors. It pulsates with energy."

We were all proud to be involved with it (and had a great time at the premier!)  Meanwhile Greg went on to direct "Kapital" for the Man

chester International Film Festival, a bold collaboration with composer Steve Martland, and is currently working on "Bash The Rich", an autobiography of Ian Bone, as well as numerous smaller projects. I highly recommend his blog, Broke But Making Films as a great, inspiring read for any would-be indie film producer, but his latest venture will be particularly exciting to follow, I think.

After his "naive" success making the Plague for such a tiny budget, Greg has decided to make his third feature film for no money at all. No, I don't know how this is supposed to work, either! As he says it's a "slightly mad" idea, but if anyone can do it, Greg can - he has "the equipment, the crew, the actors, the determination and the mad glare in my eyes to be able to do this" - and my bet is that the results will be inspirational.

Best of all, he will be blogging it for our education and enjoyment. As he says in his latest post:

I will blog and keep a video diary of the whole journey. We will show the improvisation period that is often kept secretive, the madness of shooting on no money, the turbulent editing process and the possible festival circuit and uk cinematic release of the film. Everything you need to know on how to - or possibly how not to - make a no-budget feature film.

As anyone who has checked out the fantastic extras on the DVD of The Plague will know, coming from Greg this is no idle claim. I for one will be keeping a sharp eye on his RSS feed in the coming weeks and months, I hope you will too.

And you could do worse than rent or buy a copy of "The Plague", while you're at it, too!

Galactic Symphonies - Kaoss Pads and Poetry

So, Richard's session proved to be even more fun than I expected ! The project was a collaboration with unique 60's poet-lyricist Stephen Kalinich, and comprised a fascinating improvised mixture of Kaoss Pad manipulated soundscapes, gentle acoustic guitar numbers and full-on almost-rap sections. Where things got really interesting is that the release is to be a double-sided disc - CD on one side and DVD on the other, so we had a studio recording to master, plus a live performance for the DVD.

Initially Richard had thought of the live version as more of a bonus to the CD release, and anticipated spending less time on a "rough cut" master. However since the recordings were made he had started to enjoy the live performances more and more, and decided to spend more time on them. At the end of mastering the studio version I gave him a brief demo of how the live performance would sound if we converted it to surround-sound using the System 6000's "unwrap" capabilities, and he was hooked. The processing he uses on the live guitars, especially the Kaoss Pad (*), worked fantastically well with the unwrap, creating a really convincing 3D soundscape. So an extra day was booked and now there will be 3 versions on the disc - studio stereo on the CD, and live stereo and surround-sound on the DVD.

(*) Richard uses two of these while performing - "playing" them with his toes !