Knowing the difficulty we would have in bringing together two contrasting genres, with the subgenre of rom-com not usually connected with the idea of an ‘indie’ film, we thought it would be important to understand the camera techniques and other features which help to define the conventions of this form of film.
I felt it was important to trace this idea of an ‘indie’ movie as its own identifiable genre back to it’s origins by observing the work of John Cassavetes.
John Cassavetes- The Godfather of Independent film
"People have forgotten how to relate or respond; what I`m trying to do with my movies is build something audiences can respond to."
As an Oscar nominated Director, writer and actor John Cassavetes is best known as the pioneer of American independent film who tried to peel away from the dominating Hollywood film industry he worked in to try to create films that were closer to truth and reality.
What defined his films from the mainstream of Hollywood wasn’t just their low budget value, it was their use of improvisation and attempts to capture realism through adopting a Cinéma vérité style. Unlike in hollywood films he wanted the audience to be aware of the presence of the camera through the combination of naturalistic camera movement and more abstract, less generic use of editing and camerawork that is prevalent in ‘truthful cinema’.
Here is a clip from the 1968 film Faces. starring Cassavetes' wife Gena Rowlands it was only the second film that he both directed and financed independently. The film was nominated for 3 Oscars which shows the filmmakers high regard within the film industry.
After observing the filming techniques Cassavetes used in his films and understanding his ethos, that would go on to establish certain conventions for the independent film we felt more confident in applying this to our own ‘independent film’ opening. Lingering on shots was a technique I think could work well in establishing the lack of excitement and unglamorous lifestyle of our young protagonist when filming the bedroom sequence that will introduce his character. Also by subverting character roles with the protagonist being an unlikable nerd we are complying with Cassavetes ethos of not creating an idea which is completely generic.
Happy-Go-Lucky
As part of our research into independent film, I thought it might be worth taking inspiration from one of Mike Leigh’s film’s Happy-Go-Lucky. Although british, and a more modern filmmaker, Leigh uses similar methods and processes to Cassavetes such as producing a script through improvisation with the actors and it is this single visioned filmmaking that has lead to his films classification as ‘indie’ films even if sometimes they are financed by large film studios and achieve commercial success.
As the director of critical hits such as Vera Drake, his films are often referred to as gritty and dark, so it was refreshing to see him produce a film that was equally complex with 3 dimensional characters but had a positivity and light hearted tone that also fitted with that of a rom-com.
Speaking at the New York film festival in 2008 Mike Leigh expressed his reasons for holding shots for long periods of time such as the two shot at the end of Polly’s first driving lesson in the film, was because he wants the audience to be aware of the organic nature of the performances. I would agree with him that by giving the performers space to breathe in this way allows the audience to understand each character. I think that ultimately in order to create an opening which is both absorbing for the audience and which fits the conventions set by our brief we will need to use many of the filming techniques established by directors like Cassavetes and Leigh and also think about the overall tone of the film that is influenced by it’s genre.
For our idea of a dream sequence we wanted to get it very much from a single persons perspective as dreams often are. We wanted the scene to feel very vivid yet the camera shot to be completely different to those we would later use so as to set it apart as his fantasy not as part of his reality. To get his perspective we would need to use a POV shot that would help to capture people’s reaction to him. We imagined the camera pushes through a crowd of people capturing their adoring reactions to him whether as a boy giving a high five or a girl winking flirtatiously at him. We wanted a POV that matched the characters exact eye line so that the viewer felt like they were in his shoes. We looked for examples of how this type of shot has been done to great effect before. The one example that immediately sprung to mind was the Channel 4 comedy series Peep Show which uses the pov shot when combined with narration to really put you in the head of the two main characters. Most of the show is shot from either Mark or Jeremy's POV even when both characters are involved in a shot reverse shot. By hearing their strange and disturbing thoughts and their view on the world it makes for genuinely original and hilarious show.
However it was a different example that really captured our imagination. The music video to The Prodigy’s Smack My Bitch Up.
We all liked way in which they tricked the audience into thinking it was a male characters perspective when at the very end they reveal it to in fact be a girl. It made me think that if they were able to make us believe in the gender of the character just through the actions you see them doing then we would be able to make the audience believe that the person is attractive and the life and soul of the party without physically showing them. It is all in the camera movement and the other actor’s interaction with the camera. We liked how they jerked the camera from one point to the other reflecting the characters ever changing point of focus and the frantic nature of the whole video with time slowing down and speeding up as well as the camera spinning reflecting the persons wasted state. It was also effective having both the actor’s arms in shot and the interaction between the camera lens and what was in shot with water spraying the screen as the individual takes a shower or when a towel covers the screen when she is drying herself. It is these techniques that really make you see the screen as the persons eyes and face and that bring the action to life.
A problem that we were going to have to face if we were to go down the internet dating route in our opening was how to film someone on a computer and the website itself without boring the audience. A film I saw recently that did this well was The Social Network which focuses on what could potentially be quite a boring story cinematically, the creation of Facebook. Of course its an intriguing story otherwise no one would make a film about it but director David Fincher still had to solve the problem of filming long sequences of people just programming at computers.
He managed to overcome this through treating these moments as action sequences using close ups and quick editing between typing hands, looks of concentration and the computer screen itself. In this way he was able to bring energy to the scenes and capture the complete focus, quick thinking and drive behind the protagonist, Mark Zuckerberg that lead him to ultimately create Facebook. I think that although the protagonist in our film is very different from that in The Social Network we can still adopt a similar approach in trying to convey his escapism by creating a dynamic and engaging internet browsing sequence.
In order to create an interesting and engaging film opening we needed to have a good and original idea that was central to the narrative we would setup.After discussing different ideas in our groups the one that seemed to resonate most with everyone was the concept of an online dating romantic comedy.What attracted us to this idea was the thought of trying to bring an original slant to an often tired and unoriginal genre (Jennifer Aniston be warned!). Something as prevalent as internet dating and online interaction, as a relatively new phenomena, has yet to be fully exposed onscreen. The only films of any note on the subject being The Social Networkand Catfish. By exploring this subject and by also subverting character roles with the youth protagonist, the hero, being an unconfident, unpopular nerdy kid rather than a handsome ultimately Hollywood style leading man, will hopefully help us to create an opening that will move away from the blockbuster, Hollywood film plot thathas defined the rom-com genre. By being original our film will be more in the tone of what small independent films are about, exploring new ideas that often hold up a mirror to society and use realistic characters that people from a specific area can relate to.An example of this is This Is England which focuses specifically on working class skin heads in the north of England in the 1980’s and is therefore will not appeal to world wide audience in the way Blockbuster films do.
Taking this core idea and how we wanted our young protagonist to be, we developed our initial idea into a vague scene-by-scene structure for an opening. We wanted to start with a very short dream sequence which falsely portrays the young protagonist as a hugely popular figure in which he walks through a party before flirting with the girl who would later be identified as the main love interest, this scene would then cut to the character in his bedroom either asleep or getting ready to go out as a nerdy, awkward teenage boy. By presenting two contrasting scenes straight away we hope to surprise the audience by setting up a profile for the main character, which leads the audience down one trail of what the style of the film is and its conventions before immediately challenging these expectations. It is vital that a film grips an audience straight from its opening and by catching the audience out in this way the viewer is far more likely to be intrigued by the film and its main character. Also by creating an illusion of the identity of the character it tied in nicely to one of the themes that fitted with the online dating aspect to the film, the idea that anyone can be someone online.
After briefly re- establishing the young protagonists identity we would introduce the online dating element with the character looking at his computer. We had thoughts on how this could incorporate into our opening credits, with each name being displayed as an online profile. It could also potentially introduce the love interest through a video post he watches on the website of her. Here we thought we could make use of our trip to New York, which would be a fantastic location to film a quick clip. With our film opening only being 2 minutes long it may be that this is all that we include with the young protagonist having an online profile on this dating website in which he falsely presented himself as a popular, attractive guy.Interacting with the love interest online through a false identity. However if it fitted in we could potentially have the two characters bumping into each other at the very end of the opening, thus setting up the rest of a film by breaking the equilibrium.
As a group we also decided that we needed to come up with a rough outline of how the film would play out if we were to know if our idea had any potential. After all we were not just creating a 2-minute short film, there had to be enough substance to our initial idea that a whole feature length movie could feasibly spawn from. We came up with the idea that the young protagonist had something he couldn’t miss (something that is important to his future: an interview for Oxford/Cambridge say) but because he bumps into the girl he does miss it and this causes repercussions that develop the plot. Also to fit in with the genre conventions, there is a key hurdle that he has to overcome in order to win the girl. She doesn’t know he is the same person as the one she talks to online and this can be an area for humour with her thinking he’s gay or the problem of getting out of the ‘friendship’ category.
In discussing how the full feature length version of our film idea would play out it gave us confidence in our plan for the opening and that the idea was strong enough. I think the thing we are going to find hardest is being able to reflect the type of film wanted in our brief through a genre were the conventions do not match that of most independent, regionally financed films.
For our brief we had to create the opening 2 minutes to an independent film featuring a young protagonist and that appeared to be regional funding. This would mean that when coming up with ideas for our film opening we needed to think about the conventions implied by this brief and how are opening for a film will reflect this. For this project I will be working with Leah Beavis, George Russell and Alice Griffin.
Is a docudrama film based on a book of the same name by the climber John Simpson and documents Simpson's and Simon Yates' disastrous and near fatal attempt to climb the 20,813 foot Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes in 1985. The film combines footage of interviews conducted with Simpson, Yates and Richard Hawkins with a reenactment performed by actors. The film was directed by Kevin MacDonald.
Initial idea
As mentioned in the synopsis Touching The Void was first a novel of the same name by the climber John Simpson and the initial idea for the film came from producer John Smithson, managing director of independent production company, Darlow Smithson. However the route to a theatrical release was not straightforward as Smithson says "By the time the filming started, we felt we had already climbed a mountain of our own."
Because of the success of the book (which having sold slowly, managed to sell 500,000 copies before the films release after it won the NCR award and beat Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Tim in 1989 four years after it’s initial publication) the rights to a movie had been bought up by a big hollywood producer as Smithson explains “More than 50 producers were going for the story, and the rights were locked up in Hollywood” however despite rumours of Tom Cruise and even Steven Spielberg potentially making it with scripts having been written up to 2003 a film hadn’t yet to be made of it. Luckily Smithson was not as interested in making a feature film and was able to obtain the documentary rights instead as his production company specialises in factual documentary and he first pitched an idea for a TV documentary to Channel 4 commissioning editor Charles Furneaux and Paul Sowerbutts, managing director of Channel 4 International.
Production
Having received backing from channel 4 the project now had a budget of £400,000 but making the documentary on that budget would have been almost impossible due to the expense of filming on location in the high altitude locations in Peru. Smithson went to the US in search of more funding having previously secured financial backing from US producers with his independent production company such as its breakthrough documentary Black Box. The film was first turned down by the Discovery-owned TLC but he was able to increase the films budget to just under £1m after making a deal with PBS.
The project then grew in size after oscar-winning director Kevin Mcdonald (who would go on to direct The Last King Of Scotland) took interest in the project.
“I first heard about it from reading Joe's book which I recommend to you all. I sat up and read the book in one sitting overnight about three years ago and was completely dumb-struck by it. I found it so exciting and terrifying. It was like being transported to a totally different world - so alien does the world of high altitude and mountaineering seem to me.”
Helped by the involvment of a well respected figure in the british filmmaking industry FilmFour and then The UK Film Council got involved attracted by the unusual nature of creating a big screen drama documentary this pushed the Budget to £1.7m and the idea of a theatrical release was suddenly likely.
"Suddenly we had grown from a conventional British TV documentary into something far bigger and more ambitious”. Smithson later said.
There was a major threat to the production of the film just a couple of weeks before filming was set to begin in Peru when FilmFour was suddenly reabsorbed into channel 4 and the chief executive of film4 Paul Webster who had been so influential in securing the film4 backing for the film, quit with film4 also experiencing major budget cuts and the closing down of its distribution and international sales arm. Luckily channel 4 remained involved as a production company which meant filming could go ahead as planned with the same budget.
Director Kevin MacDonald explains the filming process
“I interviewed both Joe and Simon (the climbers) for two days each and then we filmed the reconstructions for a month in Peru in the actual spot, yes, where the adventure took place. Then a month in the Alps, shooting close-ups and other bits of reconstruction”.
Filming in such awkward conditions however wasn’t easy as Macdonald describes some of the difficulties in an interview
“We filmed with 35mm Aaton cameras in Peru and in the Alps we filmed with 16mm Arri cameras. Often the batteries ran down extremely quickly due to the cold and we learned to sleep with the batteries in our sleeping bags at night to keep them warm. We also suffered a great deal from condensation on the lenses because if one part of the equipment was even slightly warmer than the rest it would cause condensation, which would ruin the shot. A lot of times we had two cameras going, one being kept warm so that we could replace the one that was freezing up with ice on it every hour or so.”
Also when they took the two climbers back to mountain to film them together again back at the base camp they hadn’t been since the incident in 1986 it went very badly. “ The trauma of what had happened all those years ago came back to them and they began to find it more and more difficult to take part in our filming. It was a very emotional experience for both of them.” Recalls Macdonald. Simpson had suffered with post traumatic stress syndrome on returning and Joe Yates left early after getting angry with the Director.
From Simpson’s recollection it appears that neither got on very well with director.
“I didn’t enjoy the experience and Simon didn’t like the director. Simon got within an ace of head butting him because he felt Kevin MacDonald wasn’t treating the crew safely. He thought that because he wasn’t employed by the film company he could stand up to them but he just did it a bit too aggressively. Simon was judging Kevin MacDonald by climbing standards, which is very unfair because Kevin MacDonald is a film director with a Hugh Grant hairstyle from London. The only ice he had seen in his life was in a Gin and Tonic, suddenly he is staggering around at 18,000ft trying to make a film. I was saying to Simon, just respect him for that, you couldn’t make a film mate, so don’t criticise him because he is doing his best.”
Their visit back to the mountain was excluded from the final cut but made into a short documentary called The Return to Siula Grande which features on the DVD extras
Because Film4 was no longer able to distribute the film, Pathé stepped in to distribute and market the film for a UK theatrical release. With IFC Films distributing the film in America. And various other companies distributing to other countries.
Had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on the 5th September 2003 and its UK premiere at the London Film festival 27th October 2003. Its UK theatrical release date was 12th December 2003 and was then released in cinemas in New York on 23rd January 2004. Later it was exhibited in south America (Argentina 12 March 2004 Mar del Plata Film Festival), had cinema releases in Asia and Australasia (Hong Kong 15 April 2004 and Australia 24 June 2004) as well as numerous cinema releases in numerous European countries. see link
Was in cinemas for 6 weeks (42 days) and 20 weeks in America (140 days )
Widest release: 50 screens (in America 137 screens)
Release date: 12/12/2004
Closing date: 8/02/2004
American opening weekend box office takings
$96,973
(#45 rank, 5 theaters, $19,394 average, 25 January 2004)
2.1 % of Total Gross:
UK opening weekend
£115,332
(14 December 2003) (29 Screens)
TV Premiere
The film first aired on PBS in America on Sunday, November 21, 2004 because the television company helped to produce the film and this is a form of vertical integration with 1 of the companies involved in the production process also exhibiting the film.
Home Exhibition
The film was first released on DVD on 5th April 2004 in the UK by Film4 who also funded the film and this is therefore also a form of vertical integration and later in the Canada and the US (region 1) on 15th June the same year by MGM with the film also available in Video format. For a dvd release in America to be successful you need to use a large distributer and that is what MGM is as a part of Sony. Although i could not find any statistics for DVD sales it is likely to have had some financial success in America because of the size of the distributer, in the UK it is likely to have recorded far fewer DVD sales as film4 does not have the resources to widely distribute its DVD releases.
Film4 dvd only UK release MGM dvd and video USA release
For a documentary Touching the void has achieved phenomenal financial and critical success. It is the most financially succesful british documentary film of all time and has won numerous awards including a BAFTA in 2004 for Best British Film and two BIFA's for best Documentary and Best technical achievement.
After we had finished filming we uploaded all our footage onto computers so that we could begin editing.
We used Adobe Premier Pro as our editing software and so as to speed up the process we edited simultaneously on two computer's with George and Leah cutting together the first half of the film up until the point of the match on action of the case being placed on the desk and myself and Martin editing the second half of the film. Although there was the risk that the rhythm of the film could be displaced by editing on separate computers and with different editors we wanted everyone to be able to have the chance to edit and by being aware of how the two different parts of film were being edited together by communicating with one another we were able to create a smooth transition from one to the other when we eventually joined the two sections together.
I found that because i'd used the editing software before I was fairly confident at making basic edits and having a feel for what worked and what didn't. However Martin deserve's most of the credit as he did a really good job at editing the majority of the transitions, the shot reverse shot of myself and George's conversation flowed well and had a good rhythm to it, neither holding shots too long which would have made the exchange of dialogue lack purpose, nor too short, which would have ruined the natural pace of the film and made it look disjointed.
The match on action proved harder to get right and we found we had to be more precise about were to cut each shot. I learnt that sometimes, even if technically the match on action is edited almost perfectly from a continuity of the positioning point of view the edit can still not appear smooth. for example the walking to the desk and the placing of the case match on action shot didn't seem to match the rhythm of the rest of the film. No matter how smooth the match on action, the overall sequence still appeared slightly rushed compared to the other sequences and shots.
One of the main things i had to do in the edit was to put in the music over the top of the last sequences. The track we used was 'Prince Charming' in keeping with our idea of an 'Adam and the Ants' parody. Rather than just using the beginning of the track, I cut to a section halfway through the track where you get a guitar bridge (to be played over the close up shot of myself putting on the white streak of makeup) which then goes into the chorus. I managed to crop and cut the track so that the chorus came in just as it cut to a wide shot of myself dancing on the corridor.
We decided it would be a good idea to end on a freeze frame so that the audience were left with the comic image of the ridiculous pose of myself doing an 80's dance move. We couldn't find any straightforward way of doing this as we weren't able to extend the longevity of the individual frame to make it last more than a second and so using a copy and paste method we were able to get the freeze frame effect we wanted. It was then up to me to put in the credits that appeared at the end, we decided we didn't want anything gimmicky and so I chose a simple font with our names appearing in a white text, simple yet classy.
I was fortunate that I was in group containing two already very skilled and competent editors in George and Martin and i great learner in Leah which meant that all our match on action shots were spot on and there were no jerky transitions or cuts. I felt I learnt a lot about the importance of remembering to keep a clear narrative when editing and of establishing a rhythm. I improved in my ability to edit together both audio and visual content and the role music can play in helping to convey an atmosphere or mood. I think next time I get the chance to edit a film I would like to take on more responsibility as I felt I could have improved more if I had volunteered to edit more of the footage.
John Cassavetes- The Godfather of Independent film
