Helium Cow Films

02/02/2012: End of an Era (Also, Nostalgia is done!)

2012-02-02T20:07:00.001Z

When I posted the previous entry on the 30th December 2011, I would never have expected that my next entry would be my last.

The past month has been terribly busy. Perhaps if I had the willingness to write about it all at the same level of extravagant detail as I did last entry I would, but alas, I do not. Instead, I will attempt to summarize my activities. Unable to film for the first couple weekends in January, we finally resumed the filming of nostalgia. on Friday 14th January. It was a hectic rush off of the school bus as I literally ran home to grab the camera so we could film the scenes at Hills' house. Nicholson stayed over that night and after long discussions about life, love and Final Fantasy we eventually fell asleep.

Only to have to wake up at 5:30am on Saturday 15th January and make our way through the freezing darkness into Bedford to resume filming. I can't remember ever being so cold! A McDonalds' Breakfast Wrap eased our suffering, although it did taste slightly of plastic. We had hardly been home for half an hour before the two of us were out once again to meet up with Hills and film the last scene of the film - a climactic fight scene. The sun was still rising, creating silhouettes against the backdrop of the underpass at which we filmed. It looked pretty awesome.

Busy weekend didn't end there as, for the first time "professionally", I attempted to dub on Sunday 16th January. Nicholson, Hills and Lydia all came round to my house as we used my Macbook and the lovely program that is Audacity (the noise removal tool is possibly my favourite thing ever) along with Hills' high quality microphone to re-record all of the exterior scenes in the film. Progress was slow and tired, so the we were unable to get it all finished, but between the four of us we completely devoured a very large amount of KFC. So that was something.

The latter part of the following week was spent trying to arrange a second dubbing session with Nicholson and Hills. Finally, on Friday 20th after a quick and mostly painless dubbing session we had finished. On Saturday 21st I had to make my way through Bedford with my Macbook and the microphone to re-record a few lines of Lydia's dubbing. Moving around town with three large bags and a huge microphone was one of the most awkward and strangest experiences of my life. Although I was tremendously exhausted, I woke up early the next day to spend about two and a half hours revisiting many of the locations we had filmed at to record ambient noise and sound effects. I felt like an absolute idiot just standing behind a camera pointing at a road, recording the noise. However, it was probably more embarrassing for the poor elderly woman who jogged past while I was filming.

The final two shots of the film - Thomas on the roundabout - were filmed briefly on Monday 23rd January. Following this, I attempted to start recording the soundtrack with Hills, but something was missing. I tried recording it once more, but again, something wasn't quite right. On Wednesday 25th, Hills came round with Mick Hutcheon - the duo who performed the music of SUMMERTIME! - and the soundtrack was recorded literally within two hours. Possibly my favourite song in the film, the credits song, was an improvisation! The quality of those guys' music is mind-blowing. I also used a couple of the more techno tracks Hills had made himself for the party scene and the fight scene.

The following day, Nicholson came round to record a few lines of dubbing and with that, nostalgia. was finished! I cannot convey just how much time I spent over the two weeks described editing. Many nights I was up until the early hours of the morning, fine-tuning things and playing with the audio levels and trying out new editing techniques and blah blah blah blah blah. So much time and effort! But, ultimately, I think it was worth it.

I showed the almost finished cut of the film to a group of my friends on Friday 27th January and watching the majority of them sit in awe and watch the flick ranks among one of the proudest moments of my life (and that does nothing for my already inflated ego). After a bit more tweaking, nostalgia. was finally well and truly finished. Which brings me onto the next topic.

As stated in this entry's title, it is an end of an era. I have been using the "Helium Cow Films" banner since October 2008 - over three years - and now I finally feel as if it is time to say goodbye. It's been a very difficult decision. Although small (very small, in fact), I've managed to gain a few subscribes under the Helium Cow Films name and even more "likes" on the Facebook page. Starting afresh, with a new name, would mean starting all over again and having to build that up. What's more, I have decided to drop the "Cow" from the name - something that has been a part of my film-making since I started making films as "The Mad Cow" in 2005. It's been difficult, and it fills me with a great sadness to see it go. I look around my bedroom to see cows in all forms, shapes and sizes, all looking at me as if to say "Why?" But enough. Time to move on. So from now on, Helium Cow Films will now be known as Elegant Waster Films.

Thinking up a new name was almost as difficult as the decision to leave the previous one behind! I toyed with numerous names, and was almost going to name the company "Class A Films" until I realised that the name was already taken on YouTube. So I finally settled upon Elegant Waster Films - the words taken from the song "Withnail & I" by Would You Rather Kill a Puppy?; "Elegant Wasters with our aspirations intact." Indeed, "Elegant Wasters" is even engraved on my zippo!

I posted a vlog (!) on the Helium Cow Films account to point people in the direction of the new Elegant Waster Films channel. The Helium Cow Films channel will continue to be used to post the UPLOAD videos, videos of gigs and any videos that contain copyrighted material. On the Elegant Waster Films channel, I posted my first proper vlog (!!!) further explaining why I have chosen to rebrand Helium Cow Films as Elegant Waster Films. In short, I want to draw a line under everything I have done before to distance myself from the lack of quality in my previous works. Furthermore, I hope this new start will grant me the opportunity to widen my fan-base and build a YouTube channel free of copyright material.

So yeah. Watch nostalgia. on YouTube, SUBSCRIBE to the new Elegant Waster Films channel, LIKE the new Facebook pages (Elegant Waster Films and nostalgia.), FOLLOW me on Twitter and check out the the new BLOG once I get it started.

I think that's everything. This is no end. This is just the beginning.

Dim.

30/12/2011: Filming Nostalgia

2011-12-30T13:29:00.000Z

I've been putting off writing about Nostalgia for a multitude of reasons. Firstly, I've been busy and writing about the filming of Nostalgia comprehensively would take a long time. Indeed, I need to write about it comprehensively to truly document it, for that is the main purpose of this blog. But furthermore, I have been feeling a little burnt out after the stressful filming session last week. However, I have slowly been updating the blog about the multitude of things I have done in the past couple of months and after tinkering with some of the editing this morning I am feeling a lot better about the entire project. Excited, even. More excited than I have ever been about a project. It has taken far longer to film Nostalgia than I had hoped, for I had hoped to have been finished by the end of the year. I only need two more filming sessions before the entire film is filmed, and then I can begin dubbing it and getting Luke Hills to record the soundtrack for it.

We started filming on Sunday 20th November 2011. I awoke to find outside covered in thick fog, which was absolutely the ideal weather for the opening of the film. Nicholson and I trekked up to Kempston Rural Lower School and filmed the opening scene in the freezing cold. We progressed relatively quickly, however we spent a good ten to fifteen minutes trying to get this single shot of a syringe falling directly in front of the camera. While the take I ultimately used isn't perfect, it's as close as we could get. Nicholson suggested we have his character leave the exterior of the school by walking down this long path lined either side by trees - a shot that looks beautiful and will become one of the stand-out shots of the film.

After filming the opening scene we walked back to Kempston and met up with Luke Hills, who plays Nicholson's character Joe's best friend. He is called Luke. As you can tell, we're hardly lacking in creativity when it comes to character names! We had to buy a multitude of Skittles for filming which we then proceeded to gouge ourselves on - Nicholson almost chocked a couple of times. Two of the scenes that day involved Nicholson and Hills walking side-by-side talking to each other down a road, similar to a couple of scenes in SUMMERTIME such as the one I discussed in the previous entry. They work really well and feel very naturalistic. They were also pretty simple to film, despite that fact I collided with a bin while walking backwards filming.

These scenes also edited together really well. At the moment, the opening sequence is cut to the opening theme of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (showing just how heavily influenced this film is by it) while the next sequence is cut to "Rinse Me Down" by Bombay Bicycle Club. I love how this music fits with the film, but I really do need to get Luke Hills to record some original music for the film to make it more personal.

In between the first and second filming sessions, I made some further revisions to the script, resulting in a third draft. I found this quite exciting. I've never done a third draft of anything before! There were major changes made to the end of the film, because it lacked energy, power and purpose. Without saying too much, a realisation is made without any particular trigger. There is no sense of conflict or danger, just a sigh and acceptance. So I added something that I have been trying to avoid in my writing ever since Dateless Losers - a KISS! Timidly I asked Nicholson and Lydia if they were okay with that, and without the slightest hint of reluctance they agreed. I cannot even convey how much better the ending of the revised script is than the previous one.

A multitude of reasons made it impossible to film on the next couple of Sundays, for Sunday is the only day that we have been able to film on during term time. It is becoming increasingly difficult to actually find the time to film for I now work on Saturdays. Sunday is even pretty difficult most of the time, as we have reached the point in our adolescence were it is desirable and pretty much inevitable that we will go to a party on the Saturday night and then be too wasted during Sunday to do anything of any worth. Despite this, we have been able to get most of the film done.

The next time we filmed was on Sunday 11th November 2011. Lydia (Megan O'Malley from SUMMERTIME) came to Kempston so that we could attempt to film all of the scenes that happen in the field. Although I had originally intended to start filming at 10 o'clock, it was significantly later when we ultimately started filming. Quite a lot of time was wasted with the four of us (Myself, Nicholson, Hills and Lydia) walking around fields near my house trying to find the exact location we wanted. This task was made even the more frustrating by the freezing weather and damp muddy ground.

Eventually, I found exactly what I was looking for. Prior to filming, Nicholson and I had to create a mood board for the film as part of our Film Studies class. This was the moodboard:

The use of the field and the sky, this wide open space, and the idea of having a solitary person sitting in the middle of such a place surrounded by infinity is an idea that I have had for years and years and an image that I have always wanted to capture. Indeed, this idea has its origins in the interim period between Dirge of the Dead and Rebound where I wanted to capture my own feelings of isolation. I tried to achieve some of this imagery in Rebound with my own character, Edward, sitting by himself by the side of the river. However, I lacked skill as a director and knew little to nothing about how to compose a beautiful shot. I finally feel as if I have achieved this image in Nostalgia. This single shot is the most important shot in the film, and the image I would use if I were to make any promotional materials for this.

The first section of filming that day took far too long! Most of the time was spent on trying to achieve the second shot of the scene where we zoom out a long way from Nicholson's eyes to reveal him lying in this field. I had to hold the camera above myself, trying to keep it very steady, while manually zooming out. We must have tried at least ten times to get it right! The problem was exacerbated by the sun, which made it almost impossible for Nicholson to keep his eyes open, or else made them go cross-eyed and made him look like he was stoned. (Ha ha ha.) Even after all these tries, I had to manually alter this shot while editing to make it more stable - and it still isn't perfect! There's still time to fix it, though. After all that, the filming the scenes progressed very quickly.

Hills had to get changed - in the middle of this field - into his second outfit for filming. He had to wear my black skinny jeans, and I had misjudged Hills' size. It took all three of us - Myself, Nicholson and Lydia - to pull these jeans onto him. Lydia was holding the sides of it together, Nicholson was trying to fasten the button and I was trying to pull up the flies. With a shriek of pain, we got him into them.

The next section of filming that day took place in the woods which you can see in the photo above. I tried something I have been meaning to do for quite a while - a Paul Thomas Anderson-esque long take (which isn't actually long, but longer than most of the takes in the film) which follows the back of Nicholson as he walks through these woods. Hills steps out from behind a tree, followed by Lydia. That entire scene is choreographed and cut so well, as you do not see Lydia's face - it cuts to their shoes walking out, and then to a shot of Hills in centre-frame where you can just see the right shoulder of Lydia. More than anything I have done before, it is a manipulation of what the audience is allowed to see - Lydia is only revealed once Nicholson sees her truly.

Lydia then, too, had to get changed out in the open. I have never been so grateful for my actors, who more than ever before are putting up with my somewhat ridiculous and outrageous demands.

The final scene filmed that day was a quiet and poignant conversation between Nicholson and Lydia's characters. Nicholson, once again, found an amazing spot. While not quite what I pictured when writing it, the place where we ultimately filmed suited the scene perfectly. There is not too much to note about this scene, although a managed to achieve a really nice high-angle shot by scrambling on top of a mound. The framing of this shot works perfectly, as when Nicholson and Lydia sit down on a lag, you can literally just see their heads through a gap in the trees.

The following Sunday, the 18th December 2011, Hills was unable to film. I took this as an opportunity to get all of the scenes with Nicholson and Lydia together in Kempston done. It snowed that morning, which made filming look very unlikely, but the capricious weather kept on changing. Once Lydia arrived we trekked up to the fields again to film a dramatic scene in which their two characters argue. The scene is, by far, the most dramatic thing I have ever filmed. Lots of shouting and movement and exasperated body gestures. To emphasize this, I filmed it with the camera whipping back and forth between the two of them. While not perfect, the scene works really, really well and is possibly the most powerful thing I have ever done. The drama was further intensified by the way in which it started to rain while we were filming it. Once we finished, we quickly scarpered back to my house to get warm and dry and eat bacon sandwiches and watch Peep Show.

The scene I just mentioned ends with a shot of Nicholson walking away from Lydia and, as he passes, she disappears. I had hoped to achieve this effect by using cropping and key-frames, much like what I had done with the opening titles in Sherman Jones and SUMMERTIME. However, because Nicholson's arms were at an angle, I had no flat object to crop against. After tinkering with a variety of things, I finally managed to achieve a wipe effect diagonally, mapping key frames so that she disappears as he passes. However, the shot of the empty field was a lighter colour than the previous shot, creating a disjointed transition. By manually altering the brightness and contrast, I managed to match the two shades of the field. Another problem arose, though - the sky became too dark! To fix this I put an unaltered version of the shot above the altered one and then cropped to the point in which the shots become seamlessly one. After all of this fucking around, I had finally managed to achieve the desired shot, in which Lydia "magically" disappears.

After we had warmed up sufficiently, we filmed a scene towards the end of the film where Luke and Lydia's characters talk in my bedroom. It was a rather simple scene, with one very complex element - the kiss that I mentioned towards the beginning of this entry. While obviously embarrassing, the filming of it was over and done relatively quickly. Nicholson achieves some excellent physical comedy as he awkwardly moves his arms inwards and pulls away from the kiss - I wrote that shit and I still laugh at it every time!

By this point, we were very pressed for time. Not only was one clock ticking down, but two were - it was soon going to get dark outside, and the camera only had a limited amount of battery left. This was because I foolishly forgot to run it from the power-supply while filming inside. So the last two scenes were filmed in a bit of a rush. Despite this, the last scene filmed that day which is one of the final scenes of the film is really quite excellent. It begins with a tracking-shot of Lydia's character while Nicholson's character follows her, and it feels very effective. That entire scene has the same kind of energy shown in the first scene I filmed that day but presented in a more restrained and ultimately conclusive manner.

The last time we filmed was on Thursday 22nd December. This one scene in Nostaglia takes place at a party, and myself and Nicholson have been waiting for a suitable party to film at. Our friend Beth (Lauren from SUMMERTIME) was having a birthday party and I rather hastily arranged to film at it, despite everyone being somewhat reluctant (myself included). Nicholson, Lydia and I arrived earlier so that we could film the specific scene that takes place in a bathroom before filming around and about at the party. It's a simple scene, much like the scene in the bedroom, but it is also quite effective. I managed to achieve some very interesting shots within the confines of the bathroom, which was surprising. However, I fear I may have perhaps broken the 180 degree rule when I was trying to achieve an interesting shot - I can more or less justify it by the fact that Nicholson's character was drunk, though.

The frustrations of filming that day began when the party started. There were roughly 60 or so people there at the party's height and, needless to say, they were all wasted. I myself was avoiding any form of intoxication until I had filmed the shots I needed to film at the party, but Nicholson did not share my sobriety. By the time we ultimately managed to start filming, he and most other people at the party were frustratingly far gone. Trying to co-ordinate a long take in which Nicholson walks down the stairs, into a room full of people and collapses is possibly the single most frustrating experience I have ever had as a film maker. It was made even worse by the fact that I didn't even know a lot of the people at the party! Eventually, I more or less got the shot I wanted. It's not perfect, but the way in which I've edited helps it a lot. At least it's done.

I filmed various shots at the party just to achieve a sense of location. I'm quite disappointed in these shots, actually, as I realised the day after that there was so much more I could have done. Fast cuts, interesting angles... What's more, these shots kind of stand out as "improvised" amongst the rest of the footage. They more or less work, I guess, but not as well as I know I could have got them to work. Some of these issues I can fix with further editing. I also need to record sound from the next party I go to to act as the background sound from this one.

Whatever. It was difficult to film at the party. And like everyone else there, at the end of the day, I just wanted to get wasted.

So there it is! A more or less comprehensive, yet charmingly (?) disjointed account of the filming of Nostalgia thus far.

I just want to hurry up and get this film finished so I can relax.

Dim.

30/12/2011: Other SUMMERTIME Scenes

2011-12-30T10:08:00.000Z

Something I have been meaning to do for months is edit the remaining two scenes of SUMMERTIME that I filmed before giving up on the project. I finally did this on the evening of Friday 16th December in a hope of fully clearing myself from this old project before resuming work on the latest one, nostalgia.. It's fitting, in a way, as it scenes such as the last scenes edited of SUMMERTIME that really pave the way for what I am trying to achieve in nostalgia.. The scene of Jonathan and Lauren walking together, filmed entirely without the use of a tripod, is how I am trying to film nostalgia.. That's more or less the look that I am trying to achieve with the latest film. I realised that, after doing a significant amount of SUMMERTIME, that the use of a tripod, especially in conversation scenes where characters are standing, limits the movement in the piece and reduces the energy and forward momentum.

Editing these two last scenes also gave me an opportunity to do something that I have meaning to do for a long time - colour correction! Using Adobe After Effects I tinkered with some preset colour corrections to achieve the look that I was aiming for. I believe it makes the video look a lot more like actual film, and this is something that I will further explore when colour correcting nostalgia. - such as adding a mask to make the corners of the frame darker.

I uploaded the SUMMERTIME (Other Scenes) video to YouTube - not only does it include the aforementioned scenes which were only recently edited, but it also includes the scenes shot on the day at my house where we attempted to get all of the scenes in Richard's bedroom done. I don't these latter scenes are as good as any of the rest of the film - we were pressed for time and filming that day lacked energy. Furthermore, I had yet to learn how to manually adjust the iris and shutter and focus settings of my camera, so the video doesn't actually look very good at all. However, there are some pretty humourous moments in those scenes, so I am glad that I finally made them public.

Editing the last couple of scenes of SUMMERTIME and uploading all of the unreleased scenes to YouTube has been a somewhat cathartic experience. Not only has it "finished" the film as much as the film could be finished, nor has it just given me an excuse to tinker with some new editing skills - it has given me a chance to show what SUMMERTIME was really going to be about. Many people misinterpret the opening monologue as the message of the film, shown in a very obvious and heavy-handed way. These people are morons. The conversation between Jonathan and Lauren as they walk amongst the trees helps reveal the many subtleties of the characters which would have been explored further throughout the film. Jonathan has the ideas but no basis for them and no outlet to express them, merely repeating the same metaphor over and over without taking any action on it. Lauren, by contrast, has the outlet and talent as a writer yet lacks any message or original thought to convey. Whatever. I cannot be bothered to one again explain all of the ideas in SUMMERTIME and what each of the characters were intended to represent. I am done with that film.

Dim.

29/12/2011: School Vids and ShinGIGs

2011-12-29T22:53:00.000Z

I have seem to have developed a habit of starting every blog entry I write after not having written one in a while by writing about how I haven't written one in so long, and I how I always mean to, and how I will try and keep it updated more frequently in the future. By drawing attention to this, I have inadvertently done exactly the same thing. So fuck it, I've been busy.

Once again I have been working on Wootton Upper School's video production UPLOAD. Features include Wootton's latest theatre production, Back to the 80s, the AS Geography Trip to the Peak District and a couple of Media/Film Studies trips. This half-term I filmed a significant amount of the footage. It seems that I was on the vast majority of school trips that have happened over the past couple of months. Perhaps I was just looking for a reason to get out of school! The episode itself isn't perfect and I know, down to my very core, that the Geography Trip to the Peak District section is far too long. However, I believe that I have managed to change UPLOAD significantly from the terrible mess that it has been for the past couple of years.

This is due in large part to the editing of the video but also due to my partnership with the presenter, Luke Nicholson. Together, I feel as if we have put a very personal stamp on the production and inject it with some humour - as much humour as we could put into such a video while still having to lick the school's metaphorical arse. Despite receiving many positive comments about the video - even from people who don't go to my school! - I am unsure whether or not I am going to continue being involved in making UPLOAD. Partly this is because I am busy and I fear that the huge amount of time I put into UPLOAD is distracting me from more personal and satisfying pursuits. Moreover, though, it is mostly due to the way in which the production is run. I am not "in charge" of UPLOAD and I believe that the people who are "in charge" are not as competent as myself when it comes to producing video media. Furthermore, this has motivated me to take over in many ways, which I do, so much so that almost all of UPLOAD is my doing. Anyone who watches that shit knows that I am in charge.

The only major thing that the other members of UPLOAD did in this last edition was the shocking Amarillo video at the end. Even the blind could see that that is not my editing and is, indeed, significantly worse than my editing. Something that further adds to my frustrations is the lack of any sort of vision or intent from those who are "in charge". Indeed, I am very strong idea of what I want UPLOAD to be. It can't particularly be "news", because news is always current and out production is not frequent enough to achieve this. UPLOAD should be a thorough document of what has been happening at Wootton Upper School, and pretty all other members of the team seem incapable of grasping this.

The miscommunication amongst the members is also shockingly bad. I was tasked with making the video twenty minutes long, so I aimed to make the sections as long and thorough as possible. However, once I had finished editing all of it, I was informed that, no, it should merely be fifteen minutes long. I didn't have time to re-edit it, because I'm a busy man. Re-editing it would take a vast amount of time as the video is cut to hit the beats in the music, etc. So the fully rendered video was then edited by someone else in the same way an amateur hairdresser haphazardly takes scissors to a beautiful haircut, inevitably ruining it. This butchered fifteen minute cut was then shown at school, over the informative and well-edited twenty minute version. It you removed the stupid fucking Amarillo video, the better edited version would be fifteen minutes! This is the second time that the video has been butchered behind my back and then shown to form classes in school and, quite frankly, it pisses me off. So unless I am given more or less full creative control, I am not going to work on UPLOAD any longer. And the production shall suffer horribly because of it.

Something else I did at school recently was film Wootton Upper School's production of Back to the 80s, which I was helped with by friend Alex Deeley. It was a somewhat interesting experience - we used two cameras to film the musical, one with a consistent still wide-shot and one which was constantly moving and zooming to get close-ups. I manned the latter camera. The most similar thing I have ever done to this is film gigs, because you have no idea what is going to happen next. You're playing it by ear, or, more literally, eye. Eyes. Whatever. The close-up camera was usually shaky, as I was having to zoom in quite far, and it doesn't always work because I had no idea what was going to happen next. But more or less, I think the videos work rather well. Editing it was a simple yet long affair - I merely merely placed both videos and audios on two separate tracks each, got the audio synced and then cut away at the close-up shots when they worked. During the songs, I worked by either editing on the beats I thought worked or cutting in motion. I'm somewhat pleased at how well these videos turned out. I uploaded a variety of videos from the musical to YouTube and placed them into the Back to the 80s Playlist, all of which work bar the first video which instead can be found on Vimeo.

Significantly less well-produced than the Back to the 80s videos are the videos I have uploaded from gigs I have been to recently, which were all recorded rather hastily using my iPod Touch. The first batch were from Los Campesinos! performing at KCLSU on 7th November 2011. My favourite video out of the four is probably the recording of "We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed" - the way the audience (myself included) all scream "Oh we kid ourselves there's future in the fucking / but there is no fucking future" is enough to send tingles down anyone's spine. Los Camp are my very favourite band and it goes without saying that the gig was absolutely incredible - even topping Frank Turner's very intimate performance in May. Predictably, the four videos from the Los Camp gig are all on the Helium Cow Films YouTube channel.

Far stranger than the Los Camp videos is the video I recorded of Beans on Toast, a self-proclaimed "drunk folk singer" whose music is produced by the aforementioned Frank Turner, performing his most popular song "M.D.M.Amazing" at Danny's Bar, Bedford Esquires, at a free gig! And it gets eve crazier. We convinced a wasted Liam Coles - who played Jonathan in SUMMERTIME - to get up onto the stage and sing along with Jay. This resulted in one of the most hilarious, awkward and surreal things I have seen all year.

JAY: Just hum it!

LIAM: Uuurrrrgh!

Need I say any more?

In the vain of keeping this entry short, I shall end it here and save all of the personal and important shit until the next one, in which I will write about editing the final scenes filmed of SUMMERTIME and the slow, yet rewarding, experience of creating the next project nostalgia..

Dim.

P.S. Forgot to mention that I recently got a MacBook Pro and have been editing on that. It is quite terrific.

12/11/2011: Three Months Later...

2011-11-12T20:57:00.000Z

"Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop to look around once in a while, you could miss it."

The last three months have been a tremendous blur of school, school trips and shameless teenage partying. Time is harder to find than a Charizard shiny these days, but I feel, as always, that it's important to continuously update this blog with my film making activities and musings so that I at least have something to show for all of my unfinished work. So yeah. Films.

The most significant development, and the one which feeds into all of the other things I will write about tonight, is that I am now an AS Level Film Studies student! It's not as exciting as that exclamation mark may lead you to believe, but it's important, nonetheless. I skipped on doing a Media GCSE and therefore this is the first time I have analysed or studied films in a formal manner. Turns out these past six years of making films has given me some edge, but it's interesting to learn about some of the more technical aspects of film production. As I writer, I am always more focussed on the story and its structure but having a more technical understanding will (hopefully) allow me to experiment with different types of film making.

After studying different types of camera angles and movements, the class was given the task of filming something to experiment with different shots. I myself made a short about a cow that climbs a guitar to reach a bed, cut rather dramatically to the opening theme from 2001. It also gave me a chance to continue what I started doing in SUMMERTIME, messing around with the manual settings of my camera. The slow shutter speed really makes that cheap lamp light look beautiful, doesn't it?

In my attempt to be the guy who "only does everything", I have started to become more active in the school community this year. Member of School Parliament, peer listening, writing for the school's magazine Insight and also editing the school's half-termly video news production Upload. Despite a tremendous struggle, miscommunication between members of Upload and disappearing footage, I managed to pull together the very first edition of Upload for this academic year. It was edited in a single day in a stay-up-all-night-editing session. It's a miracle the thing even got finished in time! Unfortunately, the very best part of the episode ("Not that kind of green!") was considered too risqué and had to be cut. It's a shame. I had hoped to steer Upload away from being an overly smug ass-kissing affair. Perhaps there is hope for it being "edgier" in the future.

Yesterday in Film Studies, Luke "Sex Education!" Nicholson and myself grabbed an eager Chris Dwyer to quickly film a short so that Luke could get "comfortable in front of a camera". The resulting film was BIZARRE BATHROOM, a "psychological horror" set in the Year 11 toilets at school. Filming it was incredibly refreshing. I have not made a film in a short amount of time without a script in at least four years. The pressure to get it done within the ten minutes we had was a thrill - I even jumped over a chair! And then stumbled and fell awkwardly in front of some people in my year group. The film is obviously rushed and looks terribly amateurish - the simple titles at the beginning are all too reminiscent of my pre-Helium Cow Films films - but for what it is, considering it was shot in ten minutes without any planning or previous ideas, it is pretty alright. It also gave me a chance to experiment filming free-hand and to mess around with the brightness and contrast in post-production.

The editing of BIZARRE BATHROOM was far more troublesome than I had hoped for - the footage was shot with one of the school's cameras (can you tell from the poor quality?) meaning that I had to convert the footage with SUPER before I was allowed to import it into Premiere Pro. This, unfortunately, caused the audio to become unsynched so I had to resynch it, going on nothing but the lip movements of the actors. I think I did a pretty good job with that. Furthermore, I had to enlarge all of the footage and stretch it into 16:9 (for some reason it was in 4:3, although it was shot in 16:9). Another slight irritation for me is an unintended lighting change which happens towards the end of the film - I suppose the bathroom lights needed time to "heat up", and once they had done so the scene was significantly brighter than it was in the proceeding shots. In spite of everything, I am certain the film has been able to give those who watched it some laughs, which means that it was a thorough success. ("Why have you pulled your trousers down?")

Now I come onto the biggest development - Helium Cow Films' next film, entitled nostalgia. It explores the main character Joe's feelings of nostalgia (surprise). He believes that everything was better in the past when all that he and his best friend Luke cared about was finding a Charizard shiny, or when he was dating the beautiful Charlotte. After crashing out at a party Joe partakes in a journey through his own subconscious where he realises that not all is as it seems and is forced to learn some tough life lessons.

nostalgia. is being made as part of my Film Studies coursework along with Luke "This is my bathroom, Chris!" Nicholson. It's very much inspired by Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Submarine, which is why posters for both of those films have found their way onto its "moodboard". It has been a really interesting experience, writing nostalgia., for many reasons. Firstly because it is the first time I have ever co-written something with someone else. What I have tried to do in nostalgia. is write characters that do not talk or sound in the slightest like myself. I do not believe putting oneself into one's art is wrong or cheap, but I think it is interesting that I am trying something completely different. nostalgia. is also the first film I have written using Celtx instead of Microsoft Word, which gives it a more professional layout.

I am certain there is far more I could write about nostalgia., but it is fast approaching nine o'clock and I have an insane amount of school work to finish. I have uploaded the screenplay to the Helium Cow Films deviantART account and we will hopefully start filming next weekend. Nicholson will be playing the main character, Joe, with Luke Hills (who did the music for SUMMERTIME) playing his best friend Luke and Lydia Gledhill (Megan O'Malley in SUMMERTIME) portraying Joe's ex-girlfriend Charlotte. Needless to say, I am pumped to start filming. I have no doubts that this will be my best film yet!

Lastly, a quick word on (oh God when will it end) SUMMERTIME. I was watching the first fifteen minutes again the other day and was reminded that I have more of the film I have yet to edit, and some parts which are edited but not on YouTube! I am far too busy at the moment, but before the end of the year I hope to edit whatever I did not edit before of SUMMERTIME and upload all scenes from the unfinished film to YouTube. Also, when I have the time, I will edit together the bloopers. There are bound to be some fucking hilarious moments!

I think that just about covers everything. I really need to learn how to write these things more frequently - it will save me from having to spend an hour to write every damn blog entry!

Dim.

10/08/2011: SUMMERTIME's Screenplay now on deviantART

2011-08-10T23:16:00.002+01:00

I think now I can safely say that I am finished with my latest project, "SUMMERTIME". There are a couple of scenes I have filmed but not yet edited and there are several scenes which are not part of the Week One which has been uploaded to YouTube. There is a possibility that these will get uploaded eventually, but not for a while. Furthermore, I may not upload some of the scenes at all as I believe they are significantly weaker than the rest of the film and I would not want to dilute the overall quality of what has been done.

As sad as it is, after putting so much time into the project and seeing most of it turn out so well, I do feel somewhat relieved. I have just less than a month of summer left to sort myself out and prepare for the start of my A-Levels. What is on YouTube is good, far better than anything I have ever done before, and I must continue to tell myself that all of this time has not been wasted. It has been a learning experience.

Although no finished product has emerged from this endeavour, I do still have a finished screenplay. A bloody long 119 page screenplay, in fact. What's more, the screenplay for SUMMERTIME is far and away the best thing I have ever written. In a move that has become the norm, I have uploaded the SUMMERTIME Screenplay to deviantART so that anyone who is interested can read it. More importantly, the collection of my scripts on deviantART are a testament to all of the hard work I have put into my filmmaking over the years. I like having all of them in one place, much how I like to have all of the films in one place on my YouTube channel.

It shows more than anything else that I have done something.

Dim.

07/08/2011: The Future of SUMMERTIME

2011-08-07T20:04:00.002+01:00

About three months ago, an idea began to grow in my mind about six unique characters and the things that they experience in their six weeks of summer holiday. I had originally intended for this film to be no more than 60 pages and to become the first fully completed film I would make this year, as Sherman Jones was never finished. However, this idea exploded into an epic 119 page screenplay entitled "SUMMERTIME". Despite this, I tackled the project with the intention of completing it. Now, the completion of SUMMERTIME looks like an impossibility.

I cannot say that the problems of the film are strictly due to other people. Of course, I have made mistakes. Numerous mistakes, many of which I detailed in the ridiculously long last blog entry. Something I sometimes forget, though, is that this hobby is more than anything a learning experience for me. I hope to do this film thing professionally in the future and as much as I would love to create a professional project at the moment, I am still learning and will obviously make mistakes when I experiment with different techniques. But I literally could not have put more into this film. I always say this whenever making a new film, as I seem to put more into the most recent project than I did the last, but I cannot think of anything more I could have done to try and organise this film. I got the cast sorted as soon as possible and updated them with the most recent version of the script every few days. I organised a read-through. I made shooting blocks, prop lists, clothes lists... There was literally nothing more I could do.

I just required more effort from the cast. I understand that I am the only person who cares about this film thing and I appreciate that I am taking up other people's time when I am making these films, but the people agreed to be in the film in the first place. I shouldn't have to go out on a limb to organise people. Sending a Facebook message or a text should be enough. I shouldn't have to send both and still receive no reply, forcing me to call the specific person instead. It becomes ridiculously impossible when you are trying organise six different people. Filming becomes even more impossible when people are late and do not know their lines!

This frustration just ruins film making for me. I start every project happy and excited to see the film completed. However, every film seems to end with frustration, regardless of whether or not the film gets finished. It really should not be like that. What makes it worse is that the people I am getting frustrated at are my friends. I know that they are doing me a favour by being in my films, but they just don't take them seriously. This causes me to get angry which makes me become more distant from my friends, which is ironic, as most people would believe that it would make you closer.

I wish that my friends would have enough faith in me to understand that I know what I am doing, more or less. I know how to write, I know how to direct and I know how to edit. What is done of SUMMERTIME so far shows my skills clearer than ever. However, I cannot help but think that it would be even better if my friends had put a little more into it instead of dragging their heels, kicking and screaming in protest. I know what I'm doing. And it's good.

Despite all of this emotional gobble-de-gook, there is a much more physical reason why the future of SUMMERTIME is looking so uncertain. Turns out that people are away on holiday a lot more than I was first told. Lydia has been away for a week and is getting back today, while Liam just left for Spain yesterday for two weeks. Chris is going away away in a couple of days and it seems like most people are going away somewhere around the 25th August. So I really don't know what to do.

Lastly, I seem to have forgotten something rather important. This is my summer, too. I did not even allow myself a break after finishing my GCSEs, as I immediately launched myself into creating SUMMERTIME. It has been tiring to say the least. I literally put my life on hold whenever I start one of these films. I really have not done much this summer other than film. I am on the outskirts of everything socially, more of an observer than someone who partakes in the action. Rather like a cameraman. That's quite a fitting metaphor. With just less than a month of my summer remaining, I think I would like to take this time to sort some things out. There's a lot of personal issues I would like to sort out before school starts again on the 6th September and I really do not have the time to sort them out if I am spending all of my time focussed on the film.

I cannot stop thinking that it's a shame. Not just for me, because I have put so much time into this project, but it's a shame for everyone. It's a shame that my friends could not see what I was trying to create. It's a shame that Luke and Mick spent all that time composing and performing the music. It's a shame for anyone who enjoyed the first week of SUMMERTIME and is looking forward to seeing more. And most important of all, it's a shame that I have all of these funny, quirky, beautiful images in my head that no one else will ever get to see. That's the biggest shame.

At least I still have the screenplay, which I will upload onto the Helium Cow Films deviantART page sooner or later. Who knows? Perhaps I will get around to filming a little more of SUMMERTIME before finally calling it a day on the project.

On an unrelated and much less depressing note, I would just like to write a little about my intention of filming my next film entirely without a tripod. Panning with a tripod has become an issue, especially during SUMMERTIME, and I believe that much smoother motion can be be obtained through using the camera handheld. Secondly, I find that the handheld scenes I have filmed in SUMMERTIME look really good and make the film feel a lot more real - not that I was going for "real" in SUMMERTIME, not using a tripod for the entirety of that film would not have worked, but I do like how it feels. The final factor that convinced me to ditch the tripod for the next film was finally watching Richard Ayoade's film "Submarine". The film looks beautiful and feels so real due to the shakiness of the handheld camera. I guess that's the kind of thing I want to do next time I make a film.

Dim.

07/08/2011: Filming SUMMERTIME

2011-08-07T18:07:00.007+01:00

When I first started this blog early last year it was with the intent of continuously updating it regarding any progress in my film making endeavours. However, life has a cruel way of getting in the way of things and at times I have not been able to update the blog because nothing had been going on in regards to my film making. This past month has been very different. So much has been going on, continuously, that I have not had the time to take a significant amount of time out of my day to write about it all.

With "SUMMERTIME (Week One) (Rough Cut)" now on YouTube, as I wrote about last entry, I finally feel as if I have something to show for all of my hard work. I finally feel as if I can take the time away from any editing or organising that I could be doing just to write about all that has happened. To be honest, if I do not take the time to do so now, I do not think I ever will. There will be just too much to write about! In this following blog entry, I shall describe in exhaustive detail everything about filming the latest Helium Cow Films project "SUMMERTIME".

I went to sleep nervously on the 17th July after writing a blog entry about the newest project SUMMERTIME, which I planned to start filming the very next day. Indeed, we did start filming on Monday 18th July but, as always, not everything went according to plan. We were supposed to start filming at 9am outside Costa Coffee - this way, we would be filming early enough to avoid the large number of customers that eventually gravitate towards Costa. However, several people were late. Expected, but not appreciated. What people seem to fail to understand is that being late affects everyone else. We cannot start filming specific scenes until specific people arrive. Their lateness pushes production back further and further - sometimes even onto other days. Ultimately, it just ends up wasting a lot of people's time.

Eventually, at around 9:30am, we started filming. We progressed slowly but, sure enough, we finished the scenes outside of Costa. Or, at least, I thought we had. Filming the scene with Liam (plays Jonathan) and Shane (plays Marcus) round the back of the Mound took far longer than I had expected but turned out very well, mostly due to Shane's improvisation. Actions such as taking the lighter out of the shoe, playfully punching Liam and falling over the bench were Shane's ideas. Shane also added the sunglasses and the Strongbow bandanna to his costume and the cannabis leaf t-shirt he wears, made by Beth the night before, looks better than I ever could have hoped.

After finishing this scene, my camera was almost out of battery. I had forgotten how quickly it depletes as my last few films - Sherman Jones, New Daze, Snakes in a House - take place more or less exclusively within houses where I can connect my camera to the mains power supply. The only film I had filmed with my current camera prior to these films was what was filmed of Dateless Losers and that was filmed in much smaller chunks that what I was attempting with SUMMERTIME. After realising my camera was almost out of battery, I began to get very, very stressed. Everyone had arrived and were more or less ready to film and I was wasting their time as I had to find somewhere to re-charge my camera.

I decided to call a lunch break of some sorts as I rushed into Costa and hurriedly plugged in my camera battery charger. It was then when I remembered that I had forgotten to film the last two shots of Liam outside of Costa. How could I be so stupid!? Fortunately, the table we needed him to sit at was empty. I got Chris and Alex to stay seated on that table as I literally ran into Boots. I skid along the floor before stopping in front of Liam and the girls, hurriedly panting something about needing Liam to film. I finally got the reluctant Liam to deliver the line "let summer commence" before we all decided to go to Georgina's house and film the scenes with the girls in Megan O'Malley's bedroom. There, I could also charge my camera battery without having to timidly ask Polish men to move a little so I could plug it into the socket next to them.

The scene in Georgina's bedroom, which serves as Lydia's character Megan's bedroom in the film, didn't take too long to film. Furthermore, of all of the scenes filmed that day, that scene is probably my favourite. There is something about the performances, the way that it is shot and the way that it is edited that makes the scene really work. However, I began to notice an issue with my camera that became even more prominent the next time I filmed. My camera only seems to record in very high quality when it is surrounded by natural light. When using indoor lighting, the image quality gets slightly grainier.

After finishing the scene in Georgina's bedroom, we waited around for a while for the camera battery to charge. Once it was fully charged, we made our way back towards the Mound to finally film the first scene featuring Chris and Alex. We managed to film the first scene relatively fast compared to how slowly many of the other scenes had been filmed that day. Although the second scene on the Mound, featuring Liam, Chris and Alex, took far longer to film. So long, in fact, that it was interrupted by this:

Indeed, once again my film making has been halted by the Great British weather. After huddling under a shelter for an uncomfortable ten-ish minutes with a group of chavs we had never met before, I decided to contact everyone, apologise profusely and tell them that filming had been cancelled for the rest of the day due to the awful weather. Despite this, myself, Beth, Liam, Chris and Alex all headed to Beth's house once the weather had calmed down a little bit to film Beth's side of her phone conversation scenes. Once there, I attempted to film but it was obvious that the cast was no longer focussed. I, too, was tired from filming and decided to call it a day. Already, after a single day filming, we were terribly behind schedule.

I spent the evening of Monday 18th July and the entirety of Tuesday 19th July editing what I had filmed so far. One of the most difficult aspects of editing SUMMERTIME was that many of the scenes were reliant upon the other scenes that surround them. The film is very interconnected. This made it very difficult to judge the quality of what I had already filmed and edited but despite this, I could still tell that it was the strongest film I had made so far. Another thing I had forgotten about filming on exterior locations is that the background noise and sound of the wind are very loud. This often makes it very difficult to edit scenes together and get an overall sense of the quality of a scene. Of course, I planned on dubbing every scene on an exterior location later in production, but at the time the lack of decent audio was still troubling.

As the girls were away on holiday together from Tuesday 19th to Thursday 21st July, I decided to film all of the scenes that take place in the character Richard's bedroom on Wednesday 20th July. As most of these scenes were short, I hoped that I could perhaps also film the scenes that take place in the character Jonathan's bedroom, too, as well as a scene that features Liam, Chris and Alex as all three of them would be required that day. We started filming around half 12. As always, filming the scenes in Richard's bedroom took far longer than expected. Alex was required for all of the scenes and the others, who were not needed nearly as much, spent most of the day downstairs playing GoldenEye on the N64.

As we wrapped up the final scene in Richard's bedroom (which is, in real life, my bedroom) the clock was quickly approaching 5pm. It became clear to all of us that we would not be able to film as much as I had hoped to film that day. Again. Liam and Alex soon left my house and I exhaustedly hauled myself into bed and tried to fall asleep as Chris and Hannah played Pokémon Monopoly on my bedroom floor. That really isn't an innuendo of any sort, I promise.

After making numerous panicky phone calls that night, it became apparent that several people were not free on Friday 22nd July. I had hoped to use this day to quickly finish the scenes for Week One which we had started on Monday 18th July. With hopes of filming over the next several days crushed, I began to edit what I had filmed on Wednesday 20th July. Several problems quickly became apparent.

The close-up shots of the Cloud Strife and Tifa Lockhart action figures would not work! This is a problem I have experienced multiple times with my camera before, where the footage plays fine on the camera but when I upload it onto my computer it stutters, pixelates and becomes unsynchronised with the audio. The video for the footage completely refuses to be imported into Adobe Premiere Pro CS4. I am not sure of the reason why the footage becomes corrupted, but I think it perhaps has something to do with either the darkness of the video or the amount of zoom used. Or both.

Regardless, I decided to re-film those two shots myself, placing my lamp on the desk next to the figurines to make sure that it was not too dark. To correct continuity, I later had to add in a light source in post-production to serve as what would have been the lamp. However, the most significant aspect of re-filming these shots was that it finally forced me to start experimenting with the manual settings of my camera. For all the years I have been making films, I have used the automatic settings for whatever camera I have been using.

Prior to New Daze was when I began to play with the settings of my camera a little - small things, such as setting it to "Digital Cinema Mode" so it records at 25fps opposed to the 30fps it records at ordinarily. I played with the settings a little more in the run up to filming SUMMERTIME, changing the "Scene Mode" so that the auto-focus would work better. The problem with the auto-focus on my camera, though, is that it only really works well when an object is in the centre of the frame and when the camera is significantly zoomed into said object.

This does not work when an object quickly enters the shot, as the camera has to re-adjust the focus. In the scene with Richard in his bedroom, playing with the figurines, the two figurines are supposed to quickly enter the short. To try and get these shots done perfectly, I was forced to start playing around with the manual settings on my camera. For the first time, I manually adjusted the focus! I have continued to do this ever since. Manually adjusting the white balance, iris and focus (I'll let the shutter speed adjust itself for now) creates a much sharper, more defined image than anything that could be shot with the automatic settings. I think that the difference between what I short prior to changing the settings manually and what I shot afterwards it significant.

The automatic settings led a lot of the scenes filmed in Richard's bedroom to look very blurry and grainy. Some shots were too dark, ruined by the backlight coming through the windows. Some shots were very visually uninteresting. Some shots clearly showed the light coming from behind the curtains, even though it was supposed to be set during the evening or night! After viewing back the footage and editing it together, I really felt as if I had let everyone down. For the first time, all of the mistakes during that day were my own. What was filmed that day was significantly worse than what I had filmed on the Monday before. I had really fucked up.

Despite this massive blow to my confidence, I soldiered on filming. I spent a couple of hours walking around town with a hangover on Saturday 23rd July, filming as many shots as I could get for the opening sequence. Manually adjusting the focus for these shots really made them look sharper than anything else I had filmed before. I managed to record over half an hour of footage for a sequence that was going to last a couple of minutes. Whoops. Unable to really edit anything of the opening montage until I had the song that I was going to use and Liam's monologue, I spent the rest of Saturday hurriedly trying to organise filming for the next week.

I was supposed to be filming the Beth's side of the phone conversations on the Sunday 24th July but something came up at the last minute and she was unable to film. As she was also busy on Monday 25th, I took the opportunity to film Liam's side of the phone conversations as well as the opening and closing monologue. The day was rather relaxed as there were only two scenes to film, but it still took an awfully long time for two reasons. Firstly, I had to shoot a lot of coverage for each of the phone conversation to make sure that they edit together correctly with the other footage. Secondly, there were one or two lines that Liam really couldn't get! I swear that we must have spent about an hour trying to get one of these lines said correctly! Eventually, for the first time filming SUMMERTIME, I had filmed all that I had hoped to on a specific day. Furthermore, the scenes filmed indoors this time look far better than the scenes indoors previously, especially the one's in Richard's bedroom. This is all due to manually adjusting the white balance, iris and focus. I finished filming with Liam at around 5:30pm.

Soon after I finished filming with Liam, Luke Hills and Michael 'Mick' Hutcheon came round with their guitars to record some music for SUMMERTIME. I had envisioned SUMMERTIME as the first film of mine to be of a high enough quality to enter into film festivals and for this, I would need to avoid copyright at all costs. So that means, amongst other things, original music. Luke and Mick had agreed to compose and perform some music for the film. I knew that Luke and Mick were really, really talented musicians but I was totally blown away by what they played that night. Many of the songs they played had been made up during that day and a couple of them were completely improvised! We ended up recording 12 different songs that night. "Song #2", or so it has been saved on my computer, serves as the Main Theme of SUMMERTIME which plays during the opening sequence.

After recording the music, I spent the remainder of that night continuously trying to contact Alex. We had loosely agreed to film the following day, on Tuesday 26th July, and all of the other actors needed had replied to me confirming that they were still available. As the night progressed I got more and more stressed until ultimately I received a text from Chris, stating that he was no longer able to film as he had to attend a family barbecue. Crisis resolved, in a sense, but not with the desired resolution.

I spent the morning of Tuesday 26th July editing the opening sequence, as I finally had all three components I needed. I was dragged to town by some friends in the afternoon but could not take my mind off the film. I could not stop listening to the music Luke and Mick has performed, thinking of all of the places in the film I could put it. I wanted to be at home, finishing up the opening sequence and organising the next day's filming, which I wanted to use to wrap up what we had started on Monday 18th July. I continued to try and contact Alex but with no success. I became increasingly irritated until I decided to leave town. Once at home, I was able to finish roughly editing the opening sequence and finally managed to contact Alex. At last I had completely arranged filming for then next day. I was to meet Liam, Chris and Alex at 11am at the Mound while Beth, Lydia and Harriet were to turn up at 12 noon. Obviously, this did not go to plan at all.

I arrived in town at around 9am on Wednesday 27th July, as this was the only time I was able to get into town. After spending an hour sitting outside of Costa, indulging myself with a mocha and triple chocolate muffin, I headed towards the Mound and waited. And waited. And waited! A group of little children, I think perhaps they were American, came to the Mound to eat packed lunches at around 10:30am. As 11am began to approach, I began to ring Liam, Alex and Chris to see what time they would be arriving. None of them picked up.

The kids eventually left but my actors had still not turned up. Chris sent me a text saying that he would be a little late but I had not heard anything from Liam or Alex. Eventually Alex answered his phone and told me that he was unable to get a lift so he would have to walk to town. Still no word from Liam. Chris arrived at 11:40am and Beth and Lydia arrived on time as 12 noon. Harriet turned up at 12:30 and Liam and Alex arrived at around 12:40. If everything had gone to plan, I would have been finished by 1pm but I had hardly started! The Mound was deserted at 11am but by 1pm it was crowded with people.

As the girls had plans to go out for lunch and the Mound was crowded, I filmed their scene first. It didn't take very long and, surprisingly, the scene turned out to look rather good. I have not filmed too many things handheld before, without the use of my tripod, so it felt rather refreshing. Furthermore, the optical image stabilizer made the handheld footage look a lot less shaky than it has done in the past. Definitely something that I would like to experiment with a lot more in the future.

Liam left with Brandon and the girls to go out for lunch while I waited with Chris and Alex on the Mound. It was crowded and the chances of filming what I hoped to film that day looked increasingly slim. I laid in the sun and closed my eyes, hardly saying a word for about two and a half hours. Chris and Alex left to look around town while I waited on the Mound for the area that I needed to film on to be deserted. That mood was by far the worst mood I have ever been in due to filming. Not only that, it was one of the worst moods I had ever felt. I cannot remember the last time I was that angry! I could not get the thought out of my head that, if everyone had turned up when they were supposed to, I would be finished by now! Furthermore, I felt that everyone had a complete lack of respect for the film which means, by extension, that they have a complete lack of respect for me.

Eventually, the area was empty! I quickly rang Liam, Chris and Alex, telling them all to hurry up and get back to Mound ASAP! I paced around a lot, hoping to keep the area clear. A group of people turned up on the Mound and as I vaguely knew one of them, I politely (or possibly rudely?) asked them not to sit on the specific area I wanted to film on. At long last, the actors eventually all turned up. Despite the background noise and despite Liam feeling dreadfully ill (apparently) we filmed the scene.

However, we also needed to film under the shelter on the Mound which was, unfortunately, occupied. Every time a group left, another one turned up. It was infuriating, to say the least! Suddenly, I noticed that I knew one of the guys in the group that was currently occupying the shelter! As he and his group began to leave the shelter and head onto the Mound, I asked him (I guess it must have been rude) to not hang around on the specific area leading up to the shelter and the shelter itself for about 20 minutes. After a very awkward and confused exchange, he and his friends left and I was finally able to finish the scene!

Once again, I feel that the handheld shot of Chris and Liam walking towards the shelter works very well. The scene under the shelter is possibly a bit too dark, but it was difficult to adjust the iris to a level which made the scene look consistent with what was already filmed as well as providing enough light to see the actors' faces clearly. My feelings of relief and stress continued to escalate while filming this scene. Relief because, with every shot that was filmed, we came closer to finishing for that day. But stress because, with every minute, the camera battery came closer and closer to being depleted. Finishing this scene on another day was not an options! With literally 2 or 3 minutes left on the battery, I decided to cut one of Liam's lengthy lines of dialogue. I think that was the first line of dialogue I have ever cut in one of my films. After finally finishing that scene, I quickly recorded some lines of dialogue for when Liam is on the phone before rushing back home to edit.

After spending an hour and a half editing without saving, Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 decided to crash. After the most stressful day filming I had every experienced, that was the last thing that I needed. I decided to rant over the phone to Beth before arranging to finally film her side of the phone conversations the following day on Thursday 28th July.

Exhausted, I woke up later than planned on the 28th. I missed two buses while walking towards the bus stop but finally managed to get into town at around 11:30am. Now that I knew how the opening sequence would piece together, I knew which few shots I had to shoot or even re-shoot to complete the sequence. It took roughly half an hour and afterwards I headed to Beth's house. We started filming at around 1pm. As stated before when talking about filming Liam's side of the phone conversation scenes, it takes a long time to film them as you need to get coverage. I always attempt to get three complete takes from three different angles to make sure that the scene will cut together correctly. To try and make the scene look like it takes place during night after Beth's utterance of the word "shit", I adjusted the iris and I think, for the most part, it works well.

Although I had hoped to film all of the scenes that take place in Beth's bedroom that day with the exception of the final scene with her and Liam, I decided to call it a day after filming her side of the first phone conversation. It was already 3:30pm, if not a little later, and I was completely exhausted. If I had attempted to film anything else that day, the quality of those scenes would have suffered. Furthermore, she had plans to meet up with friends and despite what many people think, I am conscious of taking up too much of people's time when filming.

I spent the majority of that night editing once again what I had edited the previous day, which had all been deleted when Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 crashed. One of the difficulties of editing the sequence with Chris' character Nick is the cigarette that Nick is smoking. To keep continuity, I had to keep on making sure that the position of Chris' hand and the cigarette was the same from shot to shot. Overall, I think it works.

However, the biggest problem I faced when editing and the reason that Adobe had crashed the night before was to do with the close-up shots of Harriet when she is walking down the Embankment with Lydia and Beth. Almost all of the close-up shots of Harriet had become corrupted! Only a single shot of her would allow itself to be imported into my editing software, and that footage would only run for about ten seconds before it froze and the editing software crashed. I spent literally around three hours trying all sorts of things to get the footage to work. Eventually, I converted the raw footage into an MPEG-2 file using SUPER Converter, and then converted those files into MPEG-4 files using an iPod Converter. This allowed the footage to finally work in Adobe Premiere Pro CS4. All I had to do was avoid any serious pixelation and make sure that the audio was in sync with the video. The close-ups of Harriet do play at a noticeably lower resolution than the other shots, but at least I got them to work, eh?

I dreaded editing the phone conversation scene. At soon as I realised how long it would take me to edit, I seriously questioned why I had written so many split-screen phone conversations into the script! I put it off and tried to relax for a couple of days until, finally, I knuckled down and really started to edit it on Sunday 31st July. I got most of it then, but gave up and decided to get an early night for filming the next day.

I intended to film both of the scenes with Beth and Liam set during Week Two on Monday 1st August. Liam and I arrived at Beth's house at 12 noon and after she tided her bedroom for about twenty minutes, we started filming. Or, at least, we tried to. After attempting to film for another twenty or so minutes we did not have a single shot of the two of them filmed correctly. Brandon was requesting that I meet up with him in town during his lunch break, so I decided to give Beth and Liam a break for an hour as they seemed tired and unfocussed.

Upon arriving back at Beth's house around 2pm, we quickly began filming and finished the scene. Before venturing out into the blistering sun, we read-through the scenes that we were going to film. The brief read-through turned out to be a little less brief than I had hoped. Liam was not in the best of moods, to say the least, and his reluctance only intensified my frustration. Beth, embarrassed by the prospect of filming on Lime Street as the script had specified, led us down to a deserted stretch of grass near Priory Park. As pretty as the area looked, I really did not want to film there. As I have mentioned before, Bedford itself is a main character in the film. The streets, the shops, the town! Not generic patches of grass by water. There isn't anything specific in that.

Regardless, we filmed the scene in that location. It took quite a while as our progress was continually hindered by the intense heat that surrounded us. We frequently took breaks between takes in the shade to stop ourselves from melting. Despite my dissatisfaction with the location (correction: intense dissatisfaction) the scene itself looks very good. It is once again a long walking shot filmed without a tripod, similar to the shots with the girls walking down the Embankment. However, I believe this scene looks even better than that one. I walked steadily backwards the entire time and was able to keep both Liam and Beth more or less in the centre of the shot. By the time we finished it was well past 4pm. Liam needed to go to the opticians so I was unable to film the other scene I had hoped to film that day. You may be able to tell that this is a re-occurring theme in my film making.

That night, as all of the scenes were more or less edited together, I began going through the film wearing headphones, altering the sound levels to make sure that it was consistent throughout. This is something I have never done before in one of my films but I think that it is obvious to hear the great difference between the audio quality of SUMMERTIME and the audio quality of any other film I have made. Luke Hills also came over again, this time by himself, to record a song to play during Liam and Beth's phone conversation. We struggled to find something that worked well and ultimately decided to record three little sections which I could edit together to form a loop. This way, I could manipulate the music to fit the scene as best as possible. I believe that it works really quite well.

I continued to edit all of Tuesday 2nd August, unfortunately neglecting my friends who were hanging out at my house. Once I had finished adjusting the audio levels, I spent a couple of hours fine-tuning the opening sequence, especially the movement of the text. To make the text on the objects move naturally, I needed to alter its position almost frame-by-frame which takes an insanely long amount of time. But it's completely worth it, if you ask me.

After rendering the project that evening, I noticed several mistakes in that edit. The most prominent mistakes included the footage "stuttering" on Liam's title card as well as a couple of shots of Liam during the phone conversation being completely out of sync. I watched through the rendered project, stopping and starting it, making notes on all of the specific errors that I needed to change. After this, I spent a further hour or two editing, correcting the mistakes, before I rendered it again.

On Wednesday 3rd August, I uploaded "SUMMERTIME (Week One) (Rough Cut)" to YouTube.

There are more things that I could write about regarding the filming and editing process of what has been done of SUMMERTIME. In all honesty, I am surprised that I have not written more regarding the title sequence, because I did spend an indescribable amount of time editing that thing together! As it stands, I do believe I have written enough about this now. Possibly too much. I had intended to finish this entry by discussing the future of SUMMERTIME, but I have now spent more than a day slowly writing this specific entry! I do believe that shoehorning the future of SUMMERTIME into the end of this awfully long entry would do it a great disservice.

Because, to be honest, who is even reading this? There is no doubt that anyone who even reads the blog will have given up before the end of this entry. I shall write about the future of SUMMERTIME tonight. Hopefully.

Dim.

04/08/2011: "SUMMERTIME (Week One) (Rough Cut)" now on YouTube!

2011-08-04T19:50:00.001+01:00

I seem to have noticed a pattern in the way that I write these blog entries. I tend to spend the first paragraph complaining about how I have been meaning to update the blog but have been too busy to get around to it, before launching into a long description of everything that has been going on in my mind in regards to film making over the past whatever-amount-of-time. However, I shall save the belated description of my activities for another entry I plan on writing tonight. Let's focus on the interesting part for now.

The rough cut of Week One of my new film "SUMMERTIME" is now on YouTube! Uploaded on the 3rd August, the film has been up for just over 24 hours.

SUMMERTIME follows six somewhat interconnected teenagers as they live through their post-GCSE summer holidays in the quiet East Anglian town of Bedford. Will they act upon their ambitions, or will they become sleepwalkers like ever other fucker out there? And what does that even mean, anyway? Featuring music composed and performed by Luke Hills and Michael Hutcheon.

I have been working tirelessly over the past couple of months on this film. Two weeks of creating and putting together ideas, followed by the month it took to write the 119 page screenplay. I have been filming whenever I have been able to over the past several weeks and, as always, it is progressing a lot slower than I had hoped. I shall explain that more in the next entry.

Suffice to say, even creating just this section of SUMMERTIME has taken up a huge amount of my time and I was eager to hear what people think of what has been done so far. So I uploaded the rough cut of the first week to YouTube - I have filmed some other sections, but they are so disconnected from what I have done so far that they would not be very enjoyable to watch. I plan on dubbing all of the dialogue in exterior scenes and adjusting the brightness and contrast throughout the film to give the best sense of colour for each location. Furthermore, a couple of the sound effects are slightly off and there are some sections which need a little tweeking. Other than that, what I have uploaded to YouTube is pretty much what Week One will be.

The feedback I have received for SUMMERTIME has been overwhelming positive. The only real criticisms I have received are ones I plan on fixing - such as dialogue in exterior locations - or ones that are out of my control - such as the lower quality of footage recorded by my camera when filming indoors. The film has already received 82 views on YouTube, which is a surprisingly high number for one of my films which has been on the internet for just over a day. What is even more surprising are the 8 "Likes" the video has received on YouTube over such a short period of time. For comparison, "New Daze (Part 2)", one of my higher rated videos, has only received 7 "Likes" over almost nine months.

Needless to say, SUMMERTIME is far and away the best thing I have ever created, even in its unfinished state. I just wish that it had been easier and that its future looked a little more certain.

Dim.

17/07/2011: New logo and new film; "Summertime"

2011-07-17T21:19:00.002+01:00

Although I am feeling utterly exhausted, I have been meaning to update the blog for what seems like a life time so I am forcing myself to do so before sleep consumes me. Despite not updating the blog for over a month (holy smokes! Has it really been that long?) I have been feverishly busy working on the next Helium Cow Films project. Today I am going to write about it.

First, however, I would like to introduce the new Helium Cow Films logo! I have not made a full film since "New Daze" back in December 2010 so I am looking to the next project as a bold, new step in my film making. I have been using the previous Helium Cow Films logo since early 2010, around the time of making "Infatuation", so I felt like it was time for a change.

Looking back to the previous HCF logo, I do not think it summarised what Helium Cow Films really is. If someone was just glancing at the logo, they would not know that it was for a film company. Furthermore, it was too bland and too serious to really be engaging to the majority of people. I asked a friend from school, Sam Quinton, to design a new HCF logo that was more light-hearted, colourful and incorporated the film aspect into the design. I think he did a tremendous job! You will have noticed that the blog, the Facebook Page, the YouTube channel and pretty much everything to do with HCF has now been updated with the new logo.

For over a month, I have been posting an awful number of Facebook statuses and Tweets about the new film I have been writing. It is entitled "Summertime". The alternate title is "Or; why you should not make a film with six main characters when you are an amateur film maker" because believe me, it has already become a pain!

Summertime is set over the six weeks of the summer holidays experienced by six characters who have just finished their GCSEs. Unlike a lot of films, the characters do not all know each other very well. However, their influence on the other characters is rather prominent. The film had been kicking around my head for the past month before I even began writing it. There was an awful teething phase where each and every idea was somewhat painful to produce but utterly, utterly worth it.

The first idea I had for this film was about a character who had an "epiphany" about the human condition. Strangely enough, this was inspired by a single line for a Panic! at the Disco song, "Hurricane", in which Brendan Urie sings "I led the revolution / in my bedroom". This line reminded me somewhat of the character of Max Parker from Wes Anderson's "Rushmore" - this idea of a teenager trying to do something different and amazing. However, I could formulate no narrative from these ideas. This character has an epiphany and wants to do something amazing... now what?

So I thought of something different. A film with six equally important characters, opposed to the way I make films usually where their is a definitive central character (or two). It's very difficult to remember all of the ideas that went into the inception of Summertime as it feels like it was years ago. Furthermore, there were so many ideas that finally resulted in this screenplay! So many of them were ultimately never used as there was no way to fit them in. One thing I was certain of when writing Summertime was to make a film that was representative of what it means to be a teenager in this, the year 2011. Also, I wanted to emphasise the location. Bedford. I'm sixteen years old and although I have never lived in Bedford, I have always lived around it. The town is fundamentally important to who I am, and I wanted to emphasise its importance in the film.

Over time, I developed all of the six characters who are unique from one another. The character who I mentioned before found his way into the script and bookends the film in a funny and ironic way. Each character is used to convey a theme or an idea and through this, I believe that Summertime is a pretty perfect representation of who I am at this moment. Right down to the uncertainty. Despite all of the themes and ideas running through Summertime - which are too numerous to say - the main theme is the passage of time. To begin with, I struggled to find a title for Summertime and considered awful possibilities such as "Bedfordian Summer" and "Summer 2011". However, once I thought of Summertime, it clicked. Not only does the title set the time of the film, it also hints at the film's major theme.

Along with the influences I have already mentioned, Summertime has been influenced somewhat by Mallrats. Especially the way that the characters spend a lot of time just talking about the things that surround them and tell anecdotes of things that have happened to other people. Furthermore, Summertime is heavily influenced b Edgar Wright films, which has somewhat become the norm with my films following "New Daze".

Before writing the screenplay for Summertime, I decided to try and get the main characters cast first. The area of my films that is criticised the most is the acting. In many ways, this is not my fault. Nor is it the fault of the people themselves. They are people who are giving up their own, free time to be in something they have no emotional attachment to or passion for. However, it is an area that I always feel I need to try and improve on. To try and improve the acting, I attempted to cast the film before I began to write it so I could make the characters "fit" the actors a little more.

My desire for new actors has led to Summertime having a cast of people who have never been in my films before, with the slight exception of Chris Lambert who appeared in photographs in the unfinished "Sherman Jones: A Scandal in Bedfordia". Liam Coles plays Jonathan Wright, an idealistic teen who believes that he has had an epiphany regarding the human condition. Chris Lambert plays Nick Hamilton, an arrogant but hilarious smoker who constantly mocks his best friend, Richard Ferguson played by Alex William Day. Richard is a quiet, girl afraid Japanophile who feels like a girlfriend will solve all of the problems in his life. Beth Fereday portrays Lauren Demonté, who is an extraordinary writer. Or so she says. Lydia Gledhill plays Megan O'Malley who is, for lack of a better word, a bitch. Her cautious best friend, Katie Titchmarsh, is played by Harriet Clarke. Other players include Shane Hurrell, who plays Marcus York and Luke Hills & Adam Hulett, who play themselves.

I started the actual, physical writing of Summertime on the 17th June (a month ago today!). The writing has been a slow and difficult process. This is due in part to temporary postponement, because of my GCSE Geography exam on the 24th, and a busy social life - there are an unbelievable amount of parties around the week following the end of exams! However, it is mostly due to the sheer scope of the project. What I had originally intended to be a rather small film, one which I could shoot quickly in summer so that I could focus the rest of the holidays on honing other aspects of my film making and pursuing other... pursuits, quickly spun out of control. After writing the first "week", the script was already 20 pages. With six of these "weeks" to get through, it soon became evident that the 40-60 page screenplay I had been hoping for was not a possibility.

On Friday 8th July, I was contacted by e-mail and asked by my school to be a part of Wootton Upper School's production of "Fiddler on the Roof" which was performing the next week. Jumping at the opportunity, I agreed before realising that it would eat into my script-writing time considerably. However, my participation in Fiddler acted as a Godsend. Being isolated from all of the things that distract me at home - mainly the internet - made me able to focus solely on writing the script on my laptop. I must have written almost 40 pages during those two full-day Fiddler rehearsals! If it wasn't for them, the script still may not have been finished!

By the beginning of last week, when the script was roughly 76 pages long, I had no idea how much longer it would take for me to write the film. I decided to hold a read-through of what I had already written on Wednesday 13th July. The majority of the main cast turned up and it was a very surreal sight. The closest thing I had attempted to a read-through before was the night before the first day filming "Sherman Jones", when I had the main cast spread across my bedroom floor, eating fish & chips, reading through the script.

We sat around the table of Beth's house not with hard copies of the script, but with the script loaded onto the screens of laptops. Unfortunately, the read-through did not progress as well as I had hoped. We did eventually get through all of the 92 pages I had written at that point, but to say there was a lack of concentration is the understatement of the century. No, millennium! Not making a film for several months is enough time to completely forget how utterly frustrating it is to try and get people - your friends - to concentrate on something that you alone are passionate about. I hope it is not so awful when I start filming, or I may suffer a heat attack or a nervous breakdown. You pick.

On Friday 15th July, I finally finished the script for Summertime! With 21,917 words spread across 119 pages, the screenplay is the second longest I have ever written - roughly 400 words short of the length of the "Dateless Losers" screenplay. As I mentioned earlier, this was far longer than I had hoped for and this unexpected length will, most certainly, lead to the film never being finished.

Today, I spent a couple of hours in town trying to buy the green fabric paint needed to create a t-shirt for one of the characters. As it was a Sunday, the only shop that I know that sells fabric paint was shut so I was forced to improvise and buy acrylic paint. I hope it works well! Beth should be using it to make the t-shirt tonight, which is needed for-

Filming tomorrow! Yes, this is why this blog post is so important! It is already long enough. Imagine how much longer it would be if I started filming and had to include all of that into it too? It has been a complete pain to organise filming. It seems like not many people respond to Facebook messages or several thousand texts, so I am forced to phone up each person individually to ask if they can film. An inconvenience, to say the least. I am not going to dwell on such negative thoughts, though. It would be counter-intuitive to a good day's filming, is what I am really, really hoping for tomorrow.

Wish me luck. Readership of zero.

Dim.

13/06/2011: Jake Routh Unchained & Frank Turner Videos

2011-06-13T19:58:00.001+01:00

Over the past couple of days, I have uploaded several videos to YouTube. Now that all this backlog of footage is (mostly) dealt with, I can finally focus on the next film project!

As I mentioned in the previous blog entry, Jake Routh who played James Warrick in Sherman Jones made some prank phone calls prior to the first day of filming. While the footage itself is poor and the action itself could be considered juvenile, the dialogue of the footage is quite funny. As is the opening. Especially if you know Jake. The video itself is entitled Jake Routh Unchained and, as usual, can be found on YouTube.

I also mentioned in the last entry about all of the footage that I recorded from the Ben Marwood/Franz Nicolay/Frank Turner gig back on the 27th May. I spent a ridiculous amount of time yesterday unsuccessfully attempting to render the footage recorded from my camera. I tried closing everything else on my computer. I tried rendering it in a variety of different formats. I even tried changing the format of the footage first, and then rendering it. Nothing worked. I am not going to even pretend to know what was wrong with the footage recorded from my camera. Perhaps it was something to do with the lighting, or the sound, or maybe the footage got corrupted somehow. However, the raw footage plays perfectly on my computer. It got to the point where I was becoming incredibly frustrated and, furthermore, depressed that I could not get this footage to work. So I gave up.

Luckily, I did record quite a lot of Frank Turner's songs with my iPod Touch once my camera ran out of battery (I recorded that much footage!). I uploaded two of these videos to YouTube, which are "The District Sleeps Alone Tonight" and "The Ballad of Me and My Friends". After spending so much time trying to get these videos to work, I cannot be bothered anymore. I have better, more important things to focus on at the moment. Once I have more time, and have figured out a way to get some of the footage to work, I shall upload it to YouTube.

One final note. Last entry (jeez, I'm more self-referential than a Kevin Smith film) I finally discovered how to integrate a YouTube video into a blog post. This is a feature I have decided not to use for the majority of blog posts, for two reasons. The first is that the YouTube videos that appear within the blog are very small and would not create a good impression of the actual film. Secondly, I like to have the pictures on the blog to serve as a visual record of the films. If I were to always use both, the blog would ultimately become more pictures and video than text! Then it might as well be a Tumblr blog.

Tonight, I hope on finally starting the notes for my next film. Let's hope it turns out as good as I want it to.

Dim.

11/06/2011: Sherman Jones Bloopers

2011-06-11T22:16:00.002+01:00

Yesterday, I completed my penultimate GCSE exam. As my next and final exam is not for another two weeks, I have been blessed with copious amounts of time while many of my friends are still busy with exams. I spent much of Wednesday constructing a list of many things I wish to do over the next three months of summer, which includes learning to play guitar and sing, writing more blogs around the internet, starting up DimCast again and, obviously, making a new film. However, there was one item that was higher than anything else on this list: editing the bloopers for Sherman Jones.

The footage for Sherman Jones has been clogging up my computer since I filmed it back in March. Over time, little things such as unedited footage build up until you are overrun with these little tasks that dominate your mind. This is why I have started writing lists of things, so that I can better organise myself. Yesterday, after spending some time in town with friends, I came home and began editing the bloopers around 8 o'clock. I was up until half 1 in the morning before I gave up due to exhaustion. Editing bloopers always takes a very long time, especially if there is a lot of footage, as you have to sift through it all picking out the funniest bits and then cutting them close enough to intensify the hilarity. Unintimidated by the mass amounts of footage that still lied before, I woke up at 6am this morning and continued editing straight away. A little past 8am, I was finished! The Sherman Jones Bloopers are now on YouTube and I believe that they are the funnier than any of my other previous blooper videos.

Since my last entry, I have discovered how to insert YouTube videos into a blog entry. I hope this works.

While the bloopers appear very funny in hind-sight, I remember that filming what I did of Sherman Jones was a very stressful experience. I am certain that you will be able to see the growing aggravation in my voice as the bloopers progress, as people continuously mess up lines or forget them. Watching it, I have decided that I really need to focus on picking a cast who will learn lines prior to the filming of something, as that way I can focus on the direction instead of acting as a line prompt. I attempted with Sherman Jones to have a couple of read-throughs of script prior to filming, but evidently this was not enough to help people learn lines. I must force them to learn the lines. I am currently considering torture devices.

Now that the Sherman Jones Bloopers are edited and on YouTube, I feel a sense of closure with the Sherman Jones project. While I did not finish the film, I feel like I learnt enough from it and now that all of the footage is deleted, there is no chance of going back to what was once done. Which is a good thing, as it would be counter-intuitive to progression.

I will upload another video late tonight, so it will be up tomorrow morning, of Jake Routh making prank phone calls the night prior to the first day of filming Sherman Jones. While the footage itself is poor, as Jake frequently goes out of shot as I was too busy on the floor trying not to laugh to alter the camera position, the video itself is very funny. Jake is a natural comedian if there ever was one. The introduction to the video, edited by myself this morning after editing the Sherman Jones Bloopers, is also very funny.

On the 27th May, me, Brandon and a couple of other friends went to Cambridge to see Frank Turner play at St. Paul's Church. Being the person that I am, I could not help but film the vast majority of the performance. Not just Frank himself, but the other acts which were Ben Marwood and Franz Nicolay, who used to be a member of The Hold Steady! We even met Franz while walking around Cambridge and managed to get a photograph with him!

Very cool. The point of this digression is to say that, as I filmed most of the performances, I shall be uploading those videos within the next week. It will take a long time, but the footage I filmed was rather good so I will be glad to get it on the internet. I honestly have the fear, though, that soon the number of recordings of live music on my YouTube channel will heavily outweigh my actual films! Hell, they've probably surpassed my actual films already.

I'm kicking around ideas for a film to make over summer at the moment. Instead of writing exclusively about it on this blog, I am keeping a super-pretentious black notebook-cum-diary where I detail the ideas going into this film. Writing notes in notebooks for films is nothing new to me, but this time I am hoping to do it with more structure. I usually through my old notebooks away but this time, I would love to keep it and look back on it in several years' time with feelings of nostalgia.

Some of you may have noticed (can you have "some" when your readership is zero?) that I have added some more widgets to the blog, including a link to the Helium Cow Films facebook page and my Twitter account. One of the many things on the list I mentioned earlier was the aim of getting better at this whole "social networking" thing. I have this vision of creating a completely integrated system of all of these different social networks, all connecting to my (soon to be various) blog(s) and my YouTube channel. Hopefully this will at least create some audience for the things that I do.

My eyes are twitching. That may be a sign that I need to get more sleep.

Dim.

21/04/2011: Lessons learnt from making Sherman Jones

2011-04-21T17:48:00.003+01:00

Whilst editing Sherman Jones: A Scandal in Bedfordia I was hit by an amazing idea. I created this blog not only to chronicle my film making endeavours but also to show progress. It is obvious to see that every successive film of mine is exponentially better than the previous one. The idea was to create a specific post after every new film I make detailing what exactly I have learnt from that film making experience. This is the first of such blog posts. So here goes! These are the lessons learnt from making Sherman Jones.

1. You can do a lot in post-production.

Sherman Jones is the most heavily edited (albeit unfinished) film I have ever made and what has surprised me is just how much I, an amateur with one editing program, can do in post-production. It would be difficult to list all of the subtle tweaks and cuts I have made during editing, but this is nothing new from my previous films. What is new is the extensive use of more adventuress techniques, such as the frequent use of digital zooms, the split-screen phone conversation and the text that sits within the environment.

However, there is one specific thing that I am rather proud of that I doubt people will have noticed. The board game "Operation" we used was broken. Although I replaced the batteries, something was wrong in the circuit and the nose would not light up. Using Paint.NET, I was able to edit an image of the Operation board to make it appear as if the nose light was on. Pretty convincing, eh?

2. ... But not everything.

Some things that I had hoped would have worked in post-production really didn't. I learnt the limit of how far you can digitally zoom an image from my camera before it becomes so blurry that the quality is noticeably different than the rest of the footage. Furthermore, I discovered that when moving footage from side-to-side digitally (such as the clip in Sherman Jones where Sherman passes James) the footage becomes often becomes blurry.

3. Split-screen conversations are difficult.

It almost didn't work. But thankfully, it did. It is nigh impossible to get the timing correct when filming two sides of the same conversation. I learnt I needed to film each conversation from several angles, several times over, just to be safe. That way, if the clips become too out of time with one another, I can merely cut to another shot. Editing two clips where one is overlaying the other is very difficult. My computer is not powerful enough to process this, therefore the video does not play (or, rather, it plays at a very decreased frame rate (about one every five seconds)) and I have to edit the clips through sound, which can be very difficult when the two clips are saying exactly the same thing! However, it is manageable.

Cropping the clips or having them slide in is not too difficult, but I had immense problems with the line separating the two clips. I had to create an image in Paint.NET and then import it to the project. I kept on manually moving the clips and image where I want them to be in the project window, which led to inaccuracy and often led to me accidentally placing in new key frames. I have learnt that, to be precise, I must use the exact numbers in the effects window to dictate where the objects are and where they are moving to.

4. Interesting Titles.

There are two types of titles that I prefer in films. One is the simple, black-on-white kind of titles such as the ones in Annie Hall. The other type are titles that are integrated into the environment, with recent examples of this being in Scott Pilgrim and Easy A. At the moment, I am wishing to create films that are utterly visually engrossing and interesting to look at. I thought that I could create interesting, integrated titles by using the cropping tool and inserting a key frame every time a new part of the text was revealed or covered. And you know what? I was right! And I think it looks really, really good. I guess the only problem is that I have wasted this new trick on a film that I am not even finishing.

5. Musical score is important.

Previously in my films, there has been very little music in the background during conversations. I prefer minimalist films and have it when film scores become overt. I think this has led to a lot of my films feeling very "sterile" for lack of a better work and I am learning the importance of a film score. For example, the first scene in Sherman Jones would not feel the same way if not for the music in the background (conveniently stolen from my favourite film of all time (500) Days of Summer, might I add). Before I added the music, the scene irritated me as it just felt too serious. The music in the background sets the tone for the piece - light-hearted, quirky, whimsical etc. However, there is a very fine line between having too little music or too much music.

6. Patience is a virtue.

I cancelled Sherman Jones for a variety of reasons. I could not foresee the next time I would be able to film, people were irritating me, I had to begin revising for my exams and so forth. However, the biggest reasons I cancelled Sherman Jones was because I got irritated during editing. I had been in a bad mood all day, I had not filmed as much as I had wanted to and I could not get the scene to fit together the way that I wanted it to. I got so intensely frustrated that I wrote a blog post detailing my frustration and then did not even attempt to edit the film for almost two weeks.

When I returned and began to edit, the film soon began to fall into place. After four hours, the opening scene was finished and I could see that it was the finest thing I had ever made but I would not be able to finish it, as I hadn't filmed in weeks and was now too busy with school work to continue. Which is a shame. If I was more patient the first time I had attempted to edit, I may have continued the film and have it finished by now.

- - - - - - - - - -

This entire post feels very much like a conclusion for an English essay, or maybe the annotations I write for my Art class. Regardless, Sherman Jones has been a very valuable experience for me as a film maker and I have learnt more from this ten-minute, unfinished film than most of my other films. It is this new-found knowledge which makes me certain that my next project will be, by far, the best yet.

Dim.

21/04/2011: The complete unfinished Sherman Jones now on YouTube

2011-04-21T16:26:00.002+01:00

Exhausted. I am completely and utterly exhausted. This exhaustion is not due to sleepless nights or strenuous physical activity, but purely due to great mental activity over the past couple of weeks. I have been endlessly revising for my GCSE exams and over the weekend I finished editing Sherman Jones: A Scandal in Bedfordia which has been on YouTube since Monday. I would have posted about it sooner, but I have just been too damn exhausted.

I have mixed feelings regarding Sherman Jones. I know that the opening is the best thing that I have ever created, hands down. It may be due to "cheap" tricks such as the digital zooms, the split-screen and the text that sits within the environment, but many people have told me that the thing the opening looks professional. However, while the rest of the film is not too bad, I know I could have done better. It's very difficult to judge the overall quality of the piece, as it is so reliant upon other scenes. There are frequent flashbacks and split-screens and it is difficult to tell how good the film is overall while it is in this unfinished state. I would have loved to have seen the film finished. It would have been, hands-down, the best thing I have ever made. But I still know that I can do better, so what is the point in working on a project when you know a better one is just around the corner? After my exams are over, during my long summer holiday, I will create the best film I have ever made.

I have uploaded some scripts to the Helium Cow Films deviantART page for the first time in ages, including the script for New Daze and the embarrassingly bad script for Echoes of You (urgh, what was I thinking!?). Also uploaded is the script for Sherman Jones: A Scandal in Bedfordia so that anyone who is interested can see how the rest of the film would have played out.

Dim.

18/04/2011: (Pretty much) Finished editing Sherman Jones

2011-04-18T01:55:00.002+01:00

It is almost two o'clock in the morning and it was only several hours ago that I last posted a blog entry, but since then I have been busy editing Sherman Jones: A Scandal in Bedfordia and after three hours more of hardcore editing it is done! Whilst I say it is done, I know that I will render the film and then notice many mistakes and have to re-edit then re-render it. But as it stands right now, the unfinished film is finished. I decided to take a screen capture of the editing of Sherman Jones just to show how complex it is (note: the first two minutes are already rendered. Trying to edit with those scenes uncompressed totally destroyed my editing software and made it impossible to do anything, so I ended up editing the opening in a different project).

I will start to render the film before I go to bed and then, if it is as good as I can make it, I shall upload the film to YouTube tomorrow.

Dim.

17/04/2011: New YouTube videos - Opening of Sherman Jones and Dateless Losers (Part Five)!

2011-04-17T22:42:00.002+01:00

Something has been nagging at the back of my brain. An inescapable phrase that echoes through my mind every single second of every single day - "I haven't uploaded anything to YouTube in four months."

It's not like I have not been busy, because I have. Between juggling intense amounts of school work and a hectic social life it is a miracle that I have managed to get anything done over these past four months. I guess the problem is that the only thing that I have managed to do over these four months (Sherman Jones: A Scandal in Bedfordia) is now a cancelled film that shall never be finished. Regardless, on Friday I sat down at my laptop early in the morning and decided that I was finally going to edit what I filmed of Sherman Jones. Although I am still editing some of the footage, the opening to "Sherman Jones: A Scandal in Bedfordia" has been uploaded to YouTube and it is undoubtedly the best thing I have ever made. I would discuss it a little more, but I am saving that outburst of self-reflective nonsense for when the entire unfinished film is uploaded to YouTube.

I felt like I needed to make up for lost time. I needed to uploaded more to YouTube just to prove that I am some kind of productive member of society who does more than sit around and engage in pseudo-intellectual conversations (which, granted, I do most of the time). There is a video which has been sitting on my laptop for well over ten months that I was uncertain I would ever show to anyone. It is the unfinished fifth part of "Dateless Losers", a film which I spent sixth months developing and producing last year before it was eventually cancelled for a whole number of reasons.

Editing the last section of Dateless Losers was a bitter-sweet experience as I knew whilst editing it that I was not continuing with the production of the film. It made me pretty sad considering how much effort I had put into it and how well certain sections of it were turning out. However, some sections of it were not turning out anywhere near as well as I would have liked as the film was utterly crippled by its ambition. After edited the fifth part with the intention of uploading it to YouTube once it was done. However, I was very unsatisfied with the finished product at the time and decided against it. Now, I believe I have mellowed and now view the entirety of Dateless Losers with a feeling of nostalgia. Therefore, I decided to upload the fifth part of Dateless Losers just to show that once, way back in the past, in the year 2010, there were a couple of kids who tried to make a film called Dateless Losers.

Finally, I uploaded a couple of video presentations I did for my Citizenship class in school for no other reason than to keep all video project I create in one handy, easy to find place - my YouTube channel. The first is entitled "Sustainable Transport and You" and is about how sustainable transport is implemented around Bedford and the dangers or relying on fossil fuels. The second presentation is about the UK Student Protests as we were studying pressure groups in class.

For now, I believe that wraps up everything in a nice little package. I shall continue to edit Sherman Jones tonight and tomorrow with the aim of hopefully having it done tomorrow and uploaded to YouTube. Once it is done, I will feel refreshed, like a weight has been lifted from my shoulders. I shan't be thinking of the film making thing too heavily over the next couple of months due to my exams, but I believe that once they are over I shall re-evaluate things. Not just the film making, but my life as a whole. The summer feels like a time for fresh starts and new beginnings. I recently started reading a book about Film Art and I believe the understanding which I gain from it will increase the quality of my films exponentially. I keep on repeating this idea to myself that I shall write my next film as if it is both my first and last film. Whatever it ends up being, I think it is going to be really good.

Dim.

28/03/2011: More Dissatisifed Musings of a Teenage Filmmaker

2011-03-28T17:13:00.003+01:00

As soon as I post this, I shall regret it. I shall look back upon what I write and think "oh my God, shut up and stop being such a whiny teenager!" But right now, I feel like I need to post this, if for nothing more than to sort out my current thoughts so I can stop moping about the entire situation and move on. Furthermore, as I stated in my last entry, I think the documentation of any mood, be it positive or negative, is indescribably valuable.

This past weekend has been one filled with bouts of anhedonia and drunken emotional breakdowns. I was unable to film the weekend prior and I was looking forward tremendously to filming on the Sunday just gone. While I did manage to film yesterday, the experience was so intensely frustrating and inevitably unfulfilling that I am really questioning whether or not I should continue filming Sherman Jones, or whether or not I should continue making films of any form until it is a more enjoyable and worthwhile experience than it is at the moment.

On the mornings of both Saturday and Sunday, I spent over an hour on both days with Brandon Taylor cleaning his bedroom so that it would be suitable to film it. That was no easy feat! The layers of dust were so thick that at times I was uncertain of what actually lay beneath them and the floor was covered with so many crumbs and so much filth that I literally had to change my socks when I got home. I really wish that I had taken some "before and after" photographs of the bedroom to show what a remarkable difference our cleaning has made!

I woke up with a hangover on the Sunday at around 6am, remembering little from the previous night bar crying a lot and screaming profanity at cars as they drove past. I felt more tired than usual as I got up, which I soon realized was due to the clocks being put forward an hour the night before. I bathed, dressed, charged my camera, hacked away at school work and phoned my actors to see if they were getting up soon until about 9am when I trekked over to Brandon's house, my head still pounding, to wake him up as he was not answering his phone.

I knew everything was going wrong when Jake said that he could not find the hat he wore last time we filmed. That felt poignant. We filmed what we could without Sidd, who was supposed to arrive at 12. There were many agitated phone calls until eventually it hit 12, and the conversation went something like this:

Dim: Heya Sidd. What time are you getting to Kempston?

Sidd: I said I'd be there at 12.

Dim: It is 12.

Sidd: No it isn't! It's 11.

Dim: No, it's 12. The clocks were put forward last night.

Sidd: Oh, really? I'm sorry! I'll try and be there as soon as I can.

It was about twenty to 3 when Sidd finally arrived. We had less than an hour and a half to film what I needed to film as people had plans for later in the afternoon. Needless to say, we did not film all that we needed to film. We had to stop filming mid-scene, in only the second scene I had to film as Brandon's house that day out of five. The events of this past weekend combined together have sent me plummeting into depths of despair.

I had the day off school today as I felt as sick as a dog. I slept on-and-off until about 2pm when I finally pulled myself from bed and started some school work. After half an hour of that, I began to start editing Sherman Jones. My laptop has been on for far too long. The entire thing is boiling hot and causes my hand to sweat as I hurriedly type away to try and get my thoughts recorded. As I edited, all of the clips stuttered, making things incredibly difficult. And I guess that's just a great giant metaphor for this entire film, and pretty much every film that I ever make. Their productions are stuttered and everything is just intensely difficult.

I gave up editing and continued to make notes of Nazi Germany (such an uplifting topic, I might add). I will try and continue the editing this evening and hack away at this mess of a film over the next week. But for the first time in a very long time during the production of a film, I am really wondering whether or not I can be bothered to continue it. I have enough stress in my life, with school work and emotional turmoil, without these goddamn films and having to deal with people. It's the organization I can't take. It's not that I can't do it, it's just that it is really difficult. I hate the phone calls during the week, bugging people to film and making sure that they are prepared. I hate the "shut up guys" and the "be quiet" and all of the orders I have to make that fall upon deaf ears.

So here is the plan. I will continue to edit Sherman Jones this week. I shall see whether or not I like the project and make a further decision after that. If I really like it, I will continue to work on it and persevere. If I vaguely like it but do not think it is going anywhere, I shall just upload what I have done to YouTube. If I think that it is awful and not going anywhere, I shall scrap it and stop making films until I think I am in the right place to do so.

I hate cancelling films. Looking at it from an unself-centred point of view, people have put in a couple of days of their lives, solely devoted to being in this film, when they could have been doing something else. Of course I think of this, but what I think of more so is how much time I have put into this film. All of the hours of thought, of writing, of organization, of editing. To be honest, the days of filming have been the least time consuming for me. So they should count themselves lucky that they walk away from the train-wreck of a cancelled film with more time saved than myself.

There is a small silver-lining to all of this negativity and angst I am feeling at the moment. I cannot remember who said it, or maybe I did and I have just forgotten, but I think that sadness motivates creation and art. Today, whilst lying on my bed in a state between consciousness and unconsciousness an idea for a film came to me. A psychological thriller with a sole actor. In a way, kind of similar to Bret Easton Ellis' Lunar Park. Whilst I know that nobody reads this damn thing, I am adamant not to explain the idea any more as I would like it to be a surprise to people if it does eventually get made. Which is unlikely.

The lyrics to Superman by Lazlo Bane continue to echo through my head. How I wish they weren't, but how I know that they are, true. And it frustrates me.

"But I can't do this all on my own,

No, I know, I'm no Superman."

Jesus, this blog is so self-indulgent and pretentious it makes me want to puke. A friend suggested to me a couple of weeks ago that I should probably start writing a diary, seeing as I love writing about myself so much. I think she was right. I should start writing a diary.

Dim.

P.S. Flicking through older blog entries, it is worrying to see how frequently I use the word "musings" in the title. So I promise this shall be the last time I use it, and in future I shall try and be more creative with blog titles. If I cannot think of anything relevant, I shall merely just use the name of a sex position.

17/03/2011: Filming Sherman Jones

2011-03-17T19:17:00.001Z

Every time I write an entry in this blog, I tell myself that I shall update it frequently detailing what exactly I am doing regarding my hobby as a film maker. Yet time and time again, I break that promise which I make to myself. The writing of this blog becomes not a chore, but a nagging thing at the back of my mind which continues to pester me until I actually update the blog. To be honest, I rather enjoy writing this and looking back at it later on and thinking to myself; "I wrote all of this." That thought it quickly followed by; "Jesus, I used to write like a complete idiot!" Indeed, I am certain in a week's time, or whenever I next update the blog, I shall skim over this entry and think the very same thing. It is very difficult to write at times as I am constantly trying to stop myself from whining about how goddamn difficult it is to organize filming and how nobody cares about the films which I make or how important this hobby ("obsession" would probably fit better) is to me. But who in their right minds wants to read yet another depressive teenage blog on the internet? Regardless, sometimes I cannot stop myself and I think in moderation it is good to note down these thoughts and feelings as a detailed record of an emotion at a specific time in one's life has, I believe, unmeasurable value. Enough musings already, it is time to write about filming.

I mentioned in the last entry that I had written a screenplay for a film entitled "Sherman Jones: A Scandal in Bedfordia" and that I hoped to start filming it very soon. Well, I have! After many hurried phone calls last week I was eventually able to pull together a cast after trying to find actors for several weeks. Many of them are Helium Cow Films veterans who have appeared in several films before while a couple of them are completely new to my films. Brandon Taylor, who appeared as Bobby Stills in Infatuation and Alex in New Daze, plays the titular character of Sherman Jones. Jake Routh, who previously appeared briefly in Dateless Losers as Harry (and would have had a much larger role in the film if it had been finished) plays Sherman's trust assistant. Katie "Sidd" Salisbury who appeared in both Empty Love and Infatuation as Rachel plays Lucy Gillan, James' love interest, while Rhia Green who portrayed Maria in Dateless Losers is cast as her friend Rachel Peters. New to Helium Cow Films is Chris Lambert, who plays the character Henry Glover.

We began filming at around 8:30am last Sunday after staying up late watching A Clockwork Orange. Needless to say, we were all relatively shattered and if not for countless cups of coffee I doubt we would have made it through the day. We filmed all the scenes at my house, which is a sizeable chunk of the film. I would estimate it to be over one third. Throughout this week I must have spent at least eight hours editing, stringing the many shots together and then finally tweeking the footage to achieve the desired pace. So far, it is looking to be far and away the best film I have made, so I cannot wait to have it finished.

I am uncertain about filming this Sunday, however. I have been stressing out all week over this film, as to begin with I was not satisfied with my editing and over the past several days I have been hurriedly trying to contact all of the actors needed for the next filming session to see if they are free, and then working around people's schedules and plans to try and find a significant amount of time in which we can film. It's awfully frustrating. I have just started filming Sherman Jones, but I really cannot wait for it to be done - it will really be a load off my shoulders. For now, I just need to try and keep my composure and work out a way in which I can get the maximum amount of filming done over the smallest time period.

Dim.

04/03/2011: Happy New Year etc.

2011-03-04T19:00:00.002Z

It is strange to think that it has been almost three months since my last post, where I showed New Daze. I think I have developed the strongest admiration for all teenagers who are able to pursue things outside of school, such us to be in bands, as quite frankly it is very easy to get bogged down in the immense amount of schoolwork one receives during their GCSE years and beyond. This is the very thing that has prohibited my filmmaking in the past several months, as I have been revising terribly hard for exams and re-takes, the last of which I had this week (until May, obviously).

So, filmmaking!

I have not been able to commit myself to my hobby as much as I would have liked. I have actually been working in school opposed to scribbling down notes throughout lessons about films which I shall never make. But I have this constant desire to be creative. When I am not writing, or making films, or doing anything that one may consider creative, I get this immense feeling of frustration which continues to build and build until I become incapacitated, totally unable to string any two thoughts together or produce anything creative which only serves to contribute towards my feelings of frustration. Regardless of the schoolwork I have ahead of me, and regardless of whether or not I can find the actors who might best suit my films, I will make something! Otherwise, I have this fear that I may explode.

Despite the fact that my thoughts have not been focussed on filmmaking the way they once were, I have been batting around several ideas for films and have written a new screenplay entitled "Sherman Jones: A Scandal in Bedfordia". As the name suggests, it is a parody/homage to Sherlock Holmes, for I have been reading the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle novels as of late and have also watched Guy Ritchie's film based upon them as well as the terrific "Sherlock" TV series by Stephen Moffat and Mark Gatiss, which I somehow managed to miss on its original broadcast last year. Needless to say, I am completely enraptured by the characters of Sherlock and Watson and the adventures they undertake. Sherman Jones is a light-hearted, relatively broad adventure which I wrote as nothing more than a piece of entertainment and something to keep myself occupied. However, I believe that I have managed to make some vague social commentary within the piece, which kind of grew organically without myself noticing until the screenplay was finished. I am not going to say when I hope to start filming or give any kind of prediction for when the film will be done, as these estimations are never accurate. That said, I plan to make this film as soon as possible.

Another vague idea I have had is a film set in a single room with two characters - a boy and his laptop. Strangely enough, the laptop begins to take on a life of its own like HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the actions of the laptop fuel the entirety of the film. I have no ideas for this apart from a single joke and a single reference, but I am certain that with enough thinking I will be able to shape it into something at least relatively entertaining. However, how many ideas have I written about on this blog that have never progressed beyond a simple idea?

Lastly, I have had another idea for a film set mostly in a single room with only a couple of characters (all of these ideas are fuelled by my idea of creating films that are awfully "do-able" and can be done in a small amount of time, with most of the focus being placed upon the direction and cinematography opposed to hurriedly shooting in numerous locations in public). It is entitled "A(nother) Night of Revision" and follows a teenage boy as he attempts to revise for his upcoming exams. However, he is continuously distracted by numerous things, or subconsciously does his utmost to postpone his revision. He has numerous phone conversations with his best friend, who is opting to go to a party instead of revising. I have a strong idea for the opening scene and the dialogue for that section is written, along with several ideas for the phone conversations, but beyond that, I have not been able to think of much, probably because I haven't given it much thought.

While the last two ideas I have mentioned only have a slim chance of ever developing into anything more than what they are at the moment, Sherman Jones is almost a certainty which I hope I will be able to show to people in the near future.

Dim.

08/12/2010: New Daze now on YouTube

2010-12-08T15:37:00.001Z

Would you look at that - it's already December. Remember the film New Daze which I mentioned in the last entry which I had hoped to film in a single day on the 27th November? Well, it has taken over a week longer than I had planned to finish the film but, finally, it is completed! It feels good. Great, even. It's been far too long; the last film I finished was Snakes in a House and that was all the way back in August!

The Monday following the first day of filming, I uploaded the first five or so minutes to YouTube in a rough cut. However, a lot of the footage of the rough cut was re-shot with improved lighting in the finished film, which was uploaded to YouTube last night (New Daze (Part One) and New Daze (Part Two)).

New Daze follows a day in the life of fifteen year-old Joel Carrey (Venables) the day after he was dumped by his girlfriend, Annie (Latton). Joined by his best friend Alex (Taylor), the two boys do, well... nothing much at all. I had written many screenplays (as anyone who reads this blog will know) of which filming never even started. The casts where too large and the locations too many to film, as I do not have a large amount of people committed to acting in my films. So, in an effort to write something that I could actually film, I wrote New Daze which only has three characters and predominantly one location.

I think I can safely say that New Daze is far and away the best thing I have ever made. I re-watched some sections of Dateless Losers after watching New Daze and it is obvious how much I have improved. The direction and the editing is far superior, as is the humour.

New Daze takes its majority of influences from Edgar Wright, the director of Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. It is mostly influenced by Edgar Wright's television series Spaced, which combines slice-of-life with the surreal in the same way that New Daze attempts to do. This influence extends further, to the use of frequent whip transitions and the title sequence. The shot where the characters Joel and Alex enter Lidl while in conversation is an homage to a very similar scene found towards the beginning of the film Withnail & I. The long sections of dialogue in New Daze, where Joel and Alex sit around watching films and discussing them, is influenced by the similar kind of dialogue found in Kevin Smith films, especially Clerks, where the characters have long intellectual conversations regarding pop culture or hypothetical situations. Finally, the fantasy sequence where Joel attacks Alex is a slight reference to the ultra-violence found in Quentin Tarantino films - this is made obvious by the use of the title music from Pulp Fiction.

As proud as I am of New Daze, I am aware of it's faults, which I believe stand out rather vividly in contrast to the rest of the film. To be honest, I think this is more of a sign of the quality of the rest of the film than a sign of poor film-making.

In conclusion, I am just really glad to have finally finished another film. And a fifteen minute flick isn't bad for a film shot on several days over the space of less than two weeks.

Dim.

25/11/2010: Esquires Halloween Videos

2010-11-25T20:20:00.002Z

Oh how time flies when you're terribly busy. So much for my ideal of posting an update weekly, regardless of how small. As I mentioned in the last entry, I was entrusted with filming the gigs at Bedford Esquires during Halloween. All of these videos are now up on YouTube (located on the Helium Cow Films account, I cannot be bothered to link to all fourteen separate videos). I implore you to give them a look, as some of the music is absolutely terrific and some of the shots I managed to get look great!

I still haven't gotten around to filming a new film, partly due to the impossibility of finding people to act in my films. Furthermore, as I have said, I have been so busy; exams, mock exams, revision, plays, stage crew for plays, prom committee, school council... the list goes on...

However, I have been writing every now and again. I wrote this short five page script, tentatively titled "Vampire Flick", which is, as the name suggest, a vampire flick. It opens with a scene which is reminiscent of the Twilight series before taking a dramatic turn for the dark. These vampires are bloodthirsty, heartless killers who are only interested in the daily pleasures of life and killing. I have a great idea for how this film would develop, if I was a professional film maker with the resources available to me. I view it as the ultra-violence of "A Clockwork Orange" (which I was reading at the time) mixed with vampires. It is also inspired by a line in "Donnie Darko", where Donnie talks about a short story and describes the characters just wanting to see "what happens when they tear the world apart". And that is exactly what I would like this film to be about. These two vampires, who are perpetually stuck in their teens, who throw caution to the wind and try to over turn the normal order of things. There is also a strong theme of comradery throughout the film, as even these vampires who appear to be completely immoral still have a strong sense of friendship with one another. Furthermore, I had these speech planned, at the end of the film, where one of the vampires talks about how the vampires are better than humans as humans are complicated by their conscious and refuse to act upon their animal urges. I spend far too much time thinking about things that will never get done, but I am glad that I have written this down in case I forget.

It is going to be wonderful in the future when I finally have the ability to make films, I can just mine this blog and find all these wondrous ideas I once had and then build upon them with a new sense of maturity.

I have, however, written something entitled "New Daze" which will be filmed - this Saturday! It's a similar kind of film to things I have written before, but I have placed more emphasis on the film visually. I'm attempting to film it like an Edgar Wright film, with lots of whip and clever transitions so the film just flows. I have also attempted to use the sort of surreal humour which is rampant in Edgar Wright's television series "Spaced". The entire film is kind of an homage to all sorts of films that have influenced me - there are a couple of long, complex conversation scenes like those in "Clerks", an ultra-violent scene inspired by Tarantino films and a scene which is a shot-for-shot homage to "Withnail & I".

The script for "New Daze" is only 20 pages, so hopefully I can film it all on Saturday as I made the film very "do-able". It has essentially one location (my house, with a few exceptions) and two main characters.

I have been playing my guitar a lot more recently and, for once, I have written a serious song! I hope to start recording some of the songs I have written on my lovely acoustic guitar and I may start creating music videos for them.

There is probably so much more I can write, but I cannot think of it. I guess I am just trying to develop myself in numerous aspects. I am watching a lot more films, looking at them both visually and verbally, and reading a lot more books. I would love to create a film as enlightening as a piece of Oscar Wilde writing. I also wish to push myself further as a film maker and make films in numerous genres, experimenting with writing and directing. But this is made hard by the fact that nobody cares.

However, I shall strive on and try to create something worthwhile.

Dim.

24/10/2010: Radiating Eyes Videos Online

2010-10-24T19:39:00.000+01:00

It's been a couple of weeks since my last vague update, so I think it's time for a new vague update.

As I stated last blog entry, I recorded Radiating Eyes playing at a pub called "The Bear" in Bedford. After many long and hard attempts at uploading the videos to YouTube, I finally got them up (Part One and Part Two). Filming local bands playing live gigs seems like a very good opportunity which I seem to be taking advantage of. Next week, local venue Esquires is hosting a pair of Halloween themed night on Friday and Saturday - both of which I am now getting in to for free as I have been asked to films some bands play. Free gigs seems like the first step on a greater path - maybe next I will be paid for filming bands performing, or being paid to film music videos. All of which could become a source of income to help fund more ambitious ventures in my filmmaking, coupled with further promoting my own work by working for other people.

In regards to aforementioned filmmaking endeavours, I have made no further progress. I have had many ideas for new films, including building on a previous idea for a Halloween film. However, I have realized I cannot be bothered with these. I want to film "Kim", and "Travis: The Homicidal Nerd" and "Development Hell". There is no further point in writing constantly as I believe now it would only distract me from filming the many projects I already have written. All I need to do now is focus on starting filming something, but people are terrible busy at the moment, including myself with my performance of Julius Caesar just gone and two English GCSE papers in less than two weeks.

Until I can start filming, I am just going to focus on school work and further develop my filming style by watching as many films as possible.

Dim.

10/10/2010: Regular Sunday Update

2010-10-10T20:10:00.000+01:00

It seems like I tend to update the blog every single Sunday. I'm not sure what that means - maybe that Sundays are by far the most boring day of the week, therefore the only day I can bring myself to update the blog. But we all knew that already, didn't we?

As you can probably guess by the lack of a mid-week update, I did not start filming "Kim" this week. Hopefully soon, though, when everyone is free and available to film. I did, however, finish writing the script for "Development Hell"! I think it is up there with Kim as the best thing I have ever written. The script does begin to drag around the mid-point, but it soon picks up and some of the dialogue at the end of the film is the best I have ever written. I hope this film gets made, I really do.

Even if "Development Hell", or "Kim", or any of the other numerous films I have talked about never get made, you should be glad that you can now finally read everything I have ever written since "Rebound" online! Last Sunday, I spent a lot of time converting all of my scripts to PDF files and uploading them to a Helium Cow Films DeviantArt which I have created. If you have any interest in reading "Your Own Disaster", the web-series I used to talk about a lot at the beginning of the year, or seeing how "Dateless Losers" was going to finish, I suggest you check it out.

Last Thursday, I filmed local band Radiating Eyes playing a gig on lead singer, Ben Goodson's birthday. The performance was amazing and the footage isn't too bad, either! I had to climb up on top of the bar to stop myself from being knocked over by the kids moshing at the front of the pub. I shall be rendering the footage tonight into three parts, and then uploading it to YouTube like I did back in March.

I have also been toying with the idea of uploading the "legendary" fifth part of Dateless Losers (which no one but myself has seen) to YouTube. The section was unfinished and was very rough, and I am unsure whether or not I should put it online as it really isn't very good. I would ask for people's opinion on this matter, but I know that nobody reads this blog, so I needn't bother.

I think the crazy amount of film ideas leaking into my brain has finally decided to stop since I have been focussing on Development Hell (and shall now be focussing on filming "Kim" or "Travis: The Homicidal Nerd"). For this, I am glad. I am trying to read as much as possible though. In the past few months, I have read more books than I have ever read in my life and I am currently reading "A Clockwork Orange". I have also got into the habit of writing down certain lines from books when they jump out at me. I am also doing this for real life, whenever someone says something truly inspiring or hilarious.

I do have one very small idea though (like many of the very small ideas I have that I may or may not use in a film). It's about a guy who is smooth. He dresses in suits and he has his entire life together - pulling girls, getting full marks on test papers and things like that. However, he writes lists. All the time. It's like an obsession - he is constantly writing lists for everything. I do not know how I can further explore this idea, but I do think it is quite interesting.

One final thing before I go - I am re-booting my podcast "DimCast" and to coincide with this, I have created a DimCast Formspring Page so that the (very) few listeners of DimCast can ask questions that we can answer on-air.

And with that, I have nothing else to say.

Dim.

03/10/2010: General Musings and Wanting to Make More Short Films

2010-10-03T14:13:00.000+01:00

Isn't life amazing? As I have stated before, I think dialogue in films should be a blend between realistic dialogue and the writer's own voice and ideas, as ordinary conversation between people is far too monotonous and boring to create interesting dialogue in films. However, on occasion, people really do say some terrific things. Things that are both beautiful and honest, not necessarily in conventional terms, but things that ring so true that they stick with you and swim around your mind long after they have been said.

I think that I have realized that these small instances of amazing speech are what I build a lot of my films around. I remember them, I write them down and add them into my films when they seem most appropriate. In extreme cases, I may build an entire film around one or two things someone has said. I love this about writing, I love this about the way I view the world. Because sometimes, the things that people say should be shared with the world, because maybe those words will affect someone else's life like how they have affected mine.

The reason I wax poetical about this is because I have had several deep, meaningful conversations with people recently that have really stuck with me. One of which I have used as a basis of a piece of dialogue in "Development Hell", and I think the speech given by the character Steven towards the end of the film is one of the best things I have ever written.

Anyway, moving onto more conventional topics for this entry. Filming for "Kim" is still beginning tomorrow, as far as I am aware, and I am really excited about finally starting this film. On another note, I have re-watched "Snakes in a House" a couple of times recently and have decided that I really enjoy it and that it is possibly the best things I have ever made. I really want to start making more short films in that same somewhat surrealist style, where I have a short script of around ten pages and I film the entire film in a day. I really miss the days where I would do that when I was younger, and I wish to do the same thing again now that my film making skills have improved exponentially. I plan to write another short script during this week, so that, if I am not filming "Kim" on Saturday, I can create another short film instead. I may use "The Toucan" idea which I mentioned a few weeks ago, as it seems like the easiest to do and a film that I could create in a single day.

I may update the blog once more this evening, as I plan on creating a new deviantART account and uploading the scripts for everything I have ever done under the "Helium Cow Films" banner. This means that, for the one of you out there who may be interested, you can read scripts for films that I have not made yet or that I shall never make, such as "Your Own Disaster". In retrospect, the scripts for the Your Own Disaster webseries and a steaming pile of shit, though.

Dim.

01/10/2010: Starting to Get Things Done

2010-10-01T21:48:00.001+01:00

Holy shit, it's October.

I am still writing the script for "Development Hell" and am now 38 pages into the script. Once again, I abruptly stopped writing due to lack of ideas. If I leave it for a few days, however, I am certain I shall be able to think of enough ideas to finish the film. I already have the last few scenes of the film written, so that shall be relatively painless.

More importantly, I have started making progress towards starting to film the spin-off sequel to Infatuation, "Kim"! Thank Christ, as it has been well over a month since I finished the script. The main thing that has been stopping me from filming Kim was the fact that we have not been able to cast the character of Tom. I attempted to run auditions at school this Friday, however I left school before lunch as I was feeling unwell. Regardless, I am certain that no one would have turned up for the auditions, as no one cares. Posters I attempted to put up around school were taken down by a small-minded ignorant teacher who, unfortunately, has the final say when it comes to where I can put posters up. The cunt. It was also terribly demoralizing to find flyers, advertising the auditions, which I had handed out to people being thrown away and littering the school playground. Why, you ask, is all of the acting in my films less than stellar? It is because I have to use whoever the hell I can get. As for the bastards who turn their noses up at my films, fuck them, and fuck anyone who stands in my way.

As you might be able to tell, I'm not in the best of moods. Feeling relatively angry and bitter, but more importantly, I am more determined than ever to make films and prove all the naysayers wong.

In regards to the character of Tom, I will attempt to run the auditions at some point next week. I doubt anyone shall show. Therefore, it is always best to have a plan B, and "B" is for "Brandon Taylor", who starred as Bobby Stills in Infatuation and as himself in Snakes in a House. If Brandon does play the part of Tom, it shall create some bizarre continuity issues with Infatuation, however I shall attempt to address this in a very tongue-in-cheek way.

If all goes to plan (which it rarely does, but I'm praying for the best) I shall begin filming Kim next Monday. I'm going to read through the script this weekend to refresh the film in my mind and to attempt to remember how I wanted to direct it. I hope it goes well, because Kim has the potential to be really amazing!

Dim.

26/09/2010: Musings of an (Inactive) Amateur Film Maker

2010-09-26T20:55:00.000+01:00

I appear to just be using this blog as a vehicle to openly talk about all of my many ideas for films while I never seem to make any of them anymore. It's so difficult to organize a dedicated crew of people who are willing to act. However, I do hope to start filming "Kim" within the next two weeks, and maybe film parts of "Travis: The Homicidal Nerd" too. I believe that during this long period of not creating films, I have improved exponentially at writing scripts and crafted interesting dialogue. However, I think my problems are now focussed around the direction of my films and the cinematography. This is something that I will improve on with practice, but as I have no way to practice at the moment, it appears that I can't improve. Oh yes, and I also must work on the acting in my films. But that is slightly out of my control, isn't it?

I started writing "Development Hell", the film I have been talking about since goodness knows when. I'm very impressed with the script so far. I believe that it is around the same quality of "Kim", which is currently my best work. I am about fifteen pages into Development Hell and have hit a slight roadblock as I am unsure where to take the film next. I always seem to have this problem with my writing style, that I will know where the film is going through several important scenes, but getting there is the problem.

I have also thought of two new ideas to add to my billion-and-one ideas for new films to make. The first is a vague idea for a Sequel to Rebound. I have created a sequel to Empty Love (Dateless Losers, although it was cancelled and shall forever remain unfinished) and I have created a spin-off sequel to Infatuation in the form of "Kim". So I thought about returning to the first film in the "Trilogy of Love" and creating a sequel. The idea is very vague at the moment. It picks up a long time after Rebound, well over a year, and Edward has changed drastically. He is popular, in a way. Not close to people, but always attending parties and liked by all. He smokes, drinks and frequently takes drugs. I'm not sure what to do with the evolution of this character, but I guess I would like to explore the corruption and degradation of one's soul. Furthermore, I would like to explore what people really are. There is this great segment in the play "Shopping and Fucking" (I don't like the play very much, to be honest, but this part stuck with me) where one of the character monologues and posses the question what is left of a human through all the drugs we take, such as coffee, or cigarettes, or anything. The things we do as people, are these because of all these drugs we take, or because they are what we want to do? I believe that is very interesting and I would love to explore something along those lines.

Yesterday, I saw Lee Teivans (Ryan from Empty Love and Dateless Losers) for the first time in months. It was really great as we spent the day together catching up. I think it is a crying shame that Dateless Losers never got finished, because there is so much humour that can be extracted from the characters of Brendon and Ryan. I have been kicking around an idea for a few weeks about short, episodic episodes entitled "The Adventures of Brendon and Ryan", which would just be short videos with the two main characters. No great philosophical questions or character development, just a bit of light hearted humour. Maybe I shall write some episodes when I get ideas for them.

I'm very tempted to upload all of my scripts for everything written post-Rebound to the internet, so that people could see them. What I might do is make a "HeliumCowFilms" deviantArt page and upload all of the scripts to there. I doubt anyone will read them, but it would be nice to have them as a resource, a portfolio of screenplays if you will. With that said, I believe I have discussed all of the ideas I have had in the last week regarding my films. I think I am going to hold auditions for the character of Tom in "Kim" at school this week, hopefully this Friday. I want to start filming "Kim" so badly!

Dim.

19/09/2010: Terribly Unproductive, But Still Writing

2010-09-19T20:36:00.005+01:00

It was around this time a year ago that I was filming "Rebound", the first film I had made for over a year and the film that I guess defined how I would create films in the future. A lot has changed since then - not just personally with me as a character, but artistically. I have become a far better writer, director, and even to some extent, an actor. But at the moment, I am feeling terribly unproductive.

I guess it isn't entirely my fault. Not even mostly my fault. I have two scripts, which I think are great ("Travis: The Homicidal Nerd" and "Kim") but I am still lacking my willing crew of budding wannabe actors. It is times like this where I am terribly envious of my brother Matt, who also makes films. By the time he was my age, he had a committed team of wannabe film makers who had been making films independently of him before they had even met. These guys understood each other, had similar tastes and knowledge in both film and other areas. However with me and my film making endeavours, I am a one man army. I write things myself, I direct things myself, I edit things myself, I produce things myself and more often than not star in the films, to boot. It isn't essentially due to vanity, that I think I am so good at acting, but more so that I act in my films because I can't get enough people to do so. Or, well, I can't get people who I think are good enough to do so.

I think one of my pet peeves is when people disregard my films or criticize them due to the acting. It's difficult enough trying to get people to spend a large amount of their time to be in one my films, and it is more difficult still to get people who are truly good at acting to do so. Nigh impossible, actually, seeing as they often have commitments to other drama-related extracurricular activities. Finding people is seemingly harder than ever right now as so many people, myself included, are busy with exams. The exam board's choice to split up the exams so that they are modular means students are essentially working constantly through exams throughout the entire year, having to revise every few weeks for yet another exam. It's a complete pain in the ass, to be frank.

Regardless of whether or not I am getting anything filmed, I am continuing to write. I once read somewhere that the more one writes, the better they become at it, so the best way to improve writing is to constantly do it. So I guess that's what I'm trying to do - just to write out all of these strange little ideas I have at the moment into full scripts so I have a plethora of scripts to pick from as soon as I have a chance to start filming things again. I think one of the reasons I am feeling so unproductive is that, after writing a script, I have nothing yet to show for that film idea. I could try and show people the script, but getting someone to read a script out of the goodness of their heart is terribly difficult. I just want some feedback. I want an intelligent conversation regarding the script, discussing it, getting advice on how I could improve. I tried sending the script for "Kim" to several teachers of mine almost two weeks ago, and I have hear nothing in response. It's demoralizing.

However, in a very British way, I "carry on". I'm just continuing to write. I finished the script for "Echoes of You" and I am really disappointed in it. I believe that I really rushed the script as I was itching to get onto the next script I wanted to write. I had a few, really good ideas for Echoes of You, but there wasn't enough substance to the film. There was one key idea to the entire film and the rest of the film seems pointless until the twist ending. Due to the ambiguous, confusing nature of the film which is supposed to keep the audience guessing, I didn't have an opportunity to use too much interesting dialogue in the film. It's just full of lots of half finished sentences and ellipses as the main character doesn't seem to have the balls to finish any sentence. I don't like the script at all.

Continuing in my fashion of writing down every little idea I have for films, so that I may have an archive to draw from when I attempt to write any of these ideas, I have two more small ideas for films. The first is titled "General Chit-Chat". The idea stems from when I wrote the title down in dialogue in a rough script of Echoes of You. I thought to myself, what if there was a general in an army? Named General Chit-Chat? He would always lose battles due to the fact that he gets lost in conversation easily. I have this vague idea of General Chit-Chat standing in the middle of a war (could be made by a blue-screen, or sound effects in the background). A member of the army runs up to Chit-Chat for new orders - however, Chit-Chat just talks and talks about things unrelated to the war. At the end of this short film, another army member runs up to Chit-Chat and shouts "Sir! I've just got news that we've lost the war!" which Chit-Chat replies to with "Oh. Shit."

Another idea I have had for over a week now is "Our Friend the Zombie". Ever since Dirge of the Dead, I have always wanted to make another zombie film. However, Dirge of the Dead was so difficult to make. To create a regular type of zombie apocalypse film, I would need a large cast, something I cannot be bothered with at this time of my life. I thought, however, what if I approach zombies from an entirely new angle? I don't want to give too much away about the plot, but the film would take place mostly in a single house hold, focussing on four teenage friends. It takes place at the beginning of a zombie apocalypse, quite a while before the topic becomes widespread and newsworthy. It would transcend genres, to an extent, constantly mixing horror and comedy with strong, human drama. It's an interesting idea, to say the least, but I am not sure what will come of it.

Yesterday, I managed to acquire a relatively nice acoustic guitar for the very reasonable price of £35. Since I bought this guitar, I have been playing it almost non-stop. I have written yet another song titled "Pretty Girl" which is somewhat more serious than things I have done before. It's technically the best things I have ever written and played on my guitar and I am determined to become a somewhat okay guitarist and singer. So you should expect a lot more "Desperate Guitarist" videos in the future.

Regardless of all these ideas I have been having and songs I have been writing, the project I am focussing most of writing and developing at the moment is now titled "Development Hell". Tracing this film all the way back to its origins, I guess it originally started in 2006 as a film I tried to make after Murder Mystery titled "Making the Movie". I filmed one scene of this film and then gave up for reasons I cannot rightly remember - probably due to lack of commitment from people. The other project that has ultimately developed into "Development Hell" is "This is YouTube" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBCTPLYsaOQ), which I have mentioned quite a lot on this blog. However, I guess a lot of the ideas from This is YouTube have changed, taking the emphasis entirely off of YouTube and more on the main character's own self ambition to develop and become respected as an artist and film maker. Therefore, I changed the name.

I currently have 9 pages of notes written about Development Hell in my notebook. I've developed a plot for the film and a few pieces of dialogue. I'm really proud of this one. It's a cross between Extras and Stardust Memories, I reckon, mixed with my own style of writing and film making. Some of it is semi-autobiographical, mixed with self parody. I have also stolen a few of the misadventures that I know have happened to my brother while film making to add into the flick. For the first time, I have written a film in my "traditional" style that has no themes of love or romance. But it is still based on a huge part of my life, my films.

And I guess that's all I really care about in the end, isn't it?

Love and films.

Dim.

07/09/2010: The Ideas Keep Coming

2010-09-07T22:40:00.001+01:00

In an attempt to keep the blog as up-to-date as possible, I am going to continue to write entries, no matter how small, regarding what I am doing in terms of my films and about all of the ideas that I get, because they never stop coming!

I have been writing planning "Echoes of You" in my notebook during school. Today, I started writing the actual script in the notebook. I am unsure about how this film is going - I think the ideas are very solid and inventive, but due to the ambiguous nature of the film I am unsure about the quality of the dialogue. Is it interesting enough? Will this engage people? I am unsure. I hope to finish the script in a week or two and I believe that it shall be a rather short film, around 20 pages.

In my last large blog entry regarding ideas, I mentioned an idea I had for a film about a crow, using my brother's hand puppet bird as the titular crow. However, it turns out that the hand puppet is not a crow; it is indeed a toucan. Furthermore, a lot of my ideas for "The Crow" film developed into Snakes in a House, such as the opening scene of myself in the garden and the snake approaching me from a first-person perspective. With my new found knowledge of birds, I have moulded the idea for "The Crow" into an entirely new film based around the toucan hand puppet. It is entitled "The Toucan" and it is based around the Edgar Allan Poe poem "The Raven". The film stars one singular character, who acts and narrates the poem as while he does action on the screen. However, the poem is altered to be made slightly humorous and fit more contemporary times. Furthermore, the toucan is used as a source of comedy. Instead of the famous lines "Quoth the raven, "nevermore", it shall be read "Quoth the toucan, "SQUARK!"", the squark being the sound the hand puppet makes when it's beak is pressed together. I think it's a pretty funny idea for a short film.

Something that will not leave my mind (which is very annoying) are the ideas regarding "This is YouTube". "This is YouTube" was a film I attempted to make during 2008 but ultimately cancelled. It was somewhat semi-autobiographical and also a self parody. I have been wanting to re-do it for some time and the ideas for the film are really getting in the way of me writing "Echoes of You". The film's main character is Martin (after Scorsese), a struggling amateur film maker in his teens who is joined by his relaxed, charming best friend Steven (after Spielberg). Martin is searching for recognition and wants to further himself as a film maker and an artist, yet is faced with difficulties at every turn. The film would be a comedy-drama with a serious edge, but more often than not the comedy would be the focus. I wish to use an Oscar Wilde quote at the beginning "All bad art is the result of good intentions" as I believe that really summarizes the film (and my life too, to an extent). This will fade and then cut to a scene or two from Martin's latest film - which isn't very good. I'm thinking about then cutting, at some point during the film, to the film being played on a screen as Martin shows the film to an audience who are underwhelmed by the film which he has poured his heart in to. I've written a bunch of notes in the back of my notebook regarding this film. I'm thinking about downplaying the YouTube aspect which this film was originally designed around and changing it to Martin seeking more recognition for his films in the real world, as that is easier to portray and easier to relate to for the viewer. I really want to change the title, too, as I do not believe it fits any more. I'm viewing this film as a cross between Woody Allen's Stardust Memories and the TV series Extras. I have lots of vague ideas for scenes, such as Martin handing out a flyer to a passers-by who proceeds to screw it up and throw it away seconds later. Like in Stardust Memories, everyone is wanting Martin to do funny films which he wants to focus on things that are more serious from now on. Like Extras, people tamper with Martin's ideas, twisting them, and offer him ideas that are completely abysmal. I have lots of ideas and a really great idea for an ending, but it is figuring out an overall plot and story arc which is the problem. But first, I really do need to finish the script for "Echoes of You"! I just wish this film would stay out of my head for the time being.

The next couple of ideas I have are very brief and based off of people I know, as I try and view them in new ways. The first is titled "Misanthropy" and stems from a) a desire to use that word as a title for a film, as it is a lovely word, and b) something a friend of mine said to me during a lesson once. The other day, this friend turns to me and says "Have you ever realized how fucking annoying everyone is?" It's a very offhand thing to say, but it has really stuck with me. In front of their faces, this person is really nice to them, but behind their backs he secretly hates everyone. The idea for the film itself is about two teenage boys who are very much into drugs. They hate the world and around them and everyone in it, believing themselves to be superior and know better than everyone else. It's a very vague idea, I know, but I could build on it. I have an idea that this film would be a cross between "Ghost World" and "Trainspotting" in terms of themes and styles. I find it interesting.

The last idea doesn't even have a title, so I shall just call it "Untitled Sister Flick" for now. It is vaguely based on a few sets of siblings that I know. The sisters are only a year or two apart in terms of age. The older is sensible, driven by school work and ambitions and hates drugs. The younger, who is adopted, is almost the opposite. The film would explore the relationship between this sisters and explore how they turned out the way that they are. I have a vague idea for the opening scene, which would be impossible to do regarding the limitation I have, but whatever. It would start in the class room of an upper school as children in an English class are reading the poems they have written for homework to the class. After a person or two, is arrives at the younger sister character, who reads her poem. The poem is beautiful, and moving, foreshadowing the themes of the film and the vaguely explaining the events prior to the film, such as her adoption, her drug abuse and how she is completely different from her sister.

Jeez, I am drained just writing all of these ideas. Goodness knows how long it will take me to write scripts for them all, if I write scripts for them all, which is very unlikely. Just a quick update on "Kim". I have re-read the script multiple times and I am really, really happy with it. It's a toss between "Kim" and "Travis: The Homicidal Nerd" for which of my films has the best script. I really want to start filming as soon as possible, but I am still looking for actors! I have three options for the female character of Caitlin, all I'm sure would do a terrific job, but I still need two male actors for the parts of Tom and Richard! Tom is good looking, charming and very intelligent. Richard is witty, intelligent and gay. This is seriously becoming a pain, as I want to start filming!

Lastly, quick note about "Travis: The Homicidal Nerd" - it has no chance of being done until October, as I am currently in the middle of redecorating my house. Which, might I say, is a complete pain-in-the-ass and is becoming incredibly disruptive for both my film studies and my school work. Anyone can guess which one of the two I most care about.

Dim.

31/08/2010: Kim's Script Finished

2010-08-31T19:58:00.000+01:00

Just a quick entry to say that I have finished writing the script for "Kim", the spin-off sequel to Infatuation. It's been a tough few weeks, but the script is finally finished, standing at exactly 50 pages long. After about 20 pages, I was feeling ridiculously burnt out on the entire film, but I struggled on and now the script is finished I cannot wait to start filming.

I'm looking for two actors and one actress to fill in some of the roles in Kim. People who wish to play the roles will have to be able to easily get to both Bedford and Kempston and allow filming to take up time both after school and at the weekends until the project is finished. The characters available are Tom (Kim's ex/boyfriend), Richard (Kim's best friend) and Caitlin (Tom's new girlfriend).

Now that I have finished the script for Kim, I finally feel like I can move on with my life and do all that coursework that is due in two days. Can anyone else believe that it is already the end of August? This Summer has gone horribly fast.

Dim.

23/08/2010: Writing Kim

2010-08-23T19:31:00.002+01:00

I have decided that, in an attempt to keep this blog from falling into stagnation like it has done in the past, I am going to continue writing blog entries, however small and incidental, updating the world on my progress.

So I started writing "Kim", the spin-off sequel to Infatuation last week and I am currently 22 pages into the script. Kim stars the titular character as she deals with the break-up from her ex-boyfriend Tom. Yes, I am still doing romantically-based comedy dramas. The inspiration for this film came from the desire to write the character of Kim Pine from the Scott Pilgrim series. I realized that I had previously loosely based as character on Kim Pine (Kim from Infatuation) and decided to further explore her.

What I am enjoying most about Kim is that it is exploring themes and ideas that I have wanted to explore for some time. Rebound focussed solely on Edward's reactions after his relationship with Alissa - the entirety of their relationship is only touched upon at the beginning of the film. That was the intent of Rebound and I am pleased with what that film accomplished, but I have always wanted to explore the degradation of a relationship in tandem with the person dealing with the after-affects, cutting back and forth in time. I had "planned", to an extent, to try re-create Rebound at some point further in my career with this new intent, creating new layers in the relationship between Edward and Alissa.

And then, almost without realizing it, this idea manifested itself in Kim. The film starts with Kim dealing with the break-up a month afterwards and skips backwards and forwards in time exploring her relationship with Tom. One of the things I am most proud of in Kim so far is how I am viewing this film visually instead of just focussing on the dialogue. Each of the transitions backwards and forwards in time are smooth, hopefully making the film flow a hell of a lot better than the previous things I have done. I am also trying to integrate the sub-titles more smoothly into the film, putting them in, on and around objects so that the entire film feels incredibly seamless.

I am also very proud of the dialogue thus-far. Although I am not straying too far from my comedy-drama style that I have previously used in Rebound, Empty Love, Infatuation and Dateless Losers I think that the dialogue in Kim has more flare and intelligence to it. I believe, in some respects, I have been influenced by Dawson's Creek and the incredibly articulate nature of the characters in the show. Most of the characters in Kim speak with great intelligence and articulation, and I hope the acting can support the dialogue that I have written. Unlike my previous films, I think Kim does not try to be funny. Since conception, I have been viewing it far more as a drama than a comedy. I believe the story itself has enough complexity and intrigue to hold the film so that I do not have to rely on dumb jokes. With that said, I still think Kim is very funny, possibly more than things I have done in the past as I am no longer trying to be funny.

I may write more Kim tonight, but I have written about 10 pages today so I am feeling rather burned out. Hopefully I shall have the entire film written in a week or two and then I can start filming soon after that.

I have not been able to start filming "Travis: The Homicidal Nerd" due to a mixture of the awful weather we are having at the moment and that my house is currently being completely redecorated.

Dim

18/06/2010: Snakes in a House

2010-08-18T16:25:00.001+01:00

Yesterday, I finally got round to recording my first (and hopefully not that last) film this Summer, Snakes in a House. Snakes in a House is a remake of a film I made four years ago, a broad comedy which is a parody/homage to Snakes on a Plane.

It was rather nice and nostalgic to film a film in a single day like how I used to opposed to spending weeks and months on a single film. The film was rather hurriedly film and it is rather rough around the edges, but I think all in all it is an entertaining video. There are a couple of slight problems with the editing, but I only noticed them after I had finished rendering and I could not be bothered to re-render the entire film. The biggest problem I have with Snakes in a House is the lighting. I'm not sure whether it is due to the new definition and format I am recording in, because I have been fiddling with my camera's settings, or because my entire house is just very poorly lit and I was not careful enough to fix this problem. It really is something I need to pay closer attention to in the future.

The next film I plan on filming is Travis: The Homicidal Nerd. I really should start organizing dates to film that film next week. In the meantime, I think I shall begin to write Kim, or at least think of ideas for the entire film and plan it out.

Dim.

16/08/2010: A Billion and One Ideas

2010-08-16T20:52:00.002+01:00

Currently sitting on top of my chest of drawers are three relatively short but completely finished scripts. I can't pretend that ever since Dateless Losers was cancelled I have been constantly working on new screenplays, however I have been thinking of a lot of new ideas for films. The likelihood of all of these things seeing the light of day is very slim, however I have decided to write a blog entry about all these ideas I have at the moment. This post is more of a focus for me so I can put together my ideas into comprehensive sentences. First, I shall start with the films I have written.

Apathy & Angst is a script I wrote about a month ago. A lot of the ideas for the film came to me during my GCSE tests, which is very off putting when you are trying to complete the test. The film centres on an unnamed Protagonist (unnamed to create a blank slate of a character without the pre-consumptions that a name would bestow upon him). The film is a departure from the romantic comedy dramas I have mostly done in the past. It is a relatively serious film about the Protagonist who is sleep-walking through life. He loves his friends, and his girlfriend, but he no longer knows how to show it. He is sick of life. He longs for a simpler time, like lower school, when everything was far simpler. I hope to achieve a great sense of nostalgia for being very young in this film. Unlike the wordy main characters I have written in the past, the Protagonist of Apathy & Angst does not talk very much. His motivations and intent are unclear throughout most of the film - only revealed at the end through an extended monologue that wraps up the film. I'll probably film Apathy & Angst sometime or other, but Travis: The Homicidal Nerd and Snakes in a House are the more pressing films that I would like to get done sooner. Oh, and a little trivia for you - "Apathy & Angst" was the first tentative name for Dateless Losers.

Travis: The Homicidal Nerd is the second script I started writing out of my new batch of films (although I only finished it last night). The concept of Travis came to me after I tried to create an obscure, comedic character that could be featured in several films - a character that people could latch onto and enjoy. The desire for such a character came from drunken discussions with my brother and his friend about their character of "Obulon", a sorcerer who also happens to be a paedophile, featured in several of my brothers films. Recently, I have been setting my films in a relatively realistic world with stories and character development. Travis was born out of the desire to just do something fun. The entire film consists of continuous references to video games as Travis kills the five people who have made his life hell one by one, Kill Bill style. The name in itself is a reference to "Johnny: The Homicidal Maniac", a comic series I have yet to read.

The third and final script I have completed right now is Snakes in House, a remake of a film I created four years ago (found here). The aim for this film was to continue with writing shorter, more broadly comedic and obscure films. However, just because the film is short does not mean it lacks quality. With this film, I really want to try and push my directing skills and become more capable of using the camera to create different moods, such as suspense.

Now, the rest of these ideas are very loose at the moment. Just base ideas for films that really need some development. I might even merge a few of the ideas together, as some of them seem to fit together quite nicely. I'd rather have a layered interesting film than one with only a single beat, right? The first vague idea I have is The Crow. Or, something like that. The film would be another one of these short surrealistic comedies about a hand puppet crow that a boy finds. Over time, though, it becomes apparent that the crow has a mind of it's own and does not want to give up its new host without a fight.

I have a few ideas for films featuring aliens. The first is a very broad Alien B-Movie Spoof. It would be poorly over-acted with poorly constructed sets and props. The film would be shot in black and white and as I said at the beginning, the humour would be very broad. The idea is inspired mostly by Plan 9 From Outer Space, along with other B-Movies featuring aliens in the 1950's. I would like it to be both an homage and a parody at the same time. I have some vague ideas involving body snatchers and shape shifters, but nothing concrete. I really want to give my own personal twist to the plot, though, my own personal edge. Maybe something more rude about the alien's intent, if you understand what I mean.

My second idea involving aliens is a more grounded Alien Comedy Film. The film features a boy who comes across an alien humanoid who always wears sunglasses. To begin with, the boy is doubtful of whether or not his new found friend is an alien, but eventually realizes that he is. The boy and the alien become close friends after a series of events, but ultimately the alien has sinister and disturbing motives. I have a concrete ending for this film planned out. I just really need to focus on developing my vague ideas for the opening and ending of the film.

My third and final idea featuring an alien motif is entitled I Want To Believe (one of the tag-lines of the X-Files). The film would be a more grounded comedy drama. I have this very set idea for the opening of the film - the camera pans along this boys desk, littered with books about aliens and action figures and sheets about conspiracy theories as the opening titles appear ("Helium Cow Films Presents" etc.). Then, at the end of the desk, the camera reaches my X-Files poster and focuses on the "I WANT TO BELIEVE" tag-line, before whipping up to the UFO on the poster and whipping around to the main character sitting on the bed, staring intently at the poster. The camera slowly zooms in on the boy as his voice over describes his obsession with the X-Files and aliens, how he believes that the mass amount of fiction produced about extra terrestrial life almost certainly proves that it exists. And that's pretty much all I have with this idea - it would be very easy to make this film a broad bizarre comedy where the boy becomes so paranoid he believes everyone around him is an alien. But I don't want that. I want something grounded, and sincere. I keep on thinking of adding a female lead character, a potential love interest, who finds an interest in the boy. But how typical is that? And I don't want the boy to discover alien life, because that is all too convenient. What I want is a film about a boy who buries himself in conspiracy theories to block out the outside world and the film is about the resolution of his position as he finally accepts the world around him. It's just hard to find a way to convey that in a film when my ideas are so scattered.

Continuing in the area of paranormal films, I would really like to do a Ghost Film. A traditional ghost/horror film with new conventions that make it feel fresh and interesting. I've been trying to watch more ghost and more horror films recently in an attempt to get some inspiration. I watched the Ring a couple of nights ago armed with a piece of paper and a pencil, taking notes of things I do and do not want to do with this ghost film. Horror films usually have very weak stories and characters, something I don't want for this film. I want to introduce my characters and develop them and their chemistry together for a good 10 pages or so before I introduce the concept of ghosts. I do not want to use children, as I believe they are over-used in horror films. I want to use a combination of possession and poltergeist activity for the manifestations of the ghost. I also want to use a lot of bizarre and unnerving imagery.

Echoes of You is an idea I've had for a really long time now. I started to develop the idea around the time I started to think about the ideas for Apathy & Angst. There isn't much I can say about this film without giving the entire plot away, and I wish to make this film someday. I really do need to develop the ideas. All I can say is that it's about the relationship between a boy and a girl, who are dating, and their only interactions occur when there is no one else around.

Saturday was an idea created by putting several ideas together. There's a lot of things I want to convey with this film, and I'm still deciding how I can show them all. Saturday takes place in the space of a single day. The inspiration behind this is Superbad, in which pretty much the entire film takes place in one day. The focus of the film are two boys, the main characters, who are best friends. It's a very different type of chemistry from that of Brendon and Ryan in Empty Love, however. One of the boys is just very disconnected from life - he's oblivious to the world around him. He has a girlfriend, who he hasn't seen in about a month, and he seems to think that is perfectly acceptable. I have not really decided on the personality of his friend, although I want it to be slightly more out-going. I kind of want this film to take place at the end of Year 11, as the two friends try and go to an end-of-the-school-year party/camp out. Many things go wrong, however. One of the themes I want to explore is how people at the same age can be so much further along in life than others. This is influenced by the television series "Spaced" where the late twenty-somethings always seem to be out-classed and out-preformed by people who are younger than them, making them feel old. I want the main characters to have no sense of direction and purpose in their lives when all of the characters around them seem to have everything planned out. Ideally, I would set this film at the end of Sixth Form, but I'm no where near close to that age yet, so I shall do the best with what I've got. There is the idea I want to explore about relationships at this young age becoming more like marriages. There was this terrific scene in South Park once where Stan and Wendy were at a dinner party and all of the couples around them were acting as if they were married, making Stan feel very uncomfortable. I would like to achieve a similar scene in Saturday. For the ending of Saturday, I picture a conversation between the main character and his (possibly ex) girlfriend. They talk about their lives, their dreams and what they hope to accomplish. It is made clear that the main character really does not know what he wants to do with his life. I want to end the film with the girlfriend saying "Do you want to go somewhere?" and the main character replying "We are somewhere" before cutting to a wider shot, then fading to black.

Finally, the last idea I have came to me yesterday. It's no secret that I love Scott Pilgrim. I think the comics are one of the best things ever written. I love the video game, too! I've been addicted to it all week! And I cannot wait for the film directed by the always fabulous Edgar Wright. I love Scott Pilgrim. I love all of the characters, too. But I think I have decided that my favourite character, about everyone else, is Kim Pine. Kim is one of Scott's ex-girlfriends. She has freckles and is very, very sarcastic. I wish that Bryan Lee O'Malley would right a sequel spin-off series to Scott Pilgrim, featuring Kim Pine. Then I thought to myself, why don't I write a Kim Pine comic? Then I thought to myself, why don't I just make a Kim Pine film? Not a sequel to Scott Pilgrim film, but a film featuring a character called Kim who is very similar in terms of personality to Kim Pine. Then I realized that I already had a character called Kim - Charity's best friend from Infatuation, who was named after Kim Pine. Then it hit me - a sequel spin-off to Infatuation starring Kim, entitled Kim! I think I have some really good ideas for this film. Kim will be about Kim's acceptance of a break up with her boyfriend, with a very strong pro-feminist message. That was something I tried to achieve with Infatuation but I failed miserably as Charity became a very whiny, irritating character. I don't really want to give too much away about Kim, as I have a feeling you will be seeing it sooner rather than later!

I guess that is all I have to say about my numerous film ideas. Please, leave some comments below or on the Facebook page or PM me if you have any contributions to the ideas, as I really need to flesh them out. Thanks for reading,

Dim.

16/08/2010: Dateless Losers Script

2010-08-16T15:28:00.002+01:00

As I mentioned in my last post, Dateless Losers has been cancelled for quite some time now. However, I know a few people out there are rather desperate to see what happens at the end of the film. So I have decided to put up the script for Dateless Losers so anyone who has the willingness and the time to read it can do so. To download the script, click here.

Dim.

16/08/2010: Dateless Losers Cancelled

2010-08-16T11:21:00.002+01:00

Ow. It hurts even to write this. This isn't particularly new news, as the film has been cancelled for pretty much a month now, but I really, really dislike talking about it. But I guess I that I really need to document the reasons why on this blog, to keep a record and give an explanation to anyone who was anticipating Dateless Losers.

Dateless Losers is a project that I have been working on passionately for six months. It was a sequel to Empty Love, one of my previous films and probably the least favourite of my films out of Rebound, Empty Love and Infatuation. However, I love writing the characters of Brendon and Ryan. I think they have a terrific chemistry which results in some very funny dialogue. The project originally started as a short, five-minute epilogue I wanted to do. I kept on getting ideas, though, for new directions in which to push these characters. Eventually, I decided that I was aiming to write the script as close to professional length as possible. The script ended up being 118 pages long, which is 2 pages off the industry standard of 120 pages.

Being an amateur film maker, I can't rely on budgets or paid, professional actors with contracts and agents. I have to rely on whoever I can pull together and nag to be in my films. It really is a pain in the ass - I write, direct, edit, produce and more often than not star in the films. I have never created a film in which someone has not let me down at one time or another. I have to make myself ridiculously flexible, putting my life on hold so that I can grab the occasional chance of filming when the other actors are free. This became a ridiculous pain during Dateless Losers. I hate to name names, but seeing as there is a very slim chance she shall ever read this blog, I shall go ahead. Rhia Green.

Rhia played the character of Maria in Dateless Losers. She had asked multiple times to be in one of my films and I thought that she would fit the role of Maria. As is pretty obvious from what I have filmed of Dateless Losers, there is a quite a bit of kissing involved. I have always made comedy dramas with romantic overtones, but never had there been any physical manifestation of the romance hinted between characters. So I really wanted to get these two characters kissing, to make the entire film more believable.

However, Rhia landed herself a boyfriend before we started filming. Wary that she might not want to do the film anymore due to the amount of kissing, I asked her if she was still fine with it. She said that she was, which made me glad. So filming went well for a month or two, but eventually it got to the point where Rhia just became a pain in the ass to film with. She would complain and moan about the kissing, pleading to do "fake kissing" although she had no idea how such a thing was done. She cancelled on me four times in a row and became increasingly irritating, saying that she has "more important" things in her life to do than be in my film.

That really hurts me and irritates me. I poured six month of my life into this flick, constantly thinking of new ideas. I have two notebooks filled with notes about characters and music and hastily written down dialogue I wrote during school. No one understands how much time and effort I pour in to my films. At the risk of sounding melodramatic, they really are my babies.

Ultimately, Rhia decided that she would not do the film anymore if she had to kiss Lee, the actor who portrays Ryan. So I decided, "fine". She had become a royal pain in the ass to film with and there was no way that the film could be done through fake kissing, as it does not look convincing on camera (just look at Infatuation!). I do not have the time to mess around with people who would rather be somewhere else than filming. I do not have the time to film with people who decide that there are more important things in there life than something that is my life. I no longer want to be committed to projects where I work with people who do not care.

I always refrain from using profanity in this blog, as I attempt to achieve an air of professionalism, a portfolio of sorts that I can show people in the film or television industry one day when I attempt to get a job. However, this time, I shall make an exception. Fuck her. Fuck people who do not care about my films. Fuck people who aren't committed. Fuck people who insult me, or my films, yet achieve nothing in their two-bit lives. Fuck them all. It's those kind of people who push me to become the person who I am, the person who wants to persevere no matter what the cost. Because I want to make films more than anything. I'm creative. I have a voice. I have something to say about life and I believe that film is the best possible media to represent my outlook. So fuck everyone and everything that tries to drag me down, because I shall not give in.

I attempted to achieve something very ambitious with Dateless Losers - a feature-length film at the age of fifteen. In actuality what I achieved with Dateless Losers is still very admirable. I wrote an 118 page script, which I do think is really quite good. I shot some very nice scenes, my first ever film shot in HD. I learned a lot about filming, and film-making, and what audiences liked and what they didn't like. I cannot pretend that I am not bitter about the cancellation of Dateless Losers, because I really am. But I shall try my best to use this as a learning experience and use my new found knowledge to push forward and create better films.

And believe me, I have a ton of ideas.

Dim.

16/08/2010: Recent YouTube Videos

2010-08-16T10:48:00.002+01:00

It has been well over a month since I last wrote a blog entry. I mean, I've wanted to, but with each passing day it becomes harder and harder to write another entry, as more things keep on happening. I become worried because I haven't written a blog in a while and the worry then becomes a constant nagging in the back of my mind. Therefore, I will be writing a few blog entries today in an attempt to get this blog up to date.

So since my last entry, I have uploaded a fair few things to YouTube. The first of which is a song I wrote and recorded with my friend Luke Hills (who plays guitar on the track). It's entitled "Bedford Town" (and the name of our possible band is "Walk Away". Not to boast or anything, but I really do love this song. I know I am a pretty terrible singer, but Luke's guitar playing it terrific. We put together this song in about an hour and I think the lyrics I wrote are pretty good. It really is a song about Bedford, and how I see Bedford, and about how people change over time and the circumstances in which force people to change.

While searching files on my computer to delete, I came across a video I recorded in May of my friends and I relaxing at the Mound. I had brought my camera into town that day in an attempt to record real dialogue so that I could use it to see how people talk in real life. Ultimately, I never really used the footage to do anything in terms of disecting dialogue as I have realized that, more often than not, dialogue in real life is far too boring. Dialogue in films needs to be punchier, and more decisive - a blend between realism and the writer's own personal voice. However, some of the things my friends recorded with the camera were pretty funny, and the video can be located here.

Finally, during the last two full weeks of school, my year group is split into two halves - during one week, half of the year has Work Experience and the other half has Enterprise Week, then the two halves swap. For my group's Enterprise project, we created a music video using several different songs featuring school pupils and teachers dancing to songs. I later uploaded the video to YouTube, found here.

So I guess that's all there is to say about things that I have uploaded recently. And for the next post, some bad news...

Dim.

03/07/2010: Dateless Losers Parts One to Four now on YouTube

2010-07-03T11:53:00.000+01:00

After many months of anticipation (well, I hope so, at least) and production, the first four parts of Dateless Losers are now on YouTube. For those of you who are uninformed, Dateless Losers is the sequel to one of my previous films, Empty Love. Dateless Losers starts around six months after the events of Empty Love. The two main characters, Brendon (Dim Tindall) and Ryan (Lee Teivans) have found themselves in a rut. Their lives have become a continous blur of meaningless, pop-culture-filled conversations. However, when Maria (Rhia Green) enters their lives, their friendship begins to change...

Dateless Losers (Part One, Part Two, Part Three and Part Four).

What is uploaded so far brings me up to page 44 of a 118 page screenplay. There are almost 28 consecutive minutes finished, and a little more filmed that takes place afterwards. I was supposed to be filming a few scenes yesterday, but due to some mistakes and miscommunications, filming resulted in being cancelled. Oh well. Hopefully I shall be filming tomorrow, on Sunday, and as many days afterwards as I can. I have work experience next week, working in local comic book shop Close Encounters, where I work from 12-4 each day! I can't wait!

I have created flyers and business cards, promoting Helium Cow Films. I plan to hand them out to complete strangers when I go to town today, and try and get the flyers put up in shop windows. I wonder what the likelihood is that the shops will actually allow me to put the flyers up.

Finally, not one but two episodes of DimCast have been uploaded. Give it a listen some time, if you're interested.

Dim.

01/07/2010: True 16:9 Versions of Older Films now on YouTube

2010-07-01T15:27:00.000+01:00

After days and days of uploading the videos, I have finally uploaded all of the parts of the true 16:9 widescreen, higher definition versions of my previous films.

Rebound (Part One, Part Two and Part Three)

Empty Love (Part One, Part Two and Part Three)

Infatuation (Part One, Part Two and Part Three)

Right now, I am uploading the first four parts of Dateless Losers to YouTube. Hopefully, the first couple of parts will be up by the end of tonight. I'm also filming some more of Dateless Losers tomorrow and hopefully even more on Friday. I must organize more filming dates with Lee and Rhia...

Finally, there is a new episode of DimCast up, featuring the often-mentioned Sam Jay! Give it a listen, if you want.

Dim.

28/06/2010: Late Night Bloggin'

2010-06-28T23:58:00.000+01:00

It's been a few days since the last entry, so I decided that it was about time to update this thing.

I finally uploaded the EnvyFour gig from the Saturday before last to YouTube (Part One, Part Two and Part Three). I think the videos turned out pretty good - the music is great and the way I shot the performance was pretty okay, too.

I also uploaded some Dateless Losers Bloopers to YouTube. The blooper video I have uploaded at the moment consists of two mostly un-used clips from the upcoming film, Dateless Losers. It's only a short video, but I think it's pretty entertaining for a quick watch.

I have also been following through with my plans to upload true 16:9 widescreen, higher definition versions of my older films. I have uploaded Dirge of the Dead (Part One, Part Two and Part Three). I think the increase in quality and clarity is astounding! I'm currently uploading Rebound in the same higher defintion format, so hopefully all of Rebound shall be up within the next few days. I still need to follow through with my plans for writing a long, in-depth analysis for each one of these films.

Filming of Dateless Losers is progressing slowly but steadily. I filmed a little more on Sunday - woke up about 6 o'clock, got ready for filming, left at 8 and walked to town in the sweltering heat. And after filming, I had to walk BACK from town, in the still boiling weather. It was worth it, though. Hopefully I will still be filming this Friday, and then during the weekend. I really need to discuss further filming dates with Lee and Rhia. Hopefully Dateless Losers shall be finished within a couple of months and I shall begin uploading what I have done so far as soon as I have finished uploading the new 16:9 versions of my older films.

Over the past couple of days, I have been getting a lot of ideas for yet another new film. Instead of comedy-dramas, like I usually do, this film would be a straight drama with a protagonist who does not talk very much. I just keep on thinking it would be much like Less Than Zero or Catcher in the Rye thematically. I even started writing it today, titling it, temporarily, "LIFE (or something of the sort)".

I also really want to make a remake of an old film I did not finish in 2008, called "This is YouTube". The film follows a struggling, un-talented film maker and his endeavours to become popular on YouTube. Semi-autobiographical, to say the least. I gave it some deep thought a couple of weeks ago and came up with some really good ideas, and it's a shame I didn't write them down, because I can not really remember them at the moment. Hopefully they shall come back to me.

Finally, I just want to say that the new episode of DimCast will be recorded tomorrow, featuring the legendary Sam Jay who has been mentioned many times during previous episodes. I'm really excited!

Dim.

24/06/2010: A Quick Update

2010-06-24T20:04:00.000+01:00

As it has been two weeks since I last updated the blog, I decided I would leave a quick update so that I do not end up leaving the blog un-updating for three months like I did last time.

Since the last blog entry, I have been busy, busy, busy filming as much of Dateless Losers as possible. Currently, I have over 27 and a half minutes fully edited, which brings me up ot over page 40 of the 118 page script. I plan to start uploading parts of the film soon, probably after next Tuesday. Editing is taking a really long time and this whole project is taking up an unbelievable amount of my time. But, hopefully, it'll be worth it.

Last Saturday, I recorded another friend's band, EnvyFour, playing at Esquires. Literally, right now, my laptop is on the floor rendering the footage as I sit on the computer and write this blog entry. Hopefully the videos shall be up within the next few days.

I have been borrowing a copy of the Dirge of the Dead DVD from a friend as I have lost the original file on my laptop. The idea was to rip the video from the DVD to my laptop, which I have done. After a lot of struggling with aspect ratio, I finally re-rendered the file in true 16:9 widescreen and in high definition. I plan to upload this version of Dirge of the Dead to YouTube in the near future, and then acompany it with a blog entry analysing the film in extreme detail. Mainly because I want to. Then I will proceed to do the same thing with Rebound, Empty Love and Infatuation.

I'm still considering starting a Vlog, I think it would be interesting. But currently, over the past few weeks, with all my work on Dateless Losers, socializing with friends and revising for my GCSE's, I really haven't had the time.

Finally, for anyone who is interested, I have recorded another episode of DimCast, guest-hosted this time by one of my best friends, Emily Cox.

Now I am scooting off to revise Statistics, which I really should have been doing for the past few hours, but I have been too side-tracked editing and rendering and watching the X-Files.

Dim.

10/06/2010: The Complete History of Helium Cow Films

2010-06-10T20:05:00.001+01:00

After a long time of writing it and posting each part on the blog, I have finally finished writing the "History of Helium Cow Films" feature, detailing the entire history of Helium Cow Films from it's early conception in 2005 as "The Mad Cow" right up to the present.

Part One (Spring 2005 - Spring 2006)
Part Two (Spring 2006 - Summer 2006)
Part Three (Summer 2006 - Winter 2006/2007)
Part Four (Winter 2006/2007 - Spring 2007)
Part Five (Spring 2007 - Summer 2007)
Part Six (Summer 2007 - Winter 2007/2008)
Part Seven (Winter 2007/2008 - Summer 2008)
Part Eight (Game Music Videos)
Part Nine (Summer 2008 - Autumn 2009)
Part Ten (Autumn 2009)
Part Eleven (Autumn 2009 - Winter 2009/2010)
Part Twelve (Winter 2009/2010 - Summer 2010)

Dim.

10/06/2010: History of Helium Cow Films (Part Twelve: Winter 2009/2010 - Summer 2010)

2010-06-10T19:35:00.002+01:00

Welcome to the twelfth part of the "History of Helium Cow Films" feature. Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five, Part Six, Part Seven, Part Eight, Part Nine, Part Ten and Part Eleven.

After finishing Infatuation, I felt that it was tine for a change. Rebound, Empty Love and Infatuation, in a way, are all very similar films. They are all comedy-drams with underlying (and sometimes very prominent) themes of love and romance. I wanted to do something different, to prove to myself that I could write something different than what I had previously produced. I wanted a shot at something more serious. Deadly serious. So I decided to build upon a premise that I thought of while making Rebound. The finished result were seven scripts for a planned web-series called Your Own Disaster.

Your Own Disaster is about the character of David and his best friend Sarah. David is hopelessly in love with the most popular girl around, Michelle. After a party at Michelle's house, her body is discovered in the bath the morning after - dead. There is no evidence and the police are completely stumped. After a month of inactivity, David finally pulls himself together and decides to do something about it. He vows to find out the truth behind Michelle's death. So, in essence, Your Own Disaster is a murder mystery series.

The title itself comes from a Taking Back Sunday song, "Your Own Disaster". The lyrics have little to no relevance with the plot itself. However, the connection I made was that the song "Your Own Disaster" was the opening title music I used for one of my first films, Murder Mystery Seeing as the planned web-series Your Own Disaster is a murder mystery, the title naturally made sense to me.

The original idea I had while filming Rebound formulated the first half of the first episode's script. The first ten or so pages are "normal". To begin with, it is very similar in tone to my previous films with similar dialogue and jokes. The idea behind this was to lure the audience into a false sense of security. They would watch the first ten or so minutes, thinking "Oh, this is just another one of Dim's films." However, the big surprise would come the morning after the house party when Michelle's body was discovered. Originally, I had planned that the body would have been found outside in the garden, with multiple stab wounds and tons of blood. However, I could not find a way that the murderer could commit such a crime and get away with it. Therefore, I decided to move Michelle's body from being found in the garden to being found in a bath full of water, as if she had drowned, resulting in a far more ambiguous death.

I think in some ways the original inspiration for Your Own Disaster came from the 2006 film "Brick". Brick is a teen neo-noir, starring Joseph Gorden-Levitt who also stars in "(500) Days of Summer", my favourite film of all time. Brick is a tremendous film, incredibly slick and stylish. It has a way of reproducing a crime noir-esque film in a teenage setting without it devolving into comedy or something stupid. After starting Your Own Disaster, I was puzzled how to continue it. Therefore, I started watching "Veronica Mars" to find a way of creating a teen detective story that doesn't seem cheap or dumb. To a lesser extent, I also think Your Own Disaster has been influenced by the Sin City film and graphic novels.

Something I am very proud of in the scripts for Your Own Disaster is my use of characterization and dialect. Each character has a different and unique way of speaking. Some use pauses, some repeat certain phrases like most people do, some people say "like" a lot and some people are very sarcastic, or hard-boiled, or anything. It definitely has the strongest sense of characterization out of anything I have written. If filmed, I planned to further this characterization by giving each of the characters a distinctive way of dressing, making them visually distinctive from one another.

When I finally finished writing Your Own Disaster in April 2010, the total page count of all of the scripts added up to 92 pages, at the time the longest thing I had ever written for a project (beaten less than two months later by Dateless Losers, which ended up as a 118 page script). I decided that Your Own Disaster was too ambitious at the moment and that I had lost all motivation for the project. So I placed the project on the back burner and began to write Dateless Losers.

However, while I was writing Your Own Disaster, I produced a few videos. After going through some emotionally times and getting truly and utterly heartbroken, I played my guitar a lot for the first time in two years and stayed up all night writing a song, "Your Boyfriend's Penis". I subsequently recorded a music video for it. A week or so after creating Your Boyfriend's Penis, I wrote another song based on something that had happened to my friend, "Three Second Blowjob". I also made a music video for that, although I don't think it is as good as the "Your Boyfriend's Penis" music video as I was rushing it and working with a large group of people who were hard to control.

In April 2010, I started compiling the copious amounts of notes I had written about Dateless Losers (a sequel to Empty Love) and finally began writing the script. I started filming Dateless Losers in May 2010, before I had finished the script, and finished the script on the 6th June, 2010. At the time of writing this blog entry, I have recorded almost 15 minutes of Dateless Losers and will be continuing filming as soon as possible.

And with that, I have finally written almost everything there is to write about the history of Helium Cow Films.

Dim.

10/06/2010: History of Helium Cow Films (Part Eleven: Autumn 2009 - Winter 2009/2010)

2010-06-10T17:43:00.001+01:00

Welcome to the eleventh part of the "History of Helium Cow Films" feature. Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five, Part Six, Part Seven, Part Eight, Part Nine and Part Ten.

After finishing Empty Love, I soon began writing my next project. I realized that I had always written films from the male perspective as the main characters in all of my films previously had been male. I really wanted to try something slightly different and prove my writing prowess, so I decided that I wanted to write a film with a female character as the main character. To further emphasize this female point of view, I decided to use narration for the first time ever in one of my films. This resulted in a film that is somewhere between the classic "style" of my films and the Bridget Jones films. And this film was called Infatuation.

Infatuation stars Charlotte Payne as Charity, a girl who just can't seem to catch a break when it comes to men. After being dumped by her latest boyfriend, she finally seems to have given up on life. However, just when it seems all is lost, she notices Bobby Stills - the guy all boys wish they were and the guy that all girls wished they could be with. Charity then tries, with the help of her friend Kim, to enter a relationship with Bobby by using his best friend, Jeremy, to her close to him.

Like a most of my films, the character names in Infatuation either are slight references to things or have some significance. The name "Charity" means "generous in love", which seemed to fit perfectly with the type of character Charity is. The character of "Kim" is named after Kim Pine from the comic book series Scott Pilgrim - both characters also share similar, sarcastic personalities. However, Infatuation's Kim has a tendency to infer that she is lesbian.

The original idea of Infatuation came to me also while I was filming Rebound. The original scene I thought of in Infatuation is the penultimate scene where Jeremy reveals that it was him texting Charity, not Bobby, and that he is in love with her. I thought this was an amazing idea and a great twist ending to the film, resulting in a happy ending - something I tend to shy away from. The rest of the film grew outwards from there.

One of the other key scenes wish I had planned from very early development of the film is the "Misguided Ghosts" scene where Charity walks away after seeing Bobby kissing another girl. I started writing Infatuation soon after I began listening to the band Paramore, and the song Misguided Ghosts just seemed immensely beautiful and I was desperate to use it in my next film. When I write films, I usually tend to write them around songs and the images the songs create within my mind.

I started filming Infatuation in December and hoped to finish filming it by the end of the film wasn't finished until February. Numerous things got in the way of the production of the film, not the least of which was Charlotte constantly forgetting her lines and being difficult to film with. The shot where the camera pans around from the picture of Bobby to Charity and Kim sitting on Charity's bed took over an hour took over an hour to film, as Charlotte kept on forgetting or messing up her line.

The entirety of filming Infatuation was difficult and not made better by the fact that Charlotte and I were going through personal troubles with each other at the time. It was very difficult to control her, as she would not stop talking to other people that were around when we were trying to film. I remember when we filmed the second scene in KFC, I was trying to tell Charlotte what she had to say (as she had not learnt the script) and what to do, but she would not stop talking to other people. "Charlotte, listen to me!" "I am listening!" "So you know what you're doing then?" "Yeah!" "Okay. Three, two, one, action!" "... Wait, what do I do?"

On the last day of filming, in which we filmed the scene where Charity buys Bobby cigarettes and the following montage scene, Charlotte forgot her clothes despite my constant reminders for her to bring them. As she was unwilling to go back to her house to pick them up, I had to rush to the bus stop, catch a bus, rush to her house, pick up the clothes and then rush back into town. Infuriating stuff.

The scene where Charity and Kim first meet Bobby and Jeremy was originally meant to be filmed at a park. However, the United Kingdom was blessed with copious amounts of snow which resulted in many snow days during early 2010, on which I tried to film as much as possible. It was far too cold to film at the intended park and after many complaints and pleas from Charlotte and Hannah, I eventually decided to film the scene in the nearby KFC.

The very last scene, in which Charity and Jeremy spend time together, was originally not included in the script. The reason I decided I wanted to include the scene was because I really loved the song "See You at the Disco" by Luke Pickett. I listened to it while filming Infatuation and thought to myself; "what a great song! I want to use it!" I originally wanted the scene to take place at a fun fair or something similar, with Charity and Jeremy enjoying themselves together. However, there was no fair for quite some time so I took the second best option of just using clips of the couple enjoying time together.

After finishing Infatuation, I felt thoroughly done. I was really impressed with the finished result and it became my favourite film that I have done - although these days, I'm not sure whether I prefer Infatuation or Rebound. Infatuation is technically better, but Rebound has a tremendous amount of heart and personal meaning for me.

I tried to advertise the film as much as possible, not that it helped. I printed off about 80 flyers in school and tried to hand them out to people in town in an effort to try and publicise the film. However, I got too embarrassed most of the time and was too scared to approach people. I'm glad my ego has grown exponentially since then as now I am comfortable that I can approach almost anyone and force my amateur films upon them.

I also tried selling DVDs of Rebound, Empty Love and Infatuation in February in an effort to try and raise money to buy a new HD camcorder. I sold 2 copies for £5 each. It was a bigger commercial failure than New Coke. However I sold my old camcorder and got money by other means, and was finally able to buy my HD camera.

Dim.

09/06/2010: History of Helium Cow Films (Part Ten: Autumn 2009)

2010-06-09T20:49:00.001+01:00

Welcome to the tenth part of the "History of Helium Cow Films" feature. Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five, Part Six, Part Seven, Part Eight and Part Nine.

While filming Rebound, I had a conversation with my best friend at the time Lee in Close Encounters, the local comic book shop we always used to hang out in. We realized that we were in a very similar situation - we were both in relationships we did not want to be in. Our girlfriends at the time are two of my best friends and I love them to pieces, but at the time we just really wanted to end our relationships with them. But ending a relationship is always hard. That day, Lee and I spent the entire day talking about our predicament and what we were going to do about it. Then, I thought, what a great idea for a film this would be. Thus, Empty Love was born.

Empty Love is the tale of Brendon and Ryan, two best friends (based on the friendship between Lee and myself, but distorted and exaggerated, such as making Brendon very arrogant and perverted when I am quite the opposite). Brendon is in a relationship with Hayley while Ryan is in a relationship with Amy - however, both boys want to end their relationships. Brendon wants to try and get with Hayley's best friend, Taylor, while Ryan purely wants to end his relationship because he does not want to be in one any more. Both boys decide to end their relationships, but they do it in drastically different ways.

I started writing Empty Love before I had finished Rebound. All of the characters in the script are named after musicians. Brendon is named after Brendon Urie from Panic! at the Disco. Ryan is named after Ryan Ross, formerly of Panic! and now a member of the Young Veins. Hayley is named after Hayley Williams, the lead singer of Paramore. Amy is named after Amy Lee, lead singer of Evanescene. Taylor is named after Taylor Swift and Rachel is named after Rachel Minton.

The dialogue in the very opening scene, where Hayley (played by Kaytii Payne) is talking to Brendon is completely improvised. What's more is, I think her monologuing has some of the best lines in the entire film!

One of the opening scenes of Empty Love, where Brendon and Ryan sit on the car park roof and discuss how to break up with their girlfriends, is heavily based on the actual conversation Lee and I had. Jokes like saying "you too" instead of "I love you too", leaving someone for a long time and not coming back and dumping someone by rapping to the theme tune from "The Fresh Prince of Bel Air" all originated in our conversation in Close Encounters. As can be seen in the bloopers (which are very funny - Lee smashes his head on a table), that scene was originally meant to be filmed in Close Encounters. However, people were in there when we tried to film so we ended up going to the top of the Hapur Centre in Bedford and filming up there.

Empty Love also contains many in-jokes between Lee and myself (and the same goes for the upcoming sequel, Dateless Losers). The joke about Brendon and Ryan going "To Zanarkand" is a reference to a joke Lee and I had about going to Zanarkand, a location in the video game Final Fantasy X. Also, the joke about Brendon and Ryan being "Like this. Just not in bed" is another in-joke Lee and I created during the Summer.

Most of the filming of Empty Love took place during October half term. Lee and I were very eager to finish the film so we rushed to an extent, trying to get as much done as soon as possible. Because of this, I believe the quality of the film took a slight dip - some of the direction is very sloppy and no where near as visually interesting as it should be. However, considering how fast Empty Love was filmed, I think the finished result is commendable.

When I had finished, I invited a few of my friends over, some of which who had played characters in Empty Love, to show them the finished result. It was the closest thing to a "premiere" I have ever done and it was awfully nerve-racking. Every time no one laughed at one of the jokes, I died a little on the inside.

With Empty Love finished and out of the way, I moved on to my next project and the final part of what I consider the "Trilogy of Love" - Infatuation.

Dim.

09/06/2010: History of Helium Cow Films (Part Nine: Summer 2008 - Autumn 2009)

2010-06-09T19:58:00.000+01:00

Welcome to the ninth part of the "History of Helium Cow Films" feature. Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five, Part Six, Part Seven and Part Eight.

After finishing Dirge of the Dead, I was exhausted. It's pretty plain to see in the "Making Of" video that I was really at the end of my tether by the time of finishing the film. During Summer 2008, I really wanted a break from making films. I attended a film course which I have already mentioned in Part Seven, which was pretty awful. I spent a lot of the summer watching copious amounts of films and playing a lot of video games, trying to find a source of inspiration for my next film.

However, nothing came. I was going through a lot of personal issues at the time and every idea that came to me would always link back to my own life, becoming something almost autobiographical. However, I finally started to overcome the many issues that had been plaguing me by the Spring of 2009. I eventually decided, why shouldn't I write something based on my own life? So in early Summer 2009, I decided that I was going to write my first film for over a year - and this film became Rebound.

Rebound was about Edward, a boy who had been hurt and left utterly heart-broken by his lying, cheating ex-girlfriend. Heart-broken and alone. However, just when it looks like the world is against him and that he is going to spend the rest of his life in a haze of depression, a girl named Sophie appears who tries to help Edward overcome his numerous issues and become a happier person.

As soon as I finished the script, I was ready to start filming. I had shown the script to a few of my new friends who had agreed to be in it - I didn't know many of them too well, especially Leighann who played Alyssa, as she was more of a friend-of-a-friend before we started filming Rebound. Jack Oliver was the only person besides myself to have a role in a Rebound that has previously appeared in one of my films.

The character of "Edward" in Rebound is named after Edward Elric from the anime Fullmetal Alchemist, something I was watching at the time of writing Rebound. I was trying to think of a name for the main character, so I began to look at character names from things I enjoyed, thus landed on Edward. The character "Alyssa" is named after Alissa Jones, one of the main characters in Chasing Amy, one of my favourite films of all time. Also, "Simon", Edward's best friend, is named after the character Simon from the television series The Inbetweeners.

I finished the script before the beginning of the Summer holidays and I was very excited to start filming. However, organizing filming was a pain in the ass, as always. Many people were away on holiday during the Summer and it soon became apparent that I would not be able to start filming Rebound until after the Summer holidays. So I spent my Summer making a ton of new friends and adding small sections to the script. The first draft was originally just over 20 pages and I really wanted to make it longer. I went on holiday to Poland during the second week of the Summer and spent a lot of the time there thinking about Rebound and thinking about scenes that I can add to it. All of the scenes prior to Sophie going to Edward's house and tearing down the pictures of Alyssa were added in after the first draft. Strangely enough, the scene where Edward masturbates to a picture of Alyssa and a Butterfree Pokémon card came to me while I was looking around Auschwitz concentration camp. It's funny how inspiration hits at the strangest times.

In September, when we finally started back at school, I was very eager to start filming. We started filming on one of the first weeks back and filming progressed very quickly - it was all very scrappy, trying to film what we can when we can. I remember that on a few occasions Milly's mum drove us from Wootton into Bedford so we could be there as quickly as possible and start filming. However, not everything went as planned. Luke, who played Edward's best friend, was meant to appear in the final scene, delivering the final speech to Edward that wraps up the entire film. However, Luke couldn't come to filming so I quickly placed Charlotte's character in the role and quickly edited the script slightly so that it made sense. It doesn't deliver the same emotional impact, but I guess it suffices.

After finishing Rebound, I was very impressed with myself and the finish project. Some people still think that it is the best film I have made, better than the proceeding films I have made, Empty Love and Infatuation. Rebound will always hold a very special place in my heart, as it is the most personal film I have made and possibly the most personal film I will ever make. It was also the film that got me back into film making, the film that defined my "style" and how I would make films in the future.

However, Rebound wasn't enough. I wanted to do more. I wanted to make another film. And little did I know that I would have finished another 22 minute film by the end of the month.

Dim.

08/06/2010: A Quarter of a Year Later...

2010-06-08T20:41:00.000+01:00

It's been such a long time since I last updated this blog! Over the past three months, I have been rather busy either writing scripts for both Your Own Disaster and Dateless Losers, coupled with school work, mixed with an awful lot of socialising and partying. But I'm back! Writing to my audience of around, well, no one.

Since my last entry, I have uploaded a few videos to YouTube. "Your Boyfriend's Penis" is a song I wrote about something I was going through at the time under the guise of "The Desperate Guitarist". It's all meant in good humour, as a parody of my emotions. You may notice that I am in no way musically talented and did not even attempt to sing the song - it is meant to be more like spoken verse, something very stylized. I created a music video for it, which is linked to above.

I also wrote another song titled "Three Second Blowjob" and made a music video based on it. Everyone who should know already knows the story behind this song, so let's not go into it.

Not that I created it, but I would like to give a shout out to Radiating Eyes, a great local band which some of my friends are in. I recorded a gig of theirs at one of the music venues in Bedford, Esquires, towards the end of March and I have put the videos up on YouTube. There are four parts, and I am pretty sure you can find the others yourselves.

Since my last blog post, I have continued to write my episodic web murder mystery series "Your Own Disaster", which I finished writing a couple of months ago. In total, all of the scripts added together are about 92 pages long spread over 7 episodes. However, by the end of writing Your Own Disaster a lot of my enthusiasm for the project had died. I think there are some great scenes in there, some really good dialogue and some great characters. I'm really impressed with my characterization in those scripts, the way I define each character by the way that they talk. However, I think at the moment, something like Your Own Disaster is far too ambitious for me to attempt. I'm keeping the scripts and keeping the ideas at the back of my mind in the hope that one day I may return to the series and actually make it.

So as soon as I finished writing Your Own Disaster, I went straight onto "Dateless Losers". A month or two before I had even started writing Dateless Losers, I had began making copious amounts of notes in general notebooks at school - writing down possible titles for the film, the plot structure for each of the three acts and even going as far as writing down ideas for individual scenes as they came to me, in full, as I would usually do in a script.

After almost two months of writing it, I finally finished writing the script for Dateless Losers. Something that had started out as a 7 page script, meant to be a very small epilogue to Empty Love, had become a colossal 118 pages - by far the longest thing I have ever written. 120 pages is the average for a feature film screenplay, therefore Dateless Losers is pretty much written to the same length that a feature film is and therefore will probably be around the same length of a feature film!

Even I impress myself sometimes. I am really proud of the script. I think it's really funny, full of tons of pop culture references and in-jokes. And, strangely enough, I think the script is pretty emotional in places too. The way the relationship between Brendon and Ryan develops becomes pretty heartbreaking, as well as the relationship between Brendon and Ryan and the new characters introduced in the film. The way these characters talk and act and interact with each other has really been drilled into my head - so much so that in the later portions of writing the script, it became very easy as the dialogue between the characters would just bounce off from one to another.

I started filming Dateless Losers about a month ago and I intend to continue filming regularly until it is finished - hopefully it won't take more than a couple on months. Hopefully. Currently I'm meant to be revising for my GCSE's, although I am continuously getting side-tracked by doing other things, such as tweaking what I have edited of Dateless Losers.

Currently we have almost 15 minutes of Dateless Losers filmed, up to about page 22 of the script. I posted a little teaser trailer of Dateless Losers on YouTube, showing a very funny blooper which happened the first day of filming. I also posted a rough cut of the opening of Dateless Losers - believe me, the tweaks I have made to the opening now make it so much better! Also, I uploaded a small clip that Kim and Brandon recorded while I wasn't looking.

Hopefully I will be dubbing some audio with Lee on Thursday. After that, I plan to upload the first 15 minutes of Dateless Losers to YouTube. I also plan to film some more on Saturday and Sunday this coming weekend.

I have started a podcast, DimCast, in which I talk with guest-hosts about nothing for around 40 minutes. I've been told they are pretty amusing, but make your mind up for yourself.

Finally, I just want to talk briefly about my plans for this blog in the future. I really hope I do not go for another three months without updating it, as I do enjoy having a record of what I was doing, when I was doing it and how I was feeling at the time. Things like that are very precious, and I was very happy that I continued for so long to update the Mad Cow Films website so many years ago. I intend to, hopefully, write a few more entries of "The History of Helium Cow Films" feature which will bring the history up to the present - the problem is that I have left it for three months, meaning that there is more history to write about than before. Which is a pain.

I am also very tempted recently to start a Vlog, or a video diary, or just a vague documentary about myself, talking about who I am, what I like etc. I think it will give my YouTube channel a lot more personal flair and give out side viewers who do not know me something to relate to. Also, I may start uploading vague recordings of me just talking about things, reviewing things. Oh, I don't know, for example... Doctor Who. I'm not sure, hopefully I'll get around to starting to record one sooner or later.

Dim.

24/02/2010: I am up too late

2010-02-24T01:16:00.000Z

It is stupid o'clock and I should have gone to bed hours ago, but as I have not updated the blog in weeks, I decided I should just give a brief update.

Things have been slow to say the least. I have been busy recently with a large amount of coursework (the reason I am up so late tonight - this is LITERALLY leaving it to the last minute!) and also my involvement in my school's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, in which I play Peter Quince - the leader of the Mechanicals. I really should be asleep, as my first performance is tomorrow (never mind, I shall sleep during school).

I have continued writing Your Own Disaster, whenever I can bring myself to do so. The ideas are still progressing, as is my writing. I am currently thinking it will be seven shorter episodes, rather than the six episode series, with each episode lasting about 20 minutes, that I had originally planned. However, once I have finished writing the entire series, I plan on revising and re-writing it. The characters are all too willing to open their hearts and talk about how they are feeling - people in real life are not like that! Everyone is a puzzle, a mystery waiting to be solved.

However, as much as I want to write Your Own Disaster, I have been distracted by the idea of a sequel to Empty Love. As I mentioned in the last entry, I was asked to make a short film for my school's variety show. Although I had written the script for this epilogue, myself and Lee never got around to filming it (mainly due to lack of actors and my commitments to A Midsummer Night's Dream). Both myself and Lee were eager to make a full-on sequel to Empty Love, using ideas that were in the Epilogue and expanding upon them. After a long conversation with Lee on MSN, I pretty much decided on the basic plot of the entire film - slowly, the scenes and dialogue are building themselves in my head, giving me an idea of exactly how this film is going to play out. Oh, it's going to be great!

Something is annoying me though. I have no title! I hate writing without a title - it's a very small thing, and the title itself is unimportant to the entire thing, but it annoys me to write without a title. It's hard to pin-point the exact theme and mood of this film - although it IS a direct sequel to Empty Love, I am not letting it be "the sequel film". Yes, I will include the "iconic" running sequence, but very much cut down - this film will pass on its own qualities, not those of its predecessor. I want to include the word "teen" in the title. "Teen Solidarity"... no, that sounds stupid. And the film isn't ABOUT solidarity! "Two Teens and Their Quest for Happiness"... I can not write tonight... It's the exhaustion, it must be.

Last week, I finally got the HD camera I have been wanting for an age. It is a Panasonic HDC-SD10. However, the camera records in the AVCHD format which is not compatible with the editing software I own. I spent most of last week trying to adapt to Sony Vegas, but I HATE it. I cannot stand it! I tried to run Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 and, although it runs, both my computer and my laptop are too slow to run it and the HD footage properly. Oh well. Hopefully, within the next month I may be getting my brother's laptop which has 4GB RAM and should be more than capable of running it. I can't wait to finally create a film in HD!

Now, I am off to bed. Before I collapse, or something.

Dim.

08/02/2010: General Updates, Empty Love Epilogue

2010-02-08T20:27:00.000Z

I have been continuing to update the blog with the "History of Helium Cow Films" feature and I am sure that it'll be finished within a couple more entries, detailing the more recently Helium Cow Films developments.

I also finally started writing the six episode web-series I have been planning more months now titled "Your Own Disaster". I plan on reading a few of the Sin City graphic novels to gather some film-noir inspiration for Your Own Disaster. I am also currently reading "Doctor Who: The Writer's Tale: The Final Chapter" to learn more about writing scripts for television and film. It's a really, really interesting book.

However, the most interesting piece of news is that I was approached by a sixth former at my school on Thursday, asking me to create a five minute film to entire into my school's Variety Show. This started my brain thinking and soon after I had planned out the basic idea for a short epilogue to Empty Love - Empty Love had the most open ending of all of my films. I really enjoy writing both Brendon and Ryan, as in some ways, it is like expressing two very distinct and different parts of my personality. Although it is only a "maybe" whether or not the Empty Love Epilogue will be in the Variety Show, I am set on making it anyway. I just finished writing the script, which I think is terrific, and both myself and Lee really want to continue making films using the characters of Brendon and Ryan. They have a really great dynamic.

Dim.

07/02/2010: History of Helium Cow Films (Part Eight: GMVs Summer 2006 - Summer 2008)

2010-02-07T14:29:00.000Z

Welcome to the eighth part of the "History of Helium Cow Films" feature. Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five, Part Six and Part Seven.

(This entry is going to be as in-depth as I can make it, so I can look back on this blog as a historical resource to how I made films and the creative processes behind them. All of my films are going to be named in bold and I will add a link to the video on YouTube itself where I can. However, due to copyright restrictions, a lot of music of my old videos has been removed, thus removing the rest of the audio too.)

As you might have noticed from the title of this entry, this part of the feature is slightly different from the rest as I am now going backwards to talk about something that I decided not to mention in the other entries. All the time while I was making other short films, I also made lots of GMVs (that stands for (Video) Game Music Video, if you didn't know). Although these aren't technically films I made, I do believe that they really helped me improve my editing skills and that most of my subscribers on The Mad Cow YouTube Channel subscribed due to my GMVs. I will try to avoid this entry degenerating into a simple "I liked this video game then, so I made this GMV", although it might be hard to avoid.

My first GMV was a Fan-Made Twilight Princess Trailer created soon after E3 2006, because I was trembling in anticipation for The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. It used an acoustic guitar rendition of The Dark World theme from A Link to the Past. In November, I made the Fan-Made Twilight Princess Trailer 2 inspired by the recent launch trailers for Twilight Princess. The Fan-Made Twilight Princess Trailer 3 was created on December 20th, just before I received Twilight Princess and the Wii for Christmas in 2006. The music I used was "the WORLD" by Japanese rock band Nightmare. It's the first opening theme of the anime Death Note, which I was watching at the time, and it one of my favourite anime.

In the new year of 2007, I decided I really wanted to make a long Twilight Princess trailer, using all of the amazing cutscenes from the game that weren't featured in the released trailers. I spent a long time (and I mean a really, really long time) downloading the cutscenes for Twilight Princess. The end project was less of a trailer and more of a re-telling of the story, with cutscenes edited together to Zelda music, with some very good and important cutscenes remaining unedited. This projected was known as The Ultimate Twilight Princess Trailer (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9 and Part 10). It is by far the most viewed and rated thing I have EVER put on YouTube, with some parts having way over 10,000 views and upwards towards 100 ratings. I put a lot of effort into making it, but I wish some of my actual views got even part of the publicity this received.

As I mentioned in part four of this feature, while the first version of the Ultimate Twilight Princess Trailer was rendering, my mother flipped at me and stopped it, deleting most of the things I had on the computer in the process. However, I was able to salvage the first seven parts of the trailer and I finished it by making the other three parts when I got my own computer.

Before I got my own personal computer and was banned from editing on my mother's, I sneaked onto it couple of times and made an Elebits/Eledees Trailer for the Wii game Eledees (titled Elebits outside of Europe) using the song "House of Fun" by Madness. The ironic thing is that I never actually bought a copy of Eledees, despite how hyped I was for the game - I ended up borrowing a copy from a friend and completing it.

In April of 2007, I was in love with Twilight Princess (it is still one of my favourite video games of all time) and I made the Fan-Made Twilight Princess Trailer 4. Much like how the third fan-made Twilight Princess trailer used the first opening of Death Note for the music, the fourth used the second opening theme of Death Note - "What's Up People" by Maximum the Hormone.

During April-May 2007, I created three Resident Evil 4 Wii Edition and Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles trailers using footage that had recently been released during a Capcom press event. The first trailer used the song "Blue" preformed by Angie Hart and written by Joss Whedon, specifically for the seventh season episode of Buffy "Conversations with Dead People". The second trailer featured the song "Hero" by Chad Kroeger, although I was unsure about the song because it is often over-used. The third and final trailer I made for these two games once again used "the WORLD" by Nightmare, the same song I used for the third Twilight Princess trailer. All of these trailers use essentially the same footage cut together in different ways, because I was working with a limited amount of trailers. I think I like the second one the best.

In later March/April, I finally got my hands on an American imported version of Final Fantasy III on the DS, which began my life-long obsession with Final Fantasy. I played VII when I was younger and loved it, but hadn't played anything since. In April, I borrowed both Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy VIII from a friend and started playing them, loving every second, so I created A Tribute to Final Fantasy using FMV footage from Final Fantasy III, VII, Advent Children and VIII and the song "How to Save a Life" by The Fray.

On the 9th June 2007, the same day I completed Final Fantasy VII for the first time, I created Sephiroth has an Evil Plan (To Destroy the World) featuring the song "Evil Plan" by Five Iron Frenzy, one of my favourite Ska Punk bands. The idea was influenced by this video which uses the same song and Light Yagami from Death Note. The day after, I created Kadaaj Throws a Pool Party using footage from Advent Children and the song "Pool Party" by The Aquabats!. With 58 ratings at the time of writing this entry, averaging at 5/5, this is one of my most popular and acclaimed videos.

I took a break from making Final Fantasy GMVs and quickly made Resident Evil - Blood. The song featured is "Blood" by My Chemical Romance, which I first heard on another Final Fantasy GMV about Seymour Guado from Final Fantasy X.

I followed this up in September by creating five videos under the banner of the Compilation of Final Fantasy, featuring footage from Final Fantasy VII, VIII, X and Advent Children. The first GMV, Final Fantasy VII: Through the Fire, used the song "Through the Fire" from the musical episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in season 6 titled "Once More with Feeling". The second focussed on Advent Children and was titled Final Fantasy VII AC: Do You Like Waffles. It featured this little song I had seen on a Resident Evil 4 GMV previously and had found hilarious. The third GMV was Final Fantasy VIII: The Only Difference and featured the song "The Only Difference Between Martyrdom and Suicide is Press Coverage" by my first and one of my all-time favourite bands Panic! At the Disco. The next GMV, Final Fantasy X: Don't Feel Like Dancing, used the song "Don't Feel Like Dancing" by the Scissor Scissors which was very popular in the UK a while before I made the video. The final GMV in the compilation was Final Fantasy: Accidentally in Love which used the song "Accidentally in Love" by Counting Crows which was featured in the popular Dreamworks film Shrek. The GMV focusses heavily on the couples of the games featured in the compilation, and is one of my favourite GMVs I have ever made.

After the Compilation of Final Fantasy was finished, I made another video (this time an AMV, because it was based on an anime) which was Last Order: I Constantly Thank God. Once again, I used a song by Panic! At the Disco. This time, it was "I Constantly Thank God for Esteban". The footage was from the Final Fantasy VII OVA "Last Order". I cannot link to the video because unfortunately it has been blocked due to my use of copyrighted audio.

In October of 2007, I created Phantom Hourglass: Higher & Higher, based on the then upcoming The Legend of Zelda game for the DS. The song featured was "Higher & Higher", the second opening theme of the anime Rave Master (Groove Adventure RAVE) which is another one of my favourite anime.

The next GMV I made was yet another Resident Evil one titled R.E. Your Brains, using the song "re: Your Brains" by Jonathan Coulton. The footage used was taken from recently released Umbrella Chronicles trailers which allowed a lot more flexibility with how I edited it.

Due to the release of new Final Fantasy XIII and Versus XIII trailers in December of 2007, I created another GMV titled Tribute to Fabula Nova Crystallis, using a Japanese song I previously heard on a YouTube video. It is ironic how, at the time, I thought that I would never be able to own a PS3 to play either of these games and by the end of the next you I had not only a PS3 but also an Xbox 360!

In the new year of 2008, I started to play the Kingdom Hearts games and created a GMV titled Kingdom Hearts: Nine in the Afternoon, using both the opening and ending FMVs of Kingdom Hearts and Kingdom Hearts II. Upon finally completing Final Fantasy X-2, I made Final Fantasy X and X-2: Firefly which uses an extended and acoustic version of The Ballad of Serenity, the opening theme of the sci-fi Joss Whedon TV series Firefly. I also created To Those Who Protect the Planet, a tribute to the entire Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, using FMV footage and a vocal version of Aerith's theme from Final Fantasy VII, preformed by RIKKI who also preformed Suteki Da Ne.

After playing Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII, I decided to remake scene-for-scene this Japanese Crisis Core trailer in English, which resulted in the Crisis Core Trailer English Remake. It took a long time not only to get the footage I needed, but also edit them together. In May of 2008, I made my final GMV - R.E.make: Your Brains, a remake of R.E. Your Brains with more footage, as Umbrella Chronicles had been released and I was able to use all of the cutscene footage available.

After that, I stopped. I was left drained by Dirge of the Dead and did not know what to do, or how to do it, or even if I wanted to do it any more. I played a lot of video games during 2008 and the first half of 2009 - I would usually beat a video game every other week or so, sometimes beating one in a day. My interest in video games broadened and lacked focus on one specific game or franchise to make videos about. So, in the end, I just stopped.

Hopefully in the next part of this feature I will be able to talk about Helium Cow Films' recent history and wrap this entire thing up.

Dim.

02/02/2010: DVDs, Powers Manga and Assassin's Creep

2010-02-02T20:43:00.000Z

Infatuation seems to be getting a lot of positive comments and I'm really thankful for them. Keep them coming, along with constructive criticism - both are wanted! I have burned about fifteen DVDs with Rebound, Empty Love, Infatuation and all the bloopers on them but have yet to sell one single copy. That isn't to say people are not interested, more that people have no money. I'm sure to sell one of them sooner or later - for anyone who is interested, they cost £5 and are available directly from myself.

I mentioned in sixth part of the History of Helium Cow Films feature that Powers may not be completely dead. I am officially confirming that my friend Liam Venables and myself are working on a manga version of Powers, with myself writing a brand new script for it and Liam doing the artwork - he's terrific at drawing, he really is.

I have finally finished the script for mine and Brandon Taylor's short film project, Assassin's Creep, a semi-parody of Assassin's Creed. However, I am really unsure about the quality of the script and am not sure if I am ever going to film it. It just seems stupid. Really stupid. And in some ways, I feel like I am past that as a film maker. I'm past making Hello Joe and Snakes in a House and awful films like those. But in some ways, I think it might be nice to make a short, stupid film every now again. Less stress, more fun. I'm really not sure - I'm just about to e-mail the script to Brandon to see what he thinks of it and if he still wants to go ahead with it.

In the next couple of days, I will hopefully start writing the script for the first episode of my new six episode webseries "Your Own Disaster" (I'm really busy at the moment - I haven't even played a video game in over a week, which is unheard of for me). I've been thinking a lot about it recently - I always think a lot about it. Certain lines of dialogue I want to include in it, how I am going to frame certain shots etc. I may do a lot of storyboards for it, so I know how I am going to film each shot.

Dim.

02/02/2010: History of Helium Cow Films (Part Seven: Winter 2007/2008 - Summer 2008)

2010-02-02T20:18:00.000Z

Welcome to the seventh part of the "History of Helium Cow Films" feature. Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five and Part Six.

I mentioned in the last part of this feature that after I decided to cancel Powers I moved on to the biggest project I have ever worked on. This film is Dirge of the Dead.

In the beginning of the new year of 2008, I decided I wanted to try and watch a lot more films to try and get influences for my own. I remember one day, while I was ill and off school, I watched the original Night of the Living Dead. I did not enjoy it too much to begin with - the film is incredibly dated. But I continued to watch the George A. Romero "... of the Dead" films. I fell in love with Dawn of the Dead - I also loved Day, and thought Land was pretty good. I also watched 28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later and loved them. Although not strictly zombie films, I watched Sam Raimi's Evil Dead trilogy too and thought it was amazing. I was also addicted to Resident Evil games at the time, too. I ordered Resident Evil 2 (my favourite classic Resident Evil game) during that period and loved it.

Needless to say, I had zombies on the brains. I decided that I really, really wanted to do a zombie films. Rob Timmins, who I had been making films with for the past couple of years and who was essentially my writing partner and filming buddy, had no interest in making a zombie film though and had no part in Dirge of the Dead. This made the process even harder than it would have been already.

I began thinking of ideas in late January, early February. I decided that I wanted to use classic Romero zombies - the slow moving kind, opposed to the 28 Days Later style "infected". I also decided that I wanted the survivors to meet in a public place that we could get mostly deserted. So, I decided that I would have the majority of the film set at my middle school which I was attending at the time. The idea was slightly influenced by my brother Matt's attempt at a zombie film, Dead Weight, but the two films are very different.

I began watching lots and lots of "how to make zombies" videos on YouTube. I ordered a lot of high-quality make up for the zombies and a lot of fake blood, including ordering corn syrup from America to make my own fake blood if my other supply ran out (they used corn syrup, red food colouring and blue food colouring to make the blood in The Evil Dead). The funny thing is that we hardly used any of the resources in the end - I have a lot left over, if I ever wanted to make another zombie film or needed fake blood (we used the fake blood from Dirge of the Dead to make the period stain on Charity's underwear in Infatuation).

Of course, a zombie film would not be a zombie film without the actual zombies. Finding actors is hard at the best of times and made even harder when you are trying to recruit enough to play a zombie army. I made some sign-up lists at school for both people who wanted to play the zombies and people who wanted to do the zombie's make up. Loads of people signed up.

Filming started for Dirge of the Dead in late March of 2008 and was not finished until late July of the same year. The opening scene of Dirge of the Dead was filmed in the fields near Sam Braybrook's house. The next few scenes were filmed at my house and down the road where I used to live and a couple of roads that connected to it. Then, the scene shifted to the school for the rest of the film.

Filming after school for Dirge of the Dead was one of the most stressful experiences of my life. We were only allowed one day to film after school, and that was a Thursday. We also only had an hour to film. It was a pain to try and organize who was staying after school - people were just uninterested. I remember having to go around and beg my friends to stay after school for that day. It was always so frustrating. It would take a long time to get the make up on the zombies and people would always mess around (they still do) while filming, which is very stressful when you're working with limited time.

I decided to film many of the conversation scenes during lunch breaks at school. This was less than ideal. People would often forget clothing and I would always have to rush around gather people up. You would usually hear noises from the playground outside and many people would deliberately make it difficult for us to film, by running around, making noise and banging on the door of the IT room we were filming in.

Dirge of the Dead was the story of the classic zombie apocalypse told from the point of view of a young teenager named George (after George A. Romero). George wakes up one day to realise that the world he once knew is dead and zombies walk the streets. He makes his way to his local school in an attempt to find survivors. There, he finds Jonny (names after the character Johnny from Night of the Living Dead) who has been bitten by one of the zombies, along with Eve and Vince (named after Vince Vera from Pulp Fiction). The four then plan on what to do next.

Dirge of the Dead was intended as a tribute to classic horror and zombie films. There are a lot of shots or dialogue that are taken from other films. A lot of music is also taken from the ".. of the Dead" films and 28 Days Later. This wasn't intended as plagiarism - it was a tribute, an homage.

Dirge of the Dead was originally released exclusively to DVD. I was trying to remake the £70 or so that I spent on buying make up and a new tripod for my brother's camera. In the end, I made about £100 from selling DVDs which I used to fund myself buying an Xbox 360.

Months later, for Halloween, I released Dirge of the Dead (Part One, Part Two and Part Three) and the Making of Dirge of the Dead (Part One and Part Two) to YouTube on the new Helium Cow Films account. I honestly think Dirge of the Dead was not a particularly bad film. The writing was poor and cliché but that was the POINT of it. For a celebration of the zombie genre, made by a 13-year-old with numerous things limiting him, I think the film is actually pretty amazing. I put a terrific amount of work into Dirge of the Dead - it's strange comparing it to my later works such as Rebound and Infatuation, which are undoubtedly better films but much simpler.

After Dirge of the Dead, I was exhausted. I wanted a break from film making for a while. However, I attended a film making course run by Children's University with Rob during the Summer holidays. Most of the people there were years younger than us and far less experienced in film making. I was forced to partake in making some abysmal short films.

After so much stress and numerous personal issues, I gave up. I had a huge creative block and did not know what to write about. Also, I had lost all of my old friends therefore had no actors for the films. I was alone, and almost friendless.

Dim.

31/01/2010: Infatuation Bloopers and DVDs

2010-01-31T22:26:00.000Z

In between walking around town aimlessly for hours while I wait for my work experience papers to be signed and sitting in a daze of exhaustion, I finally finished editing the Infatuation Bloopers. Unlike the other blooper videos which are multi-part epics, the Infatuation Bloopers consist of only one video. This is due to a mixture of there not being too many funny bloopers, me trying to cut the bloopers tighter together to make it funnier, my own exhaustion at editing and the fact I was trying to keep it short so I could fit the video on the DVD.

I mentioned on the 27th January about a possible DVD that would include Rebound, Empty Love, Infatuation and all of the bloopers. I decided that, to make money to put towards a new laptop and maybe even a new HD camera, I would make these DVDs and sell them for £5 each. I spent the rest of today working towards the DVD - the first ever copy of it is currently burning. They will be on sale shortly, available directly from me.

Dim.

31/01/2010: Infatuation finished, now on YouTube

2010-01-31T00:08:00.000Z

At the time of writing this, it is one minute past midnight and for the last couple of hours, Helium Cow Films' latest film, Infatuation, has been up on YouTube.

Infatuation is the third film is Helium Cow Films' loose "trilogy of love", which started with Rebound and continued with Empty Love. Infatuation is the story of a girl, Charity, who seems down on her luck when it comes to boyfriends. She never seems to be able to hold one down, and they all inevitably dump her. However, she soon meets high-school heart-throb Bobby Stills - has Charity's luck finally changed?

Infatuation (Part One)

Infatuation (Part Two)

Infatuation (Part Three)

Please rate, comment and subscribe! I shall be working on the Infatuation Bloopers for the next few days and hopefully they shall be on YouTube soon.

Dim.