Yes, the fight goes on.
The script is over eighty-pages in length. At one stage, completing shooting the movie seemed like an absolutely impossible task. But after a four-month break, we are back, and making lots of progress.
Yesterday, we visited the local woods (Episburg Forest), and added some more to the forest shoot-out. It went quite well. The footage was as I had hoped.
Friday, 10 July 2009
Sunday, 13 July 2008
Who Done It 2: Double-Edged Smile
In November 2007, we were assigned to make a short film as a school project. The film had to be entitled "Who Done It", since that was apart of the National Cirriculum... whatever. Anyway, I, along with two other friends (the MSD Films lot) entered school later than others. We had all get ourselves college courses but it didn't work out for any of us. So, bearing that in mind we had to script, storyboard and film the whole thing in, like, two weeks -- so there was no time for respite.
We got to work on figuring out the story for our "Who Done It" piece. Being a huge fan of the Joker character I thought it would be pretty cool to make the killer in our film not too dissimilar from the Clown Prince in the sense that he leaves a Joker card at each crime scene. We discussed various ideas but in the end we thought the Joker route was by far the most fun and interesting idea we had culminated.
Not before long we had structured a basic story outline for our film. It was going to be about a Detective investigating the murder of a Sixth Form student in the school toilets. Throughout the movie the Detective starts to learn more about the murder and eventually he realizes that the murder is something of a set-up. We are not 100% happy with this piece of work because we acknowledge that the story is quite difficult to follow. But that is what happens when you are told to make a film in little under a fortnight.
Anyway, if you are interested in seeing the final piece, here it is in all of its glory:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=MHWCSFBLViw
Obviously, we were unable to capture the footage in HD-quality since we had to use the equipment provided by school but the film was hugely loved by the course tutor. So much so that we had all achieved a "B" grade -- the highest in the class... and everyone else had had a month's head start on us. It was also showed to other classes and it received a lot of positive feedback. I was half expecting the people who had seen it to ask for my autograph but that kind of, like, didn't happen. Oh well.
Since then, we haven't really got anything to show. We began work on a Star Wars fan film named "The Lost Brother" (roughly three months after "Who Done It") but eventually the idea was scrapped because, well, we thought the script sucked. Again, if you are interested, here is a link to the trailer we had made for the film:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=xFVH58ZOVxo
We had purchased a £300 Supreme Darth Vader costume solely for this movie so it was incredibly disheartening to see the film trash-canned. But there we go -- lesson learned. It's always there if needed, I guess...
But, the main reason we scrapped the idea is because I was sitting in front of an Apple Mac at school one day and for some reason I envisioned a scene where the killer from "Who Done It" is stood in front of a bunch of criminals, telling them to help him with a crime. Only this time, the killer is lathered in Joker make-up -- Heath Ledger style (RIP). Boy did I want to make this happen! So I informed the MSD Films lot about my change in heart and they were actually very understanding. They, too, acknowledged the poorness of "The Lost Brother" script so they were quite relieved to ditch the idea. So, the same night I began work on "Who Done It 2" and I was playing around with a lot of intriguing ideas. I had convinced myself that this is to be the project in which we had been striving to achieve. Everything that I have learned about filmmaking was going to result in this film. This is it... no getting scared now -- a nice "Home Alone" homage for you there.
After around an hour of playing with ideas I visited SuperHeroHype message boards and acquired the services of Andy Heggie (Eggyman) to co-write the film. This guy is a great writer -- full of ideas and best of all, is in love with the Joker... like meee. I told him about the original film and my ideas for the sequel and instantly he was throwing ideas at me. Over the course of the last couple of months we have intensely discussed the right direction for the film and we have found that we basically share the exact same ideas.
During writing the film, we have conformed a basic look for "Clown" (the killer from the first film). Here are a couple of YouTube videos for you to inspect:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=nqVESTeSFZ4
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=OJsQFpAF038
It goes without saying that the look for the character is heavily based on look of Heath Ledger's Joker but that has inspired us to kind of say: "You know what? Why can this not be something of a Joker origin story -- signalling the true motivations buried in this character?" You will find that in this movie we deeply explore the thought-processes of criminology to the point where we are trying to justify why a person would choose to end a life. It is looking like a great film, in my opinion -- and this is coming from someone who is very critical of their own work. It is a huge step from "Who Done It" and it really, really expands on the characters. Honestly, I believe people will really dig it.
We have almost completed the script so filming should begin within a fortnight at the very least. In the meantine, we thought we'd film a written scene from the script to give us an idea of the feel of the movie. Here it is:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=up17W8Fa0DA
We got to work on figuring out the story for our "Who Done It" piece. Being a huge fan of the Joker character I thought it would be pretty cool to make the killer in our film not too dissimilar from the Clown Prince in the sense that he leaves a Joker card at each crime scene. We discussed various ideas but in the end we thought the Joker route was by far the most fun and interesting idea we had culminated.
Not before long we had structured a basic story outline for our film. It was going to be about a Detective investigating the murder of a Sixth Form student in the school toilets. Throughout the movie the Detective starts to learn more about the murder and eventually he realizes that the murder is something of a set-up. We are not 100% happy with this piece of work because we acknowledge that the story is quite difficult to follow. But that is what happens when you are told to make a film in little under a fortnight.
Anyway, if you are interested in seeing the final piece, here it is in all of its glory:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=MHWCSFBLViw
Obviously, we were unable to capture the footage in HD-quality since we had to use the equipment provided by school but the film was hugely loved by the course tutor. So much so that we had all achieved a "B" grade -- the highest in the class... and everyone else had had a month's head start on us. It was also showed to other classes and it received a lot of positive feedback. I was half expecting the people who had seen it to ask for my autograph but that kind of, like, didn't happen. Oh well.
Since then, we haven't really got anything to show. We began work on a Star Wars fan film named "The Lost Brother" (roughly three months after "Who Done It") but eventually the idea was scrapped because, well, we thought the script sucked. Again, if you are interested, here is a link to the trailer we had made for the film:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=xFVH58ZOVxo
We had purchased a £300 Supreme Darth Vader costume solely for this movie so it was incredibly disheartening to see the film trash-canned. But there we go -- lesson learned. It's always there if needed, I guess...
But, the main reason we scrapped the idea is because I was sitting in front of an Apple Mac at school one day and for some reason I envisioned a scene where the killer from "Who Done It" is stood in front of a bunch of criminals, telling them to help him with a crime. Only this time, the killer is lathered in Joker make-up -- Heath Ledger style (RIP). Boy did I want to make this happen! So I informed the MSD Films lot about my change in heart and they were actually very understanding. They, too, acknowledged the poorness of "The Lost Brother" script so they were quite relieved to ditch the idea. So, the same night I began work on "Who Done It 2" and I was playing around with a lot of intriguing ideas. I had convinced myself that this is to be the project in which we had been striving to achieve. Everything that I have learned about filmmaking was going to result in this film. This is it... no getting scared now -- a nice "Home Alone" homage for you there.
After around an hour of playing with ideas I visited SuperHeroHype message boards and acquired the services of Andy Heggie (Eggyman) to co-write the film. This guy is a great writer -- full of ideas and best of all, is in love with the Joker... like meee. I told him about the original film and my ideas for the sequel and instantly he was throwing ideas at me. Over the course of the last couple of months we have intensely discussed the right direction for the film and we have found that we basically share the exact same ideas.
During writing the film, we have conformed a basic look for "Clown" (the killer from the first film). Here are a couple of YouTube videos for you to inspect:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=nqVESTeSFZ4
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=OJsQFpAF038
It goes without saying that the look for the character is heavily based on look of Heath Ledger's Joker but that has inspired us to kind of say: "You know what? Why can this not be something of a Joker origin story -- signalling the true motivations buried in this character?" You will find that in this movie we deeply explore the thought-processes of criminology to the point where we are trying to justify why a person would choose to end a life. It is looking like a great film, in my opinion -- and this is coming from someone who is very critical of their own work. It is a huge step from "Who Done It" and it really, really expands on the characters. Honestly, I believe people will really dig it.
We have almost completed the script so filming should begin within a fortnight at the very least. In the meantine, we thought we'd film a written scene from the script to give us an idea of the feel of the movie. Here it is:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=up17W8Fa0DA
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