April 4th, 2009.
Feedback from our director mentor, Paul Andrew Williams:
That script is one of the best short scripts I've read. It is really really good. I'd love to come to the shoot, I will keep my mouth shut don't worry. If you fancy a beer before the shoot let me know and if there is anything I can do to help let me know.
Well fucking done.
This made our day.
It's a bloody lovely thing to say.
Unfortunately, due to the last-minute nature of locations and filming dates, we didn't get to meet up with Paul before the shoot.
It's a shame we didn't have the time - what with us being all Northern and down in the Big Smoke and that.
Especially as he's the man responsible for this bit of brilliance...
Sunday, 26 April 2009
#4 - The Wish-List...
One evening, on the train from London to Manchester, having met with Andy Noble at Amplify, we set about drawing up a wish-list of actors...
Martin Freeman and Julian Barratt were ridiculously high on that list...
We didn't think we'd get them but we put them down nonetheless...
On March 27th we sent out lots of scripts and lots of approach letters... We considered them token gestures and assumed we would have to organise casting sessions for the parts of James and Myles...
Martin agreed to take part on March 31st. I thought it was April Fools Day come early and found it hard to believe...
Julian agreed to take part on April 2nd...
Joe and I were over the moon...
We still find it quite hard to believe.
x
Martin Freeman and Julian Barratt were ridiculously high on that list...
We didn't think we'd get them but we put them down nonetheless...
On March 27th we sent out lots of scripts and lots of approach letters... We considered them token gestures and assumed we would have to organise casting sessions for the parts of James and Myles...
Martin agreed to take part on March 31st. I thought it was April Fools Day come early and found it hard to believe...
Julian agreed to take part on April 2nd...
Joe and I were over the moon...
We still find it quite hard to believe.
x
#3 - People Who Actually Know What They Are Talking About.
Let it be said that we have no idea what we're doing.
After the first meeting with Andy and Amplify and Everyone Else, we left feeling well out of our depth.
As I sat there sipping London Guinness with the four other directors - talking passionately amongst themselves about lens adaptors and colour correction - I felt painfully inadequate.
The perfectly-weathered leather seats of the Shoreditch watering hole into which we'd been ushered were slowly swallowing me up.
And rightfully so.
We didn't belong in this room.
Nor have we belonged in any other room since.
Joe
After the first meeting with Andy and Amplify and Everyone Else, we left feeling well out of our depth.
As I sat there sipping London Guinness with the four other directors - talking passionately amongst themselves about lens adaptors and colour correction - I felt painfully inadequate.
The perfectly-weathered leather seats of the Shoreditch watering hole into which we'd been ushered were slowly swallowing me up.
And rightfully so.
We didn't belong in this room.
Nor have we belonged in any other room since.
Joe
#2 - Writing The Script (and Other Near Death Experiences...)
"Perfectionism is the enemy of creation, as extreme self-solitude is the enemy of well-being."
(John Updike)
'Isolation' is important subject matter for a lot of writers. For many, it is the driving force behind - and the solution to - creativity. Even today, in the CULTURE section of The Observer, Billie Joe Armstrong (lead singer and lyricist in Green Day) describes the 'sense of loneliness' identifiable on all of the band's records. In this instance, I agree. But that's not to say I haven't heard such a statement before. All artists, it seems, are solitary, isolated, lonely and tormented beings. Some of them (Ian Curtis) you believe; others (James Blunt) you do not. And to some extent it's all true.
Sort of.
Maybe.
Creative writing is an art-form that lends itself to self-solitude. It is hardly likely that Ian McEwan invited a few friends into his study when he sat down to write 'Atonement.' Novelists need to be alone when they work. How else can the personal relationship between reader and author be forged? Writing partnerships, however, are an exception. Although quite rare, they do exist in popular fiction (Stephen King/Peter Straub, James Patterson/Peter de Jonge) but they are definitely more common in film and television. Countless movies are written by two, three, even four or five people. Unlike a novel, the unique vision of a piece of film or television can be dreamt up and nurtured by several people. Comedy writers are my favourites.
For years I have been working my way back through the collaborations and partnerships that shaped - and continue to shape - British comedy. Gervais and Merchant, Fry and Laurie, Cook and Moore, Morecambe and Wise...
There is something attractive about a 'shared vision'; about exploring personal artistic themes and issues in the creative company of another person. Perhaps the difference between the two is simple: prose is written to be read (it is, in a sense, telepathy - in as much as it is born in the mind of the writer and embraced by the mind of the reader), whereas a script is written to be performed. It needs to be conversational and convincing. Collaboratively, there has to be a total and unified vision of how the written word will come to life on stage or screen. And that's where, in February 2009, my learning curve began...
Joe had written scripts before. He had written with other people before. I hadn't, but I knew that I wanted to. Unwavering as my relationship with writing prose has become, I have for many years harboured a desire to write something in the Courier New font (Joe has since explained the archaic and overdone nature of presenting scripts in this way).
The writing process began, sort of, on January 16th. We had met less than a year before (it now sounds like I am writing my autobiography) and writing together was a frequent subject for conversation. Then I received the following email:
In response to your previous suggestion that we should write together at some point...
Hello
I think we should enter this competition together:
http://www.ctrlaltshift.co.uk/film/#/Home
You have to pick one of the three themes and write a treatment for a short film. Click on the themes for info innit.
Deadline's 31 January.
Lemme know
Joe
So I had a little click and a little look and then we wrote a film treatment. We started writing the script with the notion of getting Todd Carty (Mark Fowler off of Eastenders) to cameo at the end of the film.
A lot of material - well, single lines of dialogue, but lots of them - had come out of the few nights brainstorming the treatment. There was definitely an A and a B - all we had to do was construct a funny and convincing narrative connecting the two, whilst staying true to our original aim: exposing the ridiculousness of certain attitudes towards HIV and AIDS, and especially the reinforcement of stereotype and stigma in the media.
It turns out writing comedy scripts is pretty hard.
It turns out Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie are far cleverer, far funnier and far more talented than even I imagined. And Ricky Gervais. And Steve Merchant. Which is annoying. Because, in the words of The Streets, it was supposed to be so easy...
We wrote most of the script in one exhaustive, intensive, caffeine-fuelled five day stint. Thanks to the relentless ludicrousness of the 9 to 5 (I'll refrain from a Marxist rant here - it'll do none of us any good) we could only write in the evening. And the night. And the early hours of the morning.
So that's what we did.
Monday to Friday. 6pm til whenever. And then, on the Saturday, the prospect of an all-day writing session. What made things twice as pressured was Joe's departure for America on the Sunday due to filming commitments at the SXSW music festival. This imposed a kind of 'natural' writing deadline. The plan was for the script (plus approach letters) to go out to agents while Joe was away. That way, when he returned, we would be able to devise a production schedule and get to work on shooting the film. And so...
... on the Saturday morning, with the kettle almost constantly boiling, we set to work on finishing the first completed version of the script.
It went well.
In a way.
I think we were about three quarters of the way through by that point and, feeling fresh with a whole day ahead, we were confident we could finish by 6 or 7pm. Then, just as Myles was delivering an ultimatum to James, Joe got a phonecall from fellow freelancer John Corrin (a bloody nice bloke what operated one of the cameras when we did shoot the film) to say the tapes they needed to film on at SXSW hadn't been delivered. It was just after two o clock in the afternoon. Unfortunately but understandably, the news buggered up our writing plans.
When I think back now, it is quite obvious that we had written the narrative to the point of completion in our heads. We knew exactly what would happen and where the film was headed but there were still a few scenes left to write before we got there. So, while Joe sought to resolve the problems with America (that sounds more political than it's meant to) I rushed to Dulcimer - a folk pub in Manchester - to finish the first draft.
A few hours later it was done. Structurally, it worked marvellously and I knew there were parts that would remain unedited in later drafts. I knew this because Joe and I had written them days, sometimes weeks, beforehand. The statistics joke, for example - where Myles combats James's
statement that more than 33 million people worldwide are living with HIV with the equally impressive, 'Mamma Mia grossed more than 20 million in its opening weekend....' - was written on the train to the second meeting at Amplify.
On 31st March, tired and bored at work in Salford, I received a phonecall from Joe. As far as I remember, the opening dialogue went something like this:
TIM: Hello.
JOE: Have you spoken to Jackie?
TIM: No, why?
JOE: Ah, I'm not sure if I should be the one to tell you...
TIM: What?
JOE: Martin Freeman's in.
TIM: You're joking.
JOE: I'm not. He likes the script and he wants to do it.
Just a normal day then, innit. Go to work. Have lunch. Get Martin Freeman involved in your short film. Bit more work. Home. The final surge of scriptwriting came weeks later. Originally 21 pages long, we had a lot of editing to do. Andy Noble, our London producer, suggested 10 - 15 pages and at first it seemed like a thankless task. Turns out he was right and once we got into it everything started coming together.
Held up in the Dulcimer early one mid-week evening, we set to work on finalising the script. It was the most relaxed we had been about the whole thing since winning the competition. It was a less pressured writing experience and despite the need to cut the script down we wound up adding jokes and enhancing lines. Equally, there were parts of the film that weren't needed and so we emerged, MANY hours later, with the final draft. It was only 15 pages in length.
The following day we confirmed Julian Barratt for the part of Myles.
Everything was going a bit mental...
(John Updike)
'Isolation' is important subject matter for a lot of writers. For many, it is the driving force behind - and the solution to - creativity. Even today, in the CULTURE section of The Observer, Billie Joe Armstrong (lead singer and lyricist in Green Day) describes the 'sense of loneliness' identifiable on all of the band's records. In this instance, I agree. But that's not to say I haven't heard such a statement before. All artists, it seems, are solitary, isolated, lonely and tormented beings. Some of them (Ian Curtis) you believe; others (James Blunt) you do not. And to some extent it's all true.
Sort of.
Maybe.
Creative writing is an art-form that lends itself to self-solitude. It is hardly likely that Ian McEwan invited a few friends into his study when he sat down to write 'Atonement.' Novelists need to be alone when they work. How else can the personal relationship between reader and author be forged? Writing partnerships, however, are an exception. Although quite rare, they do exist in popular fiction (Stephen King/Peter Straub, James Patterson/Peter de Jonge) but they are definitely more common in film and television. Countless movies are written by two, three, even four or five people. Unlike a novel, the unique vision of a piece of film or television can be dreamt up and nurtured by several people. Comedy writers are my favourites.
For years I have been working my way back through the collaborations and partnerships that shaped - and continue to shape - British comedy. Gervais and Merchant, Fry and Laurie, Cook and Moore, Morecambe and Wise...
There is something attractive about a 'shared vision'; about exploring personal artistic themes and issues in the creative company of another person. Perhaps the difference between the two is simple: prose is written to be read (it is, in a sense, telepathy - in as much as it is born in the mind of the writer and embraced by the mind of the reader), whereas a script is written to be performed. It needs to be conversational and convincing. Collaboratively, there has to be a total and unified vision of how the written word will come to life on stage or screen. And that's where, in February 2009, my learning curve began...
Joe had written scripts before. He had written with other people before. I hadn't, but I knew that I wanted to. Unwavering as my relationship with writing prose has become, I have for many years harboured a desire to write something in the Courier New font (Joe has since explained the archaic and overdone nature of presenting scripts in this way).
The writing process began, sort of, on January 16th. We had met less than a year before (it now sounds like I am writing my autobiography) and writing together was a frequent subject for conversation. Then I received the following email:
In response to your previous suggestion that we should write together at some point...
Hello
I think we should enter this competition together:
http://www.ctrlaltshift.co.uk/film/#/Home
You have to pick one of the three themes and write a treatment for a short film. Click on the themes for info innit.
Deadline's 31 January.
Lemme know
Joe
So I had a little click and a little look and then we wrote a film treatment. We started writing the script with the notion of getting Todd Carty (Mark Fowler off of Eastenders) to cameo at the end of the film.
A lot of material - well, single lines of dialogue, but lots of them - had come out of the few nights brainstorming the treatment. There was definitely an A and a B - all we had to do was construct a funny and convincing narrative connecting the two, whilst staying true to our original aim: exposing the ridiculousness of certain attitudes towards HIV and AIDS, and especially the reinforcement of stereotype and stigma in the media.
It turns out writing comedy scripts is pretty hard.
It turns out Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie are far cleverer, far funnier and far more talented than even I imagined. And Ricky Gervais. And Steve Merchant. Which is annoying. Because, in the words of The Streets, it was supposed to be so easy...
We wrote most of the script in one exhaustive, intensive, caffeine-fuelled five day stint. Thanks to the relentless ludicrousness of the 9 to 5 (I'll refrain from a Marxist rant here - it'll do none of us any good) we could only write in the evening. And the night. And the early hours of the morning.
So that's what we did.
Monday to Friday. 6pm til whenever. And then, on the Saturday, the prospect of an all-day writing session. What made things twice as pressured was Joe's departure for America on the Sunday due to filming commitments at the SXSW music festival. This imposed a kind of 'natural' writing deadline. The plan was for the script (plus approach letters) to go out to agents while Joe was away. That way, when he returned, we would be able to devise a production schedule and get to work on shooting the film. And so...
... on the Saturday morning, with the kettle almost constantly boiling, we set to work on finishing the first completed version of the script.
It went well.
In a way.
I think we were about three quarters of the way through by that point and, feeling fresh with a whole day ahead, we were confident we could finish by 6 or 7pm. Then, just as Myles was delivering an ultimatum to James, Joe got a phonecall from fellow freelancer John Corrin (a bloody nice bloke what operated one of the cameras when we did shoot the film) to say the tapes they needed to film on at SXSW hadn't been delivered. It was just after two o clock in the afternoon. Unfortunately but understandably, the news buggered up our writing plans.
When I think back now, it is quite obvious that we had written the narrative to the point of completion in our heads. We knew exactly what would happen and where the film was headed but there were still a few scenes left to write before we got there. So, while Joe sought to resolve the problems with America (that sounds more political than it's meant to) I rushed to Dulcimer - a folk pub in Manchester - to finish the first draft.
A few hours later it was done. Structurally, it worked marvellously and I knew there were parts that would remain unedited in later drafts. I knew this because Joe and I had written them days, sometimes weeks, beforehand. The statistics joke, for example - where Myles combats James's
statement that more than 33 million people worldwide are living with HIV with the equally impressive, 'Mamma Mia grossed more than 20 million in its opening weekend....' - was written on the train to the second meeting at Amplify.
On 31st March, tired and bored at work in Salford, I received a phonecall from Joe. As far as I remember, the opening dialogue went something like this:
TIM: Hello.
JOE: Have you spoken to Jackie?
TIM: No, why?
JOE: Ah, I'm not sure if I should be the one to tell you...
TIM: What?
JOE: Martin Freeman's in.
TIM: You're joking.
JOE: I'm not. He likes the script and he wants to do it.
Just a normal day then, innit. Go to work. Have lunch. Get Martin Freeman involved in your short film. Bit more work. Home. The final surge of scriptwriting came weeks later. Originally 21 pages long, we had a lot of editing to do. Andy Noble, our London producer, suggested 10 - 15 pages and at first it seemed like a thankless task. Turns out he was right and once we got into it everything started coming together.
Held up in the Dulcimer early one mid-week evening, we set to work on finalising the script. It was the most relaxed we had been about the whole thing since winning the competition. It was a less pressured writing experience and despite the need to cut the script down we wound up adding jokes and enhancing lines. Equally, there were parts of the film that weren't needed and so we emerged, MANY hours later, with the final draft. It was only 15 pages in length.
The following day we confirmed Julian Barratt for the part of Myles.
Everything was going a bit mental...
Tuesday, 3 March 2009
#1 - Manchester to London: The Initial Meeting...
It rains a lot in Manchester.
A lot of people refer to it as the Rainy City.
Indeed, it is raining now while I sit here listening to Bob Dylan, writing sentences then deleting them and then writing them again slightly differently. I am not a perfectionist.
I'm just not very good at this.
But I'll get over it.
At 1.30pm tomorrow Joseph Patrick and myself are going to meet with Andy Noble. Mr Noble is a film producer held in high regard by the British film industry and is - amongst other things - responsible for producing this piece of cinema. Then, at 2.30, we have a meeting with Paul Andrew Williams, the award-winning writer-director of London to Brighton and The Cottage.
I'll stop for a moment to assure you that I'm not bragging. Honestly. This is not my life. At least it wasn't until Tuesday, 10th February when - much to our mutual joyful surprise - Joe and I received the following email:
Hi Joe and Tim,
I am really pleased to announce that your ‘HIV and Stigma’ entry into the Ctrl.Alt.Shift Short Film Competition was successful, and that you will now go on to have your film produced and premiered in London.
Congratulations! We were very impressed with your treatment; it was thorough, well-researched and interesting, and you obviously have a good knowledge of the film-world, so we’re very much looking forward to working with you in the coming months and hope you enjoy this fantastic opportunity!
Now, what comes next. For the time-being we need you to sit tight as we are opening the People’s Choice voting shortly. This is the stage of the competition where some of the entries go through to a public vote, for the chance to join you and the other winners in having their film produced. Once this is over we will be pairing you with your director mentor and discussing the production schedule and all other details. In the mean time, I hope this has made your day, and speak soon!
Kind Regards,
Hayley,
Ctrl.Alt.Shift.
Joe got the email first. I was eating bread and houmous in the kitchen of my flat when the phone rang.
'Are you ready for this?' He shouted, then proceeded to read Hayley Myers's email aloud.
I think we both reacted in the same way. Disbelief. Realisation. Understanding. And a lot of excited trembling.
The next day Joe sent me a text that said:
I. Feel. Brilliant. And. You. Should. Too.
I did. I still do.
Wait. Maybe I should backtrack. I should tell you what I'm talking about.
Okay. What did we do to come by this amazing opportunity?
We entered this competition.
When we received the 'Congratulations!' email I don't think either Joe or myself knew how big this project was going to be. And it just keeps on opening out into something newer, more exciting and more worthwhile every day.
Last week we went to London for the initial meeting and met with the kind folks at Ctrl.Alt.Shift. and Amplify. The other winners were there too. Five films are being made in all. Each one will tackle one of the following issues:
War and Peace.
Gender and Power.
HIV and Stigma.
The competition is a brilliant and beautiful idea and it is looked after by people who really care about the issues at hand. Ctrl. Alt. Shift. are less concerned with preaching to people and more interested in engaging them. Everyone involved with making the films is an extension of this principle.
As Little White Lies explained:
It’s rare to find a film competition that incorporates a superb brief with an unmissable prize and also works towards helping to eradicate poverty, hunger and issues of injustice in some of the world’s poorest countries.
And so I can only end this first blog post by telling you that Joe and I are excited, grateful and humbled to be a part of this. We are doing something we love and its all for a worthy cause. At present we are finishing writing the script. Tomorrow's meeting will serve to help us do that.
There are some suitably caffeinated times ahead...
Love. Peace. Harmony.
Tim x
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