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Fish

There’s this question that everyone gets at some point or other - “Are you a dog person, or a cat person?”

I’m neither. I’m a fish person (no, not in the Lovecraftian way).

When I was much younger, we had a dog. And when I was a bit older, we had a cat. We had her for the longest. She only died after I moved out of home.

Having a dog was like having the loud kid from your class over to your place after school. Something - or someone - you’d play with, but who’d get trying after a while, no matter how much you like them.

I sound like a cat person, don’t I?

But no… having a cat… that was like having another sibling - one who never passed the age of 5. You can love them to bits, but they’re still going to ask you for something every time they see you enter the room.

And there was something else, that both cats and dogs have in common, that have always pulled me away.

They share my world.

They’re like me.

They may be animals, but fuck it - I’ve been a vegetarian all my life. I have trouble smelling the difference between bacon frying and someone having just burnt their finger on an iron. The only time I can seriously tell the difference between you, dear reader, and a cow’s arse, is when one of you is covered in herbs and condiments.

So when it comes down to it, dogs and cats breath the same air as me. They walk on legs. They manipulate with paws like I do with my hands. They chew their food with teeth. They taste with their tongues. They share a living space with me - and I don’t mean my house, I mean my world. When I walk past a neighbour’s cat, it shares the footpath with me, and neither of us is out of place.

But when I walk into my living room, and find my Angelfish swimming about their tank, I don’t make a connection. I can’t. They’re aliens. More alien to me than almost anything else can be. They’re flying - and they’re doing things I can’t even comprehend.

So it fires my imagination.

I sit down by the tank, and they swim up and stare at me, and I wonder what they see. I can’t comprehend how they think. I can’t comprehend how they feel.

They’re so foreign that I’m taken out of my life, away from my problems, and I’m left with my imagination.

And then those tiny little things that make us connect begin to happen.

The way they look at me. The blinking eyes. The tilt in their body that, being a children who grew up watching Thomas the Tank Engine and Tugs, I immediately read as a quizzacle tild of the head.

Every few months, I go to the Aquarium. I stare at other kinds of fish. And on that note, let me say this: to anyone who doesn’t understand that it IS possible to form an emotional attachment to something so alien… spend 15 minutes with a Cuttlefish. Hell, ANY Cephalopod.

When you smile at a cuttlefish, and it smiles back - you’ll feel a connection greater than what you get with most humans.

cuttlefish

Back at home, next to my tank… I get my Angelfish some food, and watch how even the way they have a meal is wildly different to me.

And so I leave, go back to my room, and once again my imagination is running like… well, something very metaphorical.

That has tentacles.

Facebook Blur

Facebook Blur (Noun): That thing that happens the morning after boozing when you make the attempt to add people on facebook whom you met while drunk the previous night, only to find that you can’t quite remember most of their names - and those whom you can remember have inconveniently put up bizarre and unhelpful profile pic which makes you unsure if it’s actually them.

Creative Comments on SZA

So, as a Thursday just rolled over, episode 3 has been released.

It’s great to get such interesting feedback from people, and it’s also a great feeling to know that we’re now done shooting & editing the remaining episodes - and that for the next four weeks, a new episode will be up every Thursday. Ongoing content is, in a lot of ways, much more satisfying than a feature.

Which brings me to this - I’ve decided that, rather than just write another article on the science (for lack of a better word) of producing content on an indie budget I’d write a little bit about just what the idea was when going into Sharehouse Zombie Apocalypse, what I was trying to achieve from a story and style point of view, what the inspirations are, what’s yet to come, and what I think we’re succeeding and failing at. (This may be a long post - and to be clear, there won’t be any spoilers beyond episode 3)

Lighting Clay's Chair

Sharehouse Zombie Apocalypse began as a short film script, the details of which I won’t go into here as it’ll spoil the events that take place later in the season. The idea was to try and make Zombies as mundane as possible, and in doing so make the reaction people have to them all the more ridiculous and insane. Every time I’d seen Zombies done, they were taken awfully seriously, I thought, given how absurd the concept is.

So the basis can be summarised as this: What if a Zombie apocalypse happened, but the actual zombies were so horribly ineffectual that the biggest problems included such things as the legality of corpse desecration? Is it “okay” to begin looting and shoplifting after an Apocalypse so horribly weak that half the shops actually remain open? This was never going to be even a little bit serious. In reality, even the “Zombies” aspect was played down a great deal in the original script. I think only one Zombie was ever seen at all, in fact. For the series we decided to play up the Zombie angle a bit more, and have a few of them milling about the area, just to accentuate how amazingly useless they were.

For example, there’s a Zombie seen very briefly in episode 1 who has managed to get himself wedged on a sharp bit of fence out the front of the sharehouse. After growling once and scaring Skyler (who wasn’t expecting him there) he doesn’t come into it much from then on - I mean, if he’s wedged in such a way that he can’t do more than make the odd bit of noise, there’s no harm in leaving him there, right? Well, at least until the smell gets too much to handle for the housemates.

Symon and Kurtis reading a script.

So really, the setting exists solely to provide a way for four characters (five, later on) to engage in discussions about the moral and practical aspects of living with other people (as George Romero says - there’s no kind of human story that can’t be told with zombies).

The best way to do this was to create characters with distinct and almost high-concept flaws. Skyler’s is narcissism, Mole’s is pride, Clay is a sociopath and Portlock is just too darn self-consciousness. It’s not too hard, from there, to start imagining fucked up situations for the bunch of them to get into when left to their own devices during a Zombie Apocalypse.

Of course, while as anyone who’s seen Insecurity or Dead Man Drinking (or any of my short films) will attest to… I do loves me some dialogue, often to the complete exclusion (or, depending on your opinion, to the detriment) of action, but, y’know, that’s the kind of thing I like watching. As I’ve said numerous times before, I get bored watching action scenes, so I don’t tend to write them.

However, a scenario like SZA is worth a lot more than just a one-room play. So many situations came out of the idea, either right from the first few meetings about the project or in discussions with actors during filming. In fact, over the course of filming season one (which was shot in one big block that took about 2 months worth of weekends to film) whether from conversations had on set, or between weekends on the phone, we’d basically extrapolated, from season one and the ideas I’d already had, precisely where to go with season two. In fact, we had so much fun shooting the first season, and figuring out where to go with season two that we’d kinda already decided that we’d film the next season, regardless of whether people liked the first one or not.

Jen and Xi examining makeup

I guess there are two kinds of ‘inspirations’ that I can talk about with SZA. There’s direct inspirations - what drove me to make it, and others to get involved… and tonal inspirations - what’s helped inspire the style of the narrative.

The first one’s actually pretty simple. We’d done a few feature films and a bunch of shorts that really fit in the drama or comedy categories, and learnt a few things from those experiences. The important ones were:

  1. People generally don’t like watching long things.
  2. Without a hook that tells people they’re going to like it, people won’t watch it.

The first item made us decide that, much as we love making low-budget features, something short and episodic was a better idea if our goal was to get people watching what we do.

The second item comes down to genre. When we made Insecurity, the ’selling point’ was that it was a hacker movie. Those are not just rare, but also rarely done well. That being the case, a lot of the people who watched it saw it solely because of the obscure subject-matter. Which isn’t to say a lot of people watched it - just that when they did, that was often the reason.

With Dead Man Drinking, the simple fact is that, love it, hate it, or don’t feel strongly one way or another - it was a dramedy. Its concept was simple enough to explain in a few words, but there’s not a great deal going for it beyond that. It had no actors people would recognise and no filmmaker whose name people would care about.

“Do a horror movie,” I was told, by a few people. ”Everybody loves a horror movie, and it seems to be the one type of film that people will tolerate from Australia.”

I don’t really like horror. It’s just never interested me. And yet when I write comedy, it tends to be dark rather than, y’know… fluffy. So when I brought up the zombie script idea… it began to fall into place.

A chance to write dark comedy, use and play around some of the traditions of a well-established genre that just might interest some folks… and the perfect way to make something interesting out of what amounts to a one-room-play for much of the first season.

As for the second kind of ‘inspiration’… well, it’s character comedy, as most things I write tend to be. So if you want a list of things that I drew inspiration from when writing… sometimes it’s the surrealism of Black Books, sometimes the ‘comedy of incompetence’ that Dad’s Army did so well and sometimes awkward style that Gervais & Merchant or the Arrested Development guys have turned into an institution in itself.

Stuck in the Sharehouse

Once we began planning the shoot, one of the first things we had to pick was a visual style. (Well, not the first thing, but it’s pretty boring talking about deciding just where to shoot) Choosing a sort of desaturated, dingy, grainy, harsh-lighting style was kind of a no-brainer. (Hah! See what I did there?) Not so much to artificially make it look ‘old’ as to accentuate the scungy life of sharehouse / post-apocalyptic living.

This kind of lighting is always fun to implement. We went for an almost film-noir style, with top-down and very extreme lighting designed to just show up the faces - if that. In some cases we did nothing but silhouettes. Of course, it helped that the shooting location actually WAS lit with top-down lights, so it didn’t seem too out of place to have everything lit that way.

In terms of what we failed at, this is occasionally one that leaps out at me. Put SZA on a projector or a big-screen TV, and I think it looks pretty good. Put it on mobile devices or youtube (our target platforms… *cough, cough*) and you can’t guarantee that either the lighting in the viewing area OR the background lighting on the display medium are going to be even vaguely reasonable. We certainly had more than a few comments on the darkness of certain shots - and the worst part is that some of the shots that get singled out are the ones I like the best… in a controlled environment.

We’d come out of doing two indie features, so suddenly having to fight the Evil Elder Gods of Youtube was a bit of a shock.

Skyler under some lighting.

Pacing was the next question. Not a huge one when filming (as pacing is really forged in the edit) but it’s still a factor. Shoot a scene, however short, in just a single shot, and you’re stuck with the pacing you worked on with the actors. If you shoot more traditionally, with two-shots and close-ups and over-the-shoulder shots, and you open yourself up to a lot more options in terms of speed, but you still need to know what you’re doing when you shoot.

SZA was written to have a lot of rapid-fire discussion. Whether it’s about toilet paper, the ethics of beating up dead bodies, or who’s going to have to go take care of a zombie that’s made it as far as the back yard, the people who populate SZA have more in common with Aaron Sorkin characters than David Lynch ones.

Almost all of the dialogue scenes in SZA were, therefore, shot with little wide coverage. Where required, a few two-shots and wides were grabbed, but usually just to glue things together where required. Using closeups and cut-aways, the scenes worked much better with almost all the air taken out of the discussions.

It does, however, mean that the pages-of-script-to-minutes-of-final-product ratio changes quite a bit. The longest of our episodes, for example, comes in at a little under 9 minutes, and was 15 pages of written script. But then, we’re kinda used to this - Dead Man Drinking was the same. 113 pages to 90 minutes.

Me and some Zombie Extras

As a final comment - doing something that’s short and episodic means that you get a chance to experiment in a way that can often be dangerous in a film. If you’re trying to hold someone’s interest for 90 minutes, especially if money’s been thrown into the project, you probably don’t want to spend, say, 15 minutes of that time in a bizarre dream sequence that’s purely an indulgence for both yourself and your cinematographer. (No, we didn’t do that in SZA - it’s just a random example)

And so we did get a chance, with SZA, to make a few episodes that try different things. From rapid-fire dialogue episodes to awkward juxtaposition sequences to weird confrontations to comedic montages… it’s been a great experiment.

With a major TV series, directors work on anywhere from a few episodes a season, to just a single episode. In some series, this means that you get the odd episode that just ‘tries something different’, either in tone or in execution.

While the entire first season of SZA was directed by myself and Kurtis, we sometimes allowed ourselves some freedom and made like it wasn’t - if only to try something different.

It can be a little dangerous trying that sort of thing - it’s easy to go too far out of the established storytelling style of a series and find viewers screaming that you’ve jumped the shark… but regardless of the outcome, it was worth it.

Anything’s worth trying once.

Well, except possibly Russian Roulette.

We’ve had a great time making Sharehouse Zombie Apocalypse… and we can’t wait to get back to it.

Sharehouse Zombie Apocalypse Release

It’s funny - when we set out to make a feature film, memories of the astounding amount of effort and time that went into Dead Man Drinking kept flooding back into my head. So when the feeling was just ‘wrong’ and we decided to try something different, I felt a huge weight off my chest. I mean, I’d WANTED to make that feature, but I also felt that it wasn’t the right time to do something like we were planning - a heavy, off-beat dramedy with more of a point than Dead Man Drinking ever had. (Shit - that was a bit of fun, but not much more) It wasn’t even really time to do another full feature. Too time consuming.

So when the point was brought up, “Look, we’re prepping to shoot something - why not shoot something?” I had flashbacks to Insecurity. 

“Sure,” I thought. “Why not? Insecurity took us three days to shoot when another project wasn’t going so well, and ended up being one of the best things I’ve ever done.”

So I went over my old ideas. Found a short film script I wrote a few years ago - Sharehouse Zombie Apocalypse. Realised that, being half finished, it’d make a great short series. I ran the ideas by some actors. The idea worked. We figured, “Fuck it” and got filming.

Which is to say that I very quickly began turning the pages into more pages - taking the ideas and fleshing them out, taking little hints I’d dropped earlier in the script and turning them into more significant plot threads. Doing this as fast as possible, because we had only a month before filming.

We didn’t film one episode at once - figured there was little point in that. We figured we’d shoot the first season, 7 episodes, in one batch and get it all done.

Never mind that seven 10-page episodes averages at… well… the same amount of pages as a feature. Whoops. Oh well.

New rule: Don’t think before you do something stupid. It’ll only increase the chances you’ll talk yourself out of it.

Anyway, they got filmed, and four weeks later we’re ready to release the first episode, with the next six not far behind.

Just don’t ask what the cost of production did our respective budgets. Fuck, though - was it worth it!

Time is the Fire in which we Burn

Someone told me once that you can’t really understand something until you’ve done it. And by that, of course, what I mean is that I’ve heard the second part of that sentence a dozen times and figure that by putting “someone told me once” at the beginning I’ll sound like I’m quoting the words of some wise old sage, instead of pulling something out of my arse and trying to convince you that it is, in fact, a lovely bouquet of flowers.

So, you sometimes completely fail to realise just how time-consuming something else, even after doing something awfully similar a half-dozen times.

I say to myself, “Self,” I says, “Self, you’re going to have a beer, and while doing that you’ll quickly turn a pre-made credit sequence in Motion into 5 different versions for 5 different episodes of your new project, where the only difference is a few, insignificant alterations to existing lines of text. Then you’ll do some REAL work. You know - cleaning up sound, tweaking edits. The useful stuff.”

Easy.

No worries.

Two and a half hours, one beer, two lemon cordials and an entire film (as background noise) later and you’re done… with the credits sequence work.

Yikes. It really takes a lot of work to realise what a lot of work a bit of work really can be.

Next time you snigger at an action sequence that’s not quite right during a digitally-enhanced scene of a film, notice the attention to detail by putting an entire newspaper article depicting an event from earlier in the film, or notice how nice the texturing looks during a computer-animated feature…

… think about how much time went into it. Every little detail, every little item - whether it’s a single detail in a texture map, the nuance in the set dressing, or a nice detail on the costume of a background actor… give it a second thought.

Some poor fucker probably slaved away for months on that project, and at some point, it’s just possible that he spent three hours of his day trying to fix that little detail that you noticed - so that if anyone cared… the detail would be right.

Dialogue vs Visuals

So, having my head stuck so far down Final Cut Pro that I can’t see much more than sequences, timelines and filters at the moment got me thinking a great deal about what I’m doing. Not in the ‘drinking coffee, editing’ sense, mind you - in terms of just what I’m trying to achieve with this project (and others) from an artistic perspective.

Sorry, I just slipped and fell on the wankery of that last line… it’s okay, I’m back now.

Point being this - I’ve had to make a lot of choices as to what takes to use of lines, and sometime the following kinds of things come up: Take 3 was gold, but the lighting wasn’t just the way we’d set up the shot up to look. Or the boom bobbed into frame, and in order to use said take I’d have to artificially zoom in by a percent or two, and in doing so lose some of the definition of the image.

But each time, I’d make that call. The best take, regardless of any technical issues. Y’know, short of someone barrelling the friggin’ camera.

Then comes the trimming out of any bit of dead space that doesn’t work precisely toward the scene. No space damnit! No space.

But that’s the way I write, really. I tend to write very Sorkin or Smith-esque dialogue, I think. Which isn’t a comment on its quality - just that my dialogue tends to work better when cut very, very fast. That’s how it’s written, and generally that’s how it’s performed.

I recently had a discussion with another indie director, in which he (quite fairly) critiqued the fairly simple visual presentation of my work.

Not only do I agree with him, but I’d take it a step further and say that in some cases (See The Chunda Weed) it’s almost literally talking heads.

It’d be interesting to extend what I do into action sequences (complicated ones, not simple stuff like in Dead Man Drinking) but for the moment I’m happy just doing what I do, and the reason is pretty simple:

When I watch a movie, action and flashy shots tend to lose me very quickly. I can’t think of anything more boring than an action movie, unless it has awesome characters and relentlessly witty dialogue to go with it (See Die Hard With A Vengeance). I recognise that some people find their pulses pounding when watching stylised footage of people beating each other up or trying to escape flying digital effects, but that’s just not me. I nod off during the inevitable action sequence that happens at the end of even the best action films I can think of, and when the whole movie is based around this, I tend to start fighting the urge to play solitaire on my phone.

Some of my favourite little films are two or three people chatting in a room for two hours (See Interview or Two Girls and a Guy).

And what’s the point of making films you wouldn’t want to watch yourself?

I consider myself lucky - the types of films I write are relatively easy to film on a micro-budget.

Not Quite a Trilogy

As you read this: apologies if you get a bout of allergies due to the cobwebs. It’s been a strange few months since my last posting.

In short: we were preparing a third feature. My reason for trying a third zero-budget feature was… uh… nonsensical. Why does anyone try to make something in threes? I guess I was largely thinking of Rodriguez’ idea of doing three zero-budget flicks in quick succession, to learn the trade. Not that the two features I’ve done so far are related in any way beyond common cast & crew in some places. They’re totally different stories, genres and the rest.

After spending weeks refining the screenplay with my brother (who makes a brilliant co-workers) I started getting cold-feet signals from various members of cast & crew. The idea of a project this size happening bothered them a bit. And it gave me a moment of pause. Just what WAS my purpose of making another zero budget feature?

What began as a simple script became more complicated. And more complicated. And soon, I realised that I was touching on emotional issues that, while probably not THAT hard to nail in performance, would take some time. And when you’re trying to shoot a film like we do, for no money and with huge restrictions… time isn’t something you have an abundance of.

So we tried a day of test shooting. Picked a few scenes, ran them, shot them… learnt a lot. Amongst other things, we learnt that the energy just wasn’t there.

When you’re trying to make a feature on a zero budget, I’ve decided there’s simply no point in trying to do something serious. It isn’t quite as fun on set for everyone, which makes people less inclined to give their time and energy to the project.

And so… we postponed it. Not sure when we’ll get to shoot it now.

This isn’t to say we stopped filming. We just decided that we’d been working for months on something, hindering ourselves by not working on a budget and on top of that we’d be doing something with no tangible end-product for probably six to nine months.

So, there we are, weeks from filming, people organised, kit ready… but nothing to shoot.

So I got drunk with Kurtis, had a few discussions, and made a fairly easy decision.

The next day I began (quickly) writing seven 4-8 minute episodes of a web series, starring the most energetic, interested and available actors I know.

That was in January.

We’re now right near the end of finishing our first “season”, and to say the response from people involved has been positive is an understatement of epic proportions. We’ve had a blast shooting it, and had support in terms of logistics, locations and music from heaps of people.

This project’s also notable because it’s the first time we’ve had dedicated make-up artists onboard.

Of course, you kinda need to when your project involves Zombies.

Dead Man Drinking is out!

So, it’s finally happened.

Almost 14 months since the first draft of the screenplay was finished and passed to my patient girlfriend to read, Dead Man Drinking is available for download.

For the moment, it’s available solely from archive.org - get it now - it’s free! Tell your friends! Hell, have a Dead Man Drinking party, even if there’s just the one of you! Join the facebook group! Or maybe the myspace page… but nobody really still uses myspace, do they?

Also, some more information about the film is also available on the web site.

Some things to look forward to in the coming month or two:

  • A 720p (that’s HD) Quicktime H.264 version available for download.
  • Free version with an audio commentary or two also being made available.
  • A DVD iso version and…
  • Hi-res PDF versions of all our poster & DVD cover art - so you can make your own version to sit on a shelf, if you have the desire to abuse your work’s laser printer with a maniacal laugh.
  • A making-of featurette. Like the one for Insecurity, only funnier, and with more random behind-the-scenes drunken shenanigans including something never before seen in the history of behind-the-scenes featurettes: our resident catering genius kicking his own shoe off into a fish-tank in a failed attempt to crush a cockroach underfoot!

DmD Release imminent and script still occasionally oozing out of my brain.

So, I’ve spent most of the last month or so penning my next feature. A lot more time than I spent writing the last two, but then, that’s probably because it’s got more complicated things in it, so I don’t want to, y’know, get it wrong.

Finally tired of writing, I’ve decided to hit the hay - but not before giving these two updates:

Firstly, Dead Man Drinking will be released this month. Probably, in the next two weeks.

Here’s a little snippet from the film we decided to release as a sort of teaser:

Secondly, I had a thought. Imagine if people in real life had little things floating beside them with their ‘post-count’. You’d pretty quickly be able tell who were the motormouths you should to ignore, wouldn’t you?

Sydney