"DEAR FATHER - MAKING A ZERO BUDGET COMEDY SHORT, PT 1"

I recently decided, after sitting and twiddling my thumbs for a bit too long, that I should make something. The video above is the end product of that decision.

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I've always felt very strongly, as someone with a passion for the creative arts in general, that we should be practising our skills constantly - even when in the middle of unplanned downtime. Especially so, in fact. I have an almost fear that if I don't keep making things then one day I'm just going to forget how to. There's always an unpleasant moment when opening a piece of software that I haven't opened in a while, and I realise I can't remember certain keyboard shortcuts. I find Blender the worst for this, having spent less time studying and practising 3D modelling than any other part of my post-production repertoire. 

Before too long though, muscle memory kicks in, and I remember why I try and practice this stuff as much as possible - for exactly these moments, when the software opens and you suddenly can't recall even the most basic of operations.

And so I found myself in a similar position recently, realising that I hadn't actually shot anything with a purpose in about a year - the last thing being my short, experimental, found-footage horror film "Lancashire 1981".

So I decided to make something.

The last few of (and in fact all of, now that I think about it...) my personal projects have been sci-fi based in some capacity. It's by far and away my favourite genre of film to work in, and probably my favourite genre full stop. But I wanted to do something different that would still allow me to practice my skills in compositing, editing, sound design, and so on.

I had a vague idea in my head about a man who is "banished" for doing something incredibly anti-social, and who has to adjust to a new situation or surrounding as a result, but is gradually losing his mind. I ran it past of friend of mine - Nick, known to all and sundry as "Frankie" for reasons I won't go into - and he could see the potential comedy value in the setup. Between us, we fleshed it out into a more cohesive idea - the man is writing a letter home to his father, keeping him up to date with his life, but while the narration is a fairly standard, mundane letter home, the action on screen becomes more and more unhinged as the man descends into mental collapse, creating a (hopefully amusing) disconnection between the voiceover and visuals.

I was under no illusion that this would be being nominated for an Oscar any time soon, so I elected to design a workflow with the following criteria in mind:

- It had to be fast and it had to be funny: I sometimes feel like the longer I spend on a piece of personal work, the more detached I become from it, and so to keep to my original vision as much as I could I wanted to film it in a way that would allow me to gather footage quickly. In the same way, I feel that comedy lives and dies in the enthusiasm you have for the idea, so finishing the project quickly was vital before it starts to become over-familiar and stale.

- It had to serve my reasoning for wanting to make the film: As well as making something I thought people would enjoy, I wanted it to be something that allowed me to practice, specifically, completing a project from start to finish.

- It needed to work without a pre-existing narrative structure: Whilst we wrote a script for the voiceover, I felt that the real comedy aspect of the film was the visuals, and a lot of that was going to come from things I was adding in post-production. We shot quite a lot of footage that didn't make it in the end, but that was fine because we were deliberately approaching the whole project in a way that allowed me to make sense of it in post-production.

- It had to be cheap: I have no money.

FILMING

To that end, I decided my approach was going to be to film the bulk of it on my phone, this way I could get footage quickly in an almost "stream-of-consciousness" kind of way, where if we were out and about and saw something that I thought would work we could quickly film it, without the need to set up a lot of equipment. On top of which, the script called for us to film in public and, as the only person in the "crew" (Frankie played the Son and was in front of camera the entire time), I didn't want the inevitable hassle you get from people when you set up what looks to be an expensive camera in the middle of town.

"Hur, hur, is this going to be on TV?"

"Yes, it's for a programme called "Britain's Biggest Arseholes. Want to be in it?"

- Actual exchange I had as a film student in Manchester

Filming on my phone gave us that ability to move about largely unnoticed, at the tradeoff of overall image quality (although I don't think the finished product looks that bad, phone cameras these days are actually quite decent) and an unstable frame rate that seems to be tied to Samsung's filming codec that I couldn't see a way around. Shooting footage was literally a case of "go to a place, think of something amusing to do, film it, move on".

A lot of the time I was visualising what I would do to the shot in the VFX stage, and literally just needed the plate to work from. The shot of Frankie firing the bow and arrow at a man paddling a surfboard is a good example of this - I just asked him to mime out the action of firing the bow carefully, then later digitally added it in inside After Effects. My experience as a VFX artist gives me a pretty solid understanding of what I can and can't "get away with" in a film and, as stated, the emphasis on doing this quickly also meant that I didn't want to spend too much time making the visuals perfect for a 4 second long shot in a short film about a bloke that climbs into bins, shoots at passing wildlife, and eats seagulls.

SCRIPTWRITING

Frankie and I approached the script together - he wrote the first draft of the letter, and tried to make it as heartfelt as he could. We'd agreed that it should (initially) feel like a kitchen-sink-style melodrama, leaning into the "angry young man" trope and sense of social isolation often present in socio-realist British films, but ultimately have it swerve into dark surrealism and comedy violence. I remember clearly stating that I wanted it to feel a little bit like a Ken Loach drama, and to try and trick the viewer into thinking that's what they were watching. For that reason, I deliberately tried to keep the opening as joke-free and straight-faced as I could.

We sat there and passed the laptop back and forth, editing and reworking each other's writing, until we had a version of the voiceover script we were happy with. Then we recorded a rough take of it via a voice note on my phone, and I took it home to start cutting the first draft with the footage we had shot. As I mentioned, the whole film had been planned with the intention of piecing the narrative together in the edit, and it was there that I realised our script was much longer than I wanted it to be, clocking in at 6 minutes.

Not a problem though, and this is one of the best parts about co-writing a script with someone; you don't feel as bad about ruthlessly chopping their work into smaller pieces as you might if you wrote it all yourself. So that was next....

PT 2 COMING SOON.