The day formerly known as Monday

Today Jake and Andy have been mostly grumpy.

Don’t get me wrong, we are so very over St. Joseph’s College by now. But it has cast us back into location limbo.

I have already mentioned that I suffer from location angst, haven’t I?

So, on the one hand Jake is pretty relaxed about moving directly back to the haunted RAF base, zombie bar and all. But Andy-the-brat has been spoiled by other venues. I just can’t quite believe that it’s a psychiatric hospital anymore. And where else would you find the risen-Christ-turned-zombie other than in a psychiatric hospital?

So, we have spent the majority of the day scouring the inter-web for anything else vaguely appropriate. There aren’t too many options out there. And that has made us grumpy.

While Jake and I see mostly the same movie in our respective minds’-eyes, there are inevitable moments when our opinions diverge. This used to happen every once in a while when we were writing and re-writing the screenplay, and it turned out that once we’d found a mutually agreeable third solution it was invariably better than both of our earlier options. But it's still a painful process, as we bang our heads together until we both see the light. And that has made us grumpy.

Sure enough, another possible location did emerge through the gloom. Early indications weren’t great for boosting the office mood: 'the site manager cannot guarantee that this location will still be available for filming in September as it is going to be developed at some point', but a little additional prodding has alleviated those concerns a bit. We’re off for a gander tomorrow. Expect late photos and a solid plan of action borne out of six hours sat in the same car together.

Six bloody hours. Yeah. If we like it, we’re going to need to spend a whole month in Essex.

And that has made us grumpy.

So, all in all it’s been one of those days. It’s what used to be called Monday back in the working world, but it needs a better name now that we’re doing something we actually want to do. Suggestions on a pay-slip to the usual address. Truculent.

Just Another Day of the Dead

And as a way of getting past the heartache and breaking you in gently for another week at Charmed Central, a 1:44 slice of zombie life from 2007.

 

The day wound up with one of the more colourful post-filming pints that I can remember, and we allegedly made Mark Kermode laugh.

I’m tempted to drag ole’ Green and Blue into Resurrection somewhere, regardless of our eventual choice of zombie design. That said, I’m aware that it could be a very niche gag. Whatever we go for, it might still be possible to explain them away as a couple of post-infection Na'vi in differing stages of decay.

Oh, and you could do plenty sillier things than go check out Blue’s blog. He gives good read. Punchy.

Meeting the immovable object

So this is what it feels like to be a Spurs supporter. Today we found out that we won’t be going to Wembley after all.

Nope – somehow Resurrection is going to have to happen without St. Joseph’s College being part of it. Computer says no. Well, not so much no, more that they’re not going to accept anything less than my first born child and a testicle each to hire the place out.

The maths of it are thus: we were given St. Joseph’s day rate way before we even saw the place, a fairly robust £1250 per day, plus VAT, plus their security costs. OK. If we were doing a 1-day photo shoot, or if we were the BBC, then this would be the figure. But we’re not. It’s not unreasonable to expect a huge discount if we hire out the place for 3 weeks solid. And if we’re not the BBC.

So, we did easy Jake and Andy maths. We’re shooting for 18 days (in 6-day weeks) – let’s offer them £18,000, and they have to let us in a day early to prep the place, and they can take care of the VAT and the security guards (they have to pay for them to be on site whether we’re there or not). An eminently reasonable offer, we thought.

And then the reply. St. Joseph’s will accept £27,500 plus VAT. And we will need to pay for their security costs.

To save you grabbing for the calculator, I’ll break it down. They want £1250 a day, for seven days a week (i.e. even on our day off), and another £1250 for the preparation day. And we are still responsible for the VAT and the security.

I’m certainly not having a crack at the Location Agency. I mean, all they can do is pass on our proposal to the owners. But, come on, St. Joseph’s – how is this a sensible riposte in the negotiation process? I mean, the cost has actually technically gone up from their initial quote.

We got in touch. We outlined all the factors. And the word came back that there is no scope for budge. How about we defer the excess costs until after the film is sold? No. How about we just give them Jake’s testicle and my girlfriend’s cat? Again, no.

So that’s that. A bye to Brent, and a serious re-think about the RAF base. Heartbroken.

Talking out of my art’s hole

That sweet Mr. GhoulFool. He’s done it again.

Not his real name, thankfully – think more the Milk Tray man, but circa 1750.

So today while Jake and I fought through funding strategies and risk management proposals, little nuggets of GhoulFool goodness starting popping into our FTP account. And thank God they did, because now we’ve actually got something interesting to blog about – I was winding up to a detailed statistical analysis of the expected returns on DVD sales vs. Video On Demand. And I know you’re all going to torrent it anyway.

A few weeks back we sat down with the GhoulFool and chewed over our immediate artwork needs. Some new zombie designs, or some classy Resurrection font, or poster art. All very helpful.

And then the discussion moved on to drawing the screenplay as comic art.

Not the whole script, of course. And certainly not a story-board. Just a couple of key action sequences, which we can show to potential investors to give them an idea of how the movie is going to play out. Everybody understands comics.

We go home into the period of radio silence – the sound of a creative mind at play. Jake and I forget all about it, and get on with the important business of walking around broken buildings and looking at Excel.

And then pages one and two came. And then I did too.

To set the scene, what you’re seeing is what happens immediately before the party meet their first 'ripe' zombie – fast, strong and utterly terrifying. It’s what m’pal Dave calls the 'Crass Blow-job Scene'.

 

I was expecting Viz, and he brought me Neil Gaiman.

Tomorrow we all celebrate the start of the weekend by taking The GhoulFool out and buying him beer till he is so sated that he forgets how to say no. We plan on taking advantage of this impressionable state by asking him to just keep drawing until he arrives at the end of the screenplay, and then Jake and I won’t even need to film it.

Oh, and he brought us new zombie designs, and some classy Resurrection fonts, and some poster art as well. But that’s for another time. Sullied.

Echo Tango. Bravo!

You can drag the boy away from a life of shameless tarting, but you just can’t take the shameless tarting out of the boy.

As a bit of Charmed Apocalypse back-story, m’colleague Jake’s former life was spent in Search Engine Optimisation, providing expensive tricks and techniques to help companies to float up through the Google rankings. Type 'Shooting the Dead' into Google and see how high up this blog appears. That’s not by accident. It’s an unsavoury world of anchor texts, targeted links, referred traffic, tweeting and re-tweeting. Shameless tarting.

So of course I left him in charge of managing our profile.

Today, an otherwise un-bloggable day spent digging out budgetary information and writing copy for the investor package was cut short by a trip to meet Xan from the Southampton Daily Echo. And I think we can guess who set that one up.

Yup – sometime over the next few days the paper is going to publish a short piece on two local boys that packed in their day-jobs to bring #zombies to the region. Xan is also a reader of the blog, and it’s quite strange talking to someone you’ve never met before that already knows all your dirty secrets. Hello sir, if we haven’t put you off tuning in.

Brilliantly we ended up meeting in the ArtHouse, Southampton’s premiere vegetarian café. It’s difficult to imagine a less appropriate venue to wax lyrical on brain consumption and the recipe for fake blood. We may have also interrupted the placid vibe by bringing in a couple of axes as props for the photos. I feel an obligation to apologise to everyone that was put off their vegan snacks, and to warn them away from the finished movie.

I also feel an obligation to let you know that Jake is currently available for small SEO commissions (evenings only). Check out Cake-SEO, for all your Hampshire SEO needs. Whoring.

The numbers racket

Today Jake’s nervousness finally lifted.

Regular readers will know by now that while I get all unnecessary with location anxiety, Jake’s darkest fears are all about the money. So, today we worked the numbers through.

Ah, sweet Excel. Where have you been all week?

Right – who are the essential crew? Add in the cast members, location costs, on-site bogs, security, catering, hotels, equipment, etc., and a bloody big van to drive everything around in. Then all we need to do is figure out how many pages we can shoot each day.

And after much Googling, mild butchery of Bruce’s 12 in a Box constituents, and just a little bit of old-fashioned educated guess-work, we came out with a number.

Not the final number, certainly, but a pretty good first estimate. Good enough to take out to investors and stand behind.

£158,000.

Oh – wow.

Yeah, it’s a lot of money. More than the wholly un-justified £100k estimate that we had up to now been loosely banding about to each other. And Jake and I are getting paid absolutely nothing from this sum.

But here’s where the choice of genre is going to pay off. Zombies sell. Everywhere. Even the home-page of the low-budget UK undead splatter-fest The Zombie Diaries proudly crows that it has been successfully sold in 'every major territory'. More Excel magic, and bang! A hefty 23% return on investment, and that’s before any piecewise DVD / Video on Demand / etc. cash is included.

Now that’s decidedly more handsome. I checked the adding-up twice.

Inspired as we were then by the power of maths to make us happy, we decided to pick a start date. Ladies and gentlemen, principal photography on Resurrection will kick off on September 24^th. Don’t worry about not remembering this, as we have spared no expense to provide you with an aide mémoire to print out and stick to the fridge.

 

Now we’re just left with the simple task of figuring out how to get the money. Potential investors, friends of potential investors and people with upcoming trips to the dentists should make themselves known now. Has anyone got a tie that I can borrow? Shaven.

Getting Lost

Bloody YouTube.

So, a little later than planned, here’s the video of the third recce. I had hoped to send it out this morning, but YouTube saw fit to disable the Misfits backing track on Jake’s first upload for the rather petty reason that we had neither the rights nor permissions to use that tune.

Pedants. Johnny Cash is fine with it, it seems.

Rather than post it up naked, we have been forced to re-cut the video to a song that we do own the rights to. Your virtual tour will now be conducted to the accompaniment of a band that I was in with my brother when I was 14.

Ladies and gentlemen, I am delighted to introduce you to St. Joseph’s College in Brent, and to Lost Jonny playing Mosh Machine.

Please understand that we did everything we could to spare you from this – best you take it up with YouTube directly. Sorry.

Brent… out of shape

And now I'm officially in love.

People of the blogosphere, I’d very much like to take this opportunity to introduce you to the Resurrection screenplay’s soul-mate, as she pokes her tower coyly through the undergrowth.

 

St. Joseph’s College – surely the most gorgeous flavour of Old Knackered, located a mere mis-kick away from Wembley Stadium in Brent, NW London.

Imagine, if you will, a horde of zombies descending on an industrial kitchen to fix themselves a snack. Does it look like this, but with just a bit more viscera?

 

OK, then picture the kind of enormous hall in which you’d be most likely to encounter an army of the undead, if the freshly zombified Messiah himself was at the helm. Is this close (army of the undead not shown)?

 

According to the security guard, the whole site is yours for a mere £27 million. Al Fayed ain’t interested, but the BBC are frequent visitors. It was a conversation that was very reminiscent of the strangely well-informed door-man from Wayne’s World. The Location Agency demands are for £1,250 a day + VAT, so Jake and I need to get some serious negotiation practice in over the weekend. Friends and family – you have been warned.

The inevitable down-side is the noise. Although it seems well insulated from the general traffic, police car sirens are apparently not un-common (in NW London? Who’d have thought it?), and we are going to have to plan quiet narrative moments around the 3 am lull in Heathrow throughput. If anybody knows a good way to awaken an Icelandic volcano, I’m all ears. Receptive.

Master Bruce

'I wish I’d lied more. Everybody else does'.

A movie-making tip from the otherwise scrupulously honest Bruce Windwood, producer of the very entertaining and award-winning feature 12 in a Box. In what I hope will be the first of many this-is-how-you-do-it conversations with different independent movie makers, today Jake and I went to Oxford to pick his brains, although I’m aware that this phrase could easily be misunderstood in a zombie-related posting.

The man is a gentleman. Simple as that. Generous with his time, highly engaging, and with the water-wisdom of someone who’s taught himself to swim by jumping straight into the deep end. Bruce is very much of the get-on-and-do-it-yourself school of film-making – he also took on the Line Producing and 1^st AD-ing of 12 in a Box ('there’s nobody that’s going to care as much about your movie as you do'). We first met him last year at Southampton Film Week, where he was doing a seminar on feature production, and we owe him at least a plug for his next training course. 

The chat sensibly focused around our next steps, key amongst which is getting the money together. There’s a whole bunch of juicy goodness that needs to go into an investor pack (catchy synopses, statements of the director’s vision, and whatever else it needs to make the presentation look lovely), but ultimately it’s all about the money. How much is it going to cost, how much do you expect to sell it for, what are my tax write-offs and what are the risks?

So basically, it’s just the Dragon’s Den.

Ah - but with one key bonus element. Making a film is extraordinarily sexy, and apparently doubly so to middle-aged dentists. Visit a real film set! Meet someone you might recognise from The Bill! Dress up for a film premiere! See your name on the big screen!

And the Resurrection investor piece-de-resistance… come dress in zombie make-up and prosthetics and choose from a gory buffet of on-screen take-downs.

Now, thanks to Bruce, we have a copy of the 12 in a Box investment pack for 'analysis and reference'. Or, since we’re in an honest mood, for 'direct and un-credited plagiarism'.

Mr Windwood, sir – our enormous gratitude, again. And for anybody that comes to work on the Resurrection set and wonders why so much money and effort has been spent on getting the catering right, you will have Bruce to thank for that too. Stuffed.

A golden fleece

I’ve just had an email letting me know that me that my time is running out.

Yup – it was almost exactly six months ago that Jake and I stuck Resurrection up on InkTip, under the misguided belief that we might be able to sell the bugger. Our personal circumstances have obviously changed since then, but originally we had no intention of making the movie ourselves.

*Sigh*. Our more astute regular readers settle themselves in for another Phelpenrant.

For those of you unfamiliar with InkTip, it’s an American website onto which you can upload unsold screenplays. This is then allegedly trawled by industry professionals looking for new projects ('on average 150 different professionals do searches for scripts every week'). I am well aware that there is an enormous industry in the US dedicated to fleecing wannabe scriptwriters with vain promises of access to Hollywood bigwigs, but mildly positive feedback on an old Shooting People posting made me think that InkTip might possibly be the exception.

And the sad thing is that I really should have known better. This particular hound has bitten me on the arse already. I posted my previous screenplay up there, to marginal levels of industry enthusiasm.

The thing about the last screenplay though is that it’s a very British road-movie sort of personal drama with un-likeable characters and a backwards time structure that not everyone gets but which I think is essential to showing the emotional journey of the protagonist who’s either an intravenous drug-user or mentally ill and it’s kind of like a messed-up fairy tale with dark humour and a nihilistic world-view where friends betray you or abandon you or are just plain psychopathic and you find out within the first eight minutes that our lead character is doomed which kind of tinges everything that follows in a bittersweet hue.

It seemed that Hollywood just wasn’t ready for me then.

So, we play the game. With Resurrection we tried to target the perfect combination of genre, novelty and budget. A bunch of zombies terrorising a small cast, in one location, with a totally new twist to unload into an unsuspecting audience. It was even listed on InkTip as Zombie Resurrection, just to hammer the point home. A mere $100 later (including a listing in their magazine – '4,500 entertainment professionals receive complimentary printed copies, and we e-mail PDF copies to thousands of others'), and we were all set for our first big sale.

And how many of these thousands of entertainment professionals have checked out our screenplay over the last six months?

None.

Yup. Not a single person.

To put this into context, the only information that these Hollywood execs had to go on was the name of the movie, the synopsis (15 months after the zombie apocalypse, a group of survivors are forced to take refuge in an abandoned psychiatric hospital, where they encounter a mysterious zombie with the power to bring the undead back to life), and the budget estimate (which we obviously set to the lowest range available). If this reels you in, you go download the script. Or rather, you don’t.

No one? Really? I’m intrigued by the premise, and I already know how it ends.

As a wise man once said: 'Fool me once, shame on you. But we won’t get fooled again'. Mugged.

Who ya gonna call?

So anyway, here is the cut-together footage of the RAF base last week. And before the more eagle-eyed of you have a group coronary, it’s worth me mentioning that the shadowy figure at 0:49 is not our furniture-bothering revenant, but rather our altogether more corporeal guide, Mick.

On a slightly different tack, I went to watch a preview screening of the highly excellent (and highly Australian) Animal Kingdom this morning. Only to be informed that the movie was being distributed using UK Lottery cash provided by the UK Film Council. I won’t bore you with another rant about Screen South, but I did feel a momentary pang of irritation. It was as if the voices of a million Daily Mail readers cried out in indignation, and were suddenly silenced. Aggrieved.

Getting a recce

Now, that’s more like it!

Location scouting day #2 has proved considerably more rewarding. My previous St Alban hankering has now withered away to a simple curiosity about what the Old Hospital would actually look like on fire. Basically, the same thing that I wonder about most of the buildings I see.

Because today we were invited to gaze upon the Officer’s Mess.

And did they ever make a mess… a stately building on an old RAF base in Hampshire, shut since 1996 when the military decamped from the area. 

Now, this is the proper blend of shabby magnificence that we’re talking about.

Long corridors? Yeah.

A messed-up décor throughout? Mais, bien sûr.

Space for a couple of balls? Hooyah.

Damn! All it’s missing is a bar… actually, they’ve got one of those too.

So, what’s the downside? 

Well, it turns out that we’re not going to be alone.

The building sits in the midst of a bunch of bomb-proof hangars, and alongside an airstrip. On a clear summer’s day the Lee Flying Association will happily fill the surrounding skies from dawn till dusk, like a noisy mosquito infestation. 

Wednesday is glider day. At least then we might get the odd quiet moment, save for the sound of crashing balsa.

All in all, not strictly post-apocalyptic.

However there is an important difference between planes and the M25 during the hours of darkness. The cars carry on driving, the planes have to stop. So, there is a perfectly workable solution which involves shooting Resurrection throughout the night. Sure, it means a script re-write, but then again it’ll need re-working anyway once we settle on any location. A four week diet of pro-plus and it’ll only be the Coastguard helicopter that encroaches on the end of the world.

And so I’m delighted to report that my earlier concerns about finding a suitable venue are now properly assuaged. This place ain’t ideal, and we will certainly be going to have a look at other locations. But there’s a film here if we want it.

Actually, it’s what we share the inside of the building with that’s a bit more of a wild card. Mick, the very helpful property management guy that showed us around, swore that the building was haunted. The cleaner refuses to set foot inside after hearing furniture being moved around an otherwise empty house (which explains a lot about the state of the place now).

I wonder whether it’s worth hiring a second camera and asking someone to document us making the film. We may end up with two horror movies for the price of one.

“They came to make a scary film. Until they become the cast.”

Ooooooooooooh. Creepy.

Working off that unsightly vat

And the transition to responsible grown-up continues. Today we opened a company bank account.

Not that we need one just yet, but now we can register for VAT. Which means that we can claim back 20% from every ounce of film-related spend. And all with the minimum of aggravation thanks to one of those lovely on-line forms.

That said, we may have really prised open the can of worms now. We need to do our books quarterly and send the returns in on time or we will suffer what the literature describes only as a 'hefty' fine. And a little book-cooking could result in a holiday at her Majesty’s pleasure. Let it be known that I have already nominated Jake for the position of 'company accountant', m’Lud.

But, if we’re being completely honest, are there any screenwriters out there that haven’t quietly contemplated a minor felony as a way of getting six months set aside to write a first draft?

Oh – that’s just me then?

In other news, the bloody production breakdown still lumbers on, no matter how much lead we pump into its torso. It just gets so damn fiddly towards the end, as we’re forced to track every prop through the story, or deal with machetes re-appearing in the wrong rooms and revolvers with seven-shot chambers. Having to physically leave the flat to gaze over vistas of natural beauty after every other scene to guard against Excel-mediated insanity isn’t helping either. We are at scene 66 out of 76. A solid day tomorrow should see us out the other side, with or without our marbles.

And in a slightly unexpected development, my former employers are allowing the condemned parties to walk away with our company laptops at the final whistle. Although they are planning on digitally scrubbing the buggers first, all the way back to the naked silicon (so clean that I’ll have to buy another copy of XP just to get a tune out of it). Still, it’s £400 that I won’t need to spend on a new beast, and I’m not complaining.

Or should that read £333 + VAT? Trim.

Live at San Albans

And so we welcome you to take your own virtual tour around the exquisitely knackered Old Hospital, St Albans:

To avoid any confusion, I should point out that what you’re hearing throughout are the dulcet strains of Sir Johnny Cash, and not the M25. Apologetic.

Location, location, location

Jake and I do fret so.

Nothing unusual in that, I suppose. What does make it strange, through, is that we find ourselves fixating on completely different things.

Jake’s main concern boils down to whether we are going to be able to convince anyone to invest money to make the movie. We get the project to the insert-cash-here point, and then no one will. This seems a completely rational anxiety to have, but it turns out that I have a (wholly unjustifiable) belief that we’re going to be able to talk investors round when the time comes.

No, my main concern is the location. And in this regard, Jake thinks I’m mad.

The movie was written to be a low-budget production, and accepted wisdom has it that a good way to keep the costs low is to limit your locations. So, Resurrection was conceived from the outset to be shot in only two places: some random woodland (21 minutes), and a derelict psychiatric hospital (66 minutes).

Yeah – we are asking our audience to spend over an hour in a single building. It seems to me that if we don’t get this right, we are totally boned. And I’ve just made myself nervous again.

So, this morning we drew up a list of location must-haves: absolute silence, plenty of dilapidated corridors, a large hall, and a relaxed attitude to everything being covering in gore. Everything else we can write or shoot around.

Because today we went to see our first prospective venue.

Checking through the myriad of film location services on the internet, we had dug out the Old Hospital in St Albans. It was my fondest hope that this would tick all four of these must-have boxes, and I could save myself from August's stomach ulcer.

And it came close. Irritatingly close.

We thought we were onto a winner when the owner said that he was planning on eventually pulling the building down, and we could basically destroy it from the inside out during the shoot if we wanted to. Gore, blood up the walls, graffiti – he even suggested lighting indoor fires if we needed them. Check 1.

Dilapidated corridors? Check 2.

So far, so good. But sadly, that was as far down the list as we got. Everywhere we went you could hear what GoogleMaps has since identified as the M25, and it just didn’t have that 'hero' room.

So the hunt continues. There are other places to check out, each one of which gives me its own flavour of pre-emptive disquiet, and I’ll keep you posted. I may even chuck up some of the video we shot today.

But until we find the right place, I know I’ll find myself coming back to these photos for a quiet mull, wondering how we could possibly work around the problems. It did come irritatingly close *sigh*. Hankering.

Head-full of Hell

So, it seems that I may have been a little unfair to m’colleague Mr Hawkins in my last posting. Apologies, dude.

Because by close of play today we had only fought our way through to the end of scene 38, meaning that hungover Jake was operating at nearly 60% efficiency yesterday. My particular post-session circumstances find me in the middle of the perfect storm of advanced age, lack of practice and having started off as a bit of a pussy in the first place. I’m pretty certain that I wouldn’t be able to break into double figures. It seems that begrudging respect is due.

The down-side of a fully fit Jake is that after a full day of list-making, whenever I now close my eyes my default brain activity has switched to the after-image of an Excel cell being filled in. And we’re only half way through the screenplay. My subconscious used to present me with scenes from one of the Star Wars movies, and I hope that I haven't broken it permanently.

Please make it go away. Desperate.

A nervous breakdown

There is still one enormous block of work we need to get out of the way before we can properly start to chat over the project with prospective Line Producers, splatter guys, SFX experts, etc. The production breakdown.

Basically, this is an 80-page spreadsheet with everything in it, pulled out scene by scene. The characters, featured zombies, every prop, every stunt, every element of gore, each special effect, additional sounds, animals, vehicles, wardrobe elements, every time a costume gets a piece of splatter on it…

It’s an absolute monster.

The bitch of it is that although it tries to lure you into a state of mindless repetition, if you let your guard down and stop concentrating even for a moment it is stupidly easy to make a mistake. And then chances are you have to correct the same mistake on every sheet that has gone beforehand. The further in you go, the slower it becomes and the more you have to fixate on the minutiae.

So, you can imagine my delight when Jake rocked up this morning sporting the most heinous of hangovers.

Actually, to be fair to him, he rocked up in a pretty good mood, ready to tackle the beast head on. The hangover only settled in later as he sobered up.

School-night Jagers? I’m talking to you, @ThreeSpoons.

Still, we made it through to scene 14 (the end of the first act) before the mind-fog had descended too far to carry on navigating. It’ll be interesting to see how far we get tomorrow, if only to calibrate the reduction in efficiency that a big night on the pop represents. I’m expecting it to come out at around 30%.

But on a more positive note, we received a much thinner package from Companies House than we’re used to. Step aside, signed picture of Carrie Fisher, we need the frame. Professional.