Last night the cast, crew and family & friends gathered at the University of West of England in Bristol to watch a special private premiere screening of the film!
Both Darren and I were delighted with the turn out and it was a real thrill to see the film finally up on the big screen.
We'd like to thank everyone who took the time out to come and support us and especially a big thank you to those who bought a copy of the film!
We took a couple of quick pictures. The one above of Darren, James, Chris Sanigar (From Bristol Boxing Gym), Susan, Jon and Paul Henry and the one below of Cian Jarvis squaring up with Jon.
Yesterday, we sat down and we watched the full version of ‘Badman’.
Although we had viewed every scene a hundred times before during editing, sound production and video post production, this was the first time we could gauge how well the movie ‘paced’ (timings from scene to scene) and enjoy the film as a single piece of work. We’re delighted to say that with the exception of a very few technical ‘fixes’ we were both happy that this represents the final cut of the film.
As we look back over this blog, from April 2007 to date and we see the massive amount of work that went into making the film, its staggering that we managed to complete it and also a huge relief! We received an enormous amount of support from so many people both in front of and behind the camera, and we’d like to take this chance to thank them all for their tireless efforts – we simply could not have done this without them.
For all of those involved with the film, and family and friends, there will be a private screening of the film on 27th September in Bristol, and shortly after that we’ll be submitting ‘Badman’ to film festivals and considering our commercial release options. We’ll post some pictures from the Premier on this Blog shortly afterwards.
The website is up and we now have a fully fledged two minute trailer for you! You'll also find the original teaser trailer, a brief summary of the movie and a few photos from the movie! Just click on the image above.
Hope you enjoy it. Jon and I have to get back to editing now!
On Sunday 10th August, we concluded shooting on the film!
Our initial 2-3 months of shooting turned in to 10 months as we struggled to produce the movie we wanted. Weather, money, availability of the cast and crew, re-shooting, all the challenges we expected and many more were put in our way but we got there.
We are currently pulling together our first proper trailer for the film and we'll be posting that on this site in the next week or so.
Also, we have set up a private screening of the movie for late September for friends and family of the cast and crew. Which means the pressure is really on for us to complete post production!
It's going to cost us a bit, but it will be great to see the film up on a big screen. We're really looking forward to it.
This post is mostly just to share a couple of pictures of Jon and I in the editing room (A.K.A 'the Kitchen'). We've been doing this for the last couple of weekends to get the actual timings of the scene locked down so that Jon can make a start on the sounds.
The editing is quite laborious and time consuming. Because each scene is made from several different camera angles, there are lots of different shots to paste together.
Firstly we have to pick the best take or version of each shot - sometimes the actor gives a particularly good or bad performance or the lighting is just off or, in the case of outdoor filming, something unplanned happens in the background (this can be a good or bad thing depending on what it is) or there may have been a problem with the sound. Lots of things to take account of!
Next, despite our best efforts, each shot is often lit slightly differently either because we filmed it on different days and have different levels of daylight or because we had to move lighting out of shot or to provide the right sort of illumination. So we have to adjust the colour balance or brightness and contrast of a shot to match them all together.
One consistent problem we've had on set is with yellow lighting. Because we can't afford expensive studio lights, we've worked with B&Q halogens which have been great except for their... yellowness. Fortunately our editing software, Sony Vegas, allows us to correct the colour afterwards! Here's a before and after shot:
In the main filming is complete. We've been very busy since the last post completing some on set and location filming and also we're into final editing and sound production work which we expect to take July/August and a bit of September. This will mean that actual production time on the film will be a year not including the writing phase!
Below is a picture we took on location for a scene in the film (you'll have to wait and see what its about!) where I and Peter Orford (Sam) got to play soldier for the day. It was actually quite hard going but just as tough for the 'crew'
For sound editing (this is my 'speciality') I'll be using Steinberg Cubase 4 plus a whole host of other tools and tricks to create that big feature sound. Once Darren and I agree a final edit for a scene (which usually looks quite alot like Darren's rough edit to be fair!) - I get given a small version of the video and high quality dump of the sound. I fly these into Cubase and work on the sound with the video just as a reference.
All kinds of things have to be addressed from levelling sound from one take to the next to reproducing sounds that either werent captured in filming or dont sound 'right'. For an 8 minute scene it can take a couple of days to master the sound. Below is a screen image from the software based 32Bit studio.
Finally we've bought the movie domain name. www.badmanmovie.com and soon enough we'll stick the teaser trailer up there so there is something to see.
Things have been moving on a pace since we took a little break in April for Darren and Jon to both have some time off from work and away from the Project. Now back and re-energised, filming has been moving along and we're into the last few sessions of principle photography -
In the meantime for those of you who are following our progress, here is a little bit of fun. This is the moment when the Badman teaser trailer appeared along side some of the big movies of 2008 on brightcove.tv - completely by chance, we use it for hosting purposes but we ended up rubbing shoulders with the big boys!
I'm sure Darren will be putting up a better update on what we've been up to shortly! thanks for watching - Jon.
Another big day for the Badman Crew. This weekend we were busy filming a outdoor party scene. This scene takes place near the end of the film and involves almost everybody that has appaered in it to date. unfortunately as one or two people couldn't make it, we had to draft in a few extras with the promise of free food and drink.
Fortunately, the weather not only held for us, but was glorious and we were able to get everything we needed bar a few close up shots of Jon which we're hoping to get done next weekend, weather permitting!
Jon graces some of the 'background actors' with his presence.
Darren provides some direction.
Tea is an important part of any film-making enterprise!
The scene we were filming this weekend took place the morning after the infamous boxing match. As such we needed to ensure that Jon had various cuts and bruises on his face. Sadly he wouldn't let us put real ones on, so we had to settle for make-up.
On Sunday, we completed the last of the filming on our Office set. We had lots of individual shots to pick up in order to finish off scenes or bridge parts of scenes together and most of our cast descended on the set. Special thanks goes to Glenis, who was suffering horribly from what she claimed was a heavy cold, but seemed to closely resemble SARS - yet she struggled in valiantly for us!
Once we'd finished the office scenes, we had to break down the set and turn it from an office into a meeting room, so that we could film an additional scene that we felt we needed. More on that in a moment. First though, here's the video:
More on that exposition. As Jon mentioned at the end of the video, we realised fairly late on that, although we knew exactly what our characters motivations were and why they were doing what they were doing, the script didn't really lay it out clearly for the viewer. We decided that the best way to do this was to write in a short scene where we simply laid our cards on the table and said 'this is why we're all here'. As the film is set in an office it seemed obvious that they way to do this was in a briefing. So we set up a teleconference (which meant we didn't need to cast any new characters - just find some voices at a later date. Lazy? Yeah, probably. But it does the job and gave us the opportunity to add some visual comedy and a little characterisation).
The new scene will probably only last about a minute on screen, but will hopefully make things a lot clearer to the audience!
A brief note on props: It turns out that even second hand teleconferencing units and flip chart boards are really expensive. We got around this by 'acquiring' them from our day job (several members of the office facilties guys were in on the conspiracy). We brought them back again the next day. Honest.
Also... you can't remove permanent marker from a whiteboard surface with turps. We found that out the hard (and slightly panicky) way. Fortunately Dr Karen was on hand with nail varnish remover - it's the acetone, you know! Always handy to have a chemist around the house.
With our cast busy celebrating Christmas, we've spent some of our 'time off' looking at and editing some of the hours and hours of footage we've put together. We've used Sony Vegas 8 to capture the footage from the tape and plan to use it to properly edit together the final movie. We're looking forward to restarting filming this coming weekend. Our plan is to finish up as much of the filming that needs to be done on the office set as quickly as possible so that poor old Jon can have his bedroom back!
'Bad Man' is the working title of our movie project, which is currently in the shooting stage. This blog will detail our progress through the various stages of film-making. We are amateurs, holding down demanding full time jobs and undertaking this ambitious project in our spare time! Wish us luck!
Last night the cast, crew and family & friends gathered at the University of West of England in Bristol to watch a special private premiere screening of the film!
