In the can

In the can: the Useful Simple Trust launch film. I don’t quite remember how I got briefed to make this film. It probably went something along the lines of:
“the launch should have a cinema off to the side- maybe the Smallest Cinema in the World. And we should get Oli to make a film to go in it about things that are Useful and Simple”

Over the year I have been involved with making a film about Think Up Mondays. It turns out that making fly-on-the-wall documentaries is difficult- it’s hard to get people to say the right thing! It’s also difficult to get high quality images from the poor camera that we’ve been using. And it’s not cost effective to edit at work. So we got a producer-director in to develop the concept for a number of films with the intention that he will help to a greater or lesser extent produce them. It was about this time that the above conversation was had about making a film for the launch of the trust.

And so last Monday I met Caius to choose locations: Primrose Hill, the Regent’s Canal by Camden Lock, Chalk Farm Tube and in the print room at Thomas Matthews.

On Tuesday we filmed the majority of the small clips where people talk about useful or simple things. For the shoot we had both Caius and a cameraman, Mike. It was really interesting to see how the two of them composed shots, as well as how they lit them. Some people just reeled off their lines smoothly- others needed quite a few takes. I really enjoyed writing their lines with them. It’s much better to see how something sounds when someone says it rather than trying to judge the words on paper. With the clocks having gone back the weekend before, we ran out of light surprisingly quickly. We filmed the last few people in the print studio. By the end of the day we’d got nine people in film.

On Wednesday we filmed Ed’s commentary, which originally didn’t feature in the film. It’s only when I realised that there would be no formal
announcement at the launch that the need to put some explanation into the film became apparent. Whils at the time this felt like quite a shift in the film’s feel, it also gave the film a raison d’être. In the end the extra day we booked to film Ed was invaluable for assembling enough footage for the film.
Ed is an old hand at TV filming and he has worked with Caius before and so it was interesting to see the two work together to develop a dialogue and then film it: the greatest contribution in terms of camera time captured in the shortest time. Ed effectively got his lines right first time, but Caius always seem to ask for a second take- just for luck. With hindsight, these second takes were always more relaxed and usually used in the final edit rather than the first take.

Persuading Alex to film a take holding a worm was not as challenging as I thought it might be. Clement’s take was TV gold- by far the best bit of the film. The low-light of the filming was having to traipse out to Chiswick to hire the turntable used in the filming of the useful simple objects but the results were worth it.

And so to today when I joined Caius at the editing suite where he has been working with an editor to cut the film. I received a rough cut after one day of editing which I was nervous to watch. I showed it to Chris today and the list of changes was enormous. I didn’t know how we would get them all done. And the most challenging of all was to find a new sound track. Conscience that I only had an hour to trawl the whole of music for a tune I was relieved when Chris came up trumps with a sort of Calypso jazz guitar number. Compared with the twelve bar blues we had before, it gives the whole thing a lift.

See the finished article on the news part of usefulsimple.co.uk