As tweeted, facebooked, texted, printed and blogged from Trueblood to FilmInk, our film is finally going to have it’s first public outing. And launching at such a prestigious and massive festival as Toronto – we in the Griffcave couldn’t be happier.

I can’t believe it’s been a year since we started pre-production. The cast and crew have seen the finished film and told me they loved it. It is always hard seeing a film you’ve worked on for the first time. Whether you’re an actor, editor, musician or set-dresser, you try and sit back and enjoy it, but all you’re really doing is seeing how your work looks up there and checking to see if that bit you love got used or cut. So I was thrilled with their response.

Now, though, it goes beyond our immediate Griff family and it is time to throw the curtains open to the big, loud, scary world of film-lovers, critics, exhibitors and ushers. If you can imagine taking a photo of the inside of your head, your thoughts and jokes and paranoias and hates and loves, then printing that photo a thousand times, sending it out for publication, for all the world to see, then hoping everybody wants to see it, while being scared if they do, that’s what it will feel like to launch this film. What an odd job this is.
Our first screening in Toronto is on the 10th September.

http://tiff.net/thefestival?sdate=10/09/2010

Just over a year after pre-production started. Almost exactly five years after our first short film together, Mechanicals, screened at Venice.

Here we come Toronto!

Starting to put all the sound elements together. Foley has been recorded by grown men walking in trays of gravel and eating thin air with knives and forks. The band are recording what could be one of their last cues today. Could be. The dialogue and ADR has been mixed to make it seem like the actors voices came out of their mouths at the same time and in the same place. Sam Petty, sound designer extraordinaire, is not only putting all these ingredients in the one pot, but adding his own brilliant layers of tension, comedy, subliminal emotional incidental paradoxical abnormal conventional sounds to lift the film up to a new level. The mix, when it finally happens, will be like draining the stock into a fresh clean bowl.

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So yesterday at 5pm we locked the picture off. That’s it. No more tweaks or tinkers, no more shaving frames and shuffling scenes. It’s been an intense edit. A very satisfying experience working with Karen. We work well together and it feels like we’ve had the right amount of time. Although the idea of locking off doesn’t feel like a real thing. It reminds me of that story of a famous painter who turned up to the opening of his exhibition, got out his brushes and started touching up one of the paintings on the gallery wall. The curator asked him what the hell he was doing and he said he was just putting some final touches to it. Does it ever feel finished?
Anyway it has to. And now we move on to sound design. That will take us to the beginning of April.
Not sick of the film yet. I still enjoy watching the performances. We’ve found the right balance now between Griff’s charm and and Melody’s oddness. He’s brought out of his unique, solitary life by Melody’s persistence and strength. Tim works perfectly as the too-straight brother. All the characters have come alive and are a long way from when I first wrote them. Everyone’s lost scenes, or chunks of scenes, but I’m so relieved that all the characters have made it to the final cut. What a cast.

I can’t believe it, but we are now in the midst of rough cut screenings. Next week some of the main investors will be coming in to see what we’ve done. As well as our distributors, and then some other well respected peers later in the week. I am also really excited by the prospect of showing it to a test audience who have never read the script before, to see if the story holds together and makes sense. Karen (editor) Johnson and I have been in a dark room with this film for weeks now and have loved crafting and moulding, discussing, arguing and laughing about the finer and broader points of what is now a whole new film. Then in the last week or two, we have been joined a few times by our producing team who have given us the incredible benefit of their experience and skill. Almost nothing they’ve said has been ignored. But now we have to send our film out into a broader world to be judged, assessed, and hopefully enjoyed.

The process has been fascinating so far. I’m sure every writer hopes they’ve written the perfectly structured script that won’t need any changes in the edit and just needs to be shot and put up on screen as is. The fact is no film works like that no matter how long you work on the script. I don’t know why.
I asked a writer friend of mine why you can’t predict what is going to make the final cut and what isn’t. (It would be so much cheaper if you could!) She had a great point though. Sometimes an actor can say, in one look, what you have written in a page of dialogue, therefore if you keep the page of dialogue, you’ll be repeating yourself. You can’t exactly write: HE LOOKS AT HER IN A WAY THAT CONVEYS THE REGRET, WORRY, JEALOUSY and LOVE THAT HE FEELS. A reader won’t buy it. But an audience will if the actor is good enough. And ours are easily good enough.

So after this next week, we’re off into the land of fine cutting!

Then comes the sound edit and design, which is looking more and more exciting by the day.

More to come…