Premiere!
Hello everyone.
Last night was the premiere of Corpses & Other Teenage Problems! In short, it went down brilliantly and everyone seemed to like it! Now to tell you/blog/document for myself what happened leading up to the screening.
I finished the film only a week before we were due to screen it. Nathan and Jake did some final dubbing and I made some last minute adjustments to the colouring and sound. After just over 6 months of post-production work it was finally finished.
I contacted the local paper, the Halifax Courier, who then interviewed me, Matt, Fran and Nathan and took a cheesy promo shot. We ended up on page 3 and the article was great – apart from the fact that they got our premiere time wrong. You can read the article here.
All that was left then was to actually sell tickets. To break even we needed to sell 100. I gave Matt and Fran some to sell at Greenhead College and me and Nathan sold at our school. Sales were slow at first and there was a time when I was going to call the whole thing off. People opted for the excuse of saying they’d come on the door… It wasn’t going amazingly. That weekend I also went round Hebden Bridge putting up posters and one friendly music/film shop owner said he’d stock our DVDs! The hope was that enough people would pay on the door so we could make the rest of our money back.
That same week I went to the cinema to test a DVD on the big screen and it looked great. After continuing to sell and advertising in the assemblies at school the following week, as well as visiting form rooms to push sales, we managed to sell around 65 tickets. Combined with Matt and Fran’s sales it looked like we were going to make it.
The day before the premiere was definitely one of the most stressful days of my life. For some reason iDVD was playing up and we just couldn’t get a proper copy of the film onto DVD. It was only at midnight, the day of the premiere, that I finally had a working version of the film. Talk about cutting it close! I counted up the money I personally had made from selling tickets in advance and we had more than covered the amount of the deposit. With Matt and Fran’s profits and door sales we just needed to cover the rest.
Hebden Bridge Picture House were fantastic. Yesterday I turned up nice and early and we set up the film to play from my Dad’s MacBook (we’d given up on DVDs and were playing a .mov of the film through Front Row.) The projectionist was great and very friendly, as was the manager. They set up a proper shop with popcorn and drinks and pretty soon people started arriving. It was cool to see so many people turning up for our little film but as they started to take their seats I got really nervous. Not only was I unsure as to whether the film would play without glitching, would people actually like it?
The cinema played their usual advert and trailer real to give us the authentic cinema experience. Brilliant to see real trailers building up to my film, even if they did go on a little too long. Afterwards they played a 10 minute set of films and shorts I had put together. They included a trailer for my friend’s radio show, a fake trailer me, Matt, Nathan and Craig (originally to play Dom’s character) had made during the half term, my short zombie film and a fake movie piracy and cinema policy add we had filmed as well. Those were great, everyone laughed and seemed to like them. I then made a stilted and nervous speech in front of everyone and – the film started!
I had been working on Corpses for so long it felt so weird to finally be showing it people on the big screen. People seemed into it, they were quite, they laughed in the right places, some people cringed at parts. I think it worked.
Then after 35 short minutes it ended and everyone applauded. Yay! It worked, it’s over. Everyone I talked to afterwards gave great feedback and seemed to enjoy it, including the cast and rest of the ‘crew’. It was such a relief for it to be over and finally unveield.
After paying the rest of the hire money to my Dad (who had loaned me it weeks ago to book the cinema) I counted up our profits. Yes, we made a profit! £88 – which is great to say at one point is was going to be cancelled. I figured out we had around 120 people there – which is just awesome!
In the coming end of term holidays we’ll be doing making of interviews (I’m determined to keep them short and sweet this time) and audio commentaries. The DVD will be available the end of April and should hopefully make us even more money.
Thanks for reading, the Corpses journey is pretty much over now and if you’ve been reading this blog or watched our trailers or helped us out or payed to see the film or anything – thanks! Now it’s onto writing the next one, and other teenage problems.
