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.

I have been in contact with a number of different local cinemas over the past few months trying to organise a premiere for Corpses. Finally I have managed to hire the wonderfully quirky independent Hebden Bridge Picture House for a premiere on Saturday 6th March at 4:30. So, if  you’re reading and you know who I am, or if you know where Hebden Bridge is – your invited! Tickets are £4 and if you don’t go to or know anyone who goes to North Halifax Grammar School or Greenhead College (where we’re selling tickets) email me, facebook me or twitter me or… write a letter.

It was pretty difficult to secure the cinema and a price I could afford. I tried a cinema in Elland but they couldn’t project digitally and the Odeon offered a great time but was a little too expensive. But the National Media Museum? Oh my god! Over £1000 for one screening?! I bargained them down to £500 but then they seemed to think that 12 noon was a good time for a premiere. They couldn’t budge their other screenings, and that was also the main problem with Hebden Bridge. Fortunately, I found a slot in their timetable where we weren’t interrupting another screening and I managed to bargain down the price to £400. It seems like a lot of money. Especially since I’m having to pay half upfront to secure the hire. But I’m confident we can get 100 people to come to at least break even, and then anyone over that we start to make a bit of a profit. But I’m really interested in just showing it to everyone, them enjoying it (hopefully) and getting some feedback.

So that’s that. I’m pretty excited about having a real premiere and am now just working on perfecting the film. It’s almost done, there’s tiny work that needs to be done on colouring and sound. I’m planning to shoot some short fake trailers and other things to run before the film at the premiere in the coming half term, so I have lots to be getting on with!

Thanks, and I hope to see you there!

Oh, and my other film, a 60 second spoof of Avatar has made it into the top 20 finalists of Empire’s Done in 60 Seconds Competition. If you liked it, It’d be great if you could vote for it HERE (as many times as you like.)

In the first week of the month Craig Holroyd came round the record some guitar for the soundtrack. I’ve ended up only using parts of it, but we have an awesome opening track and had (read further down) an awesome end credits track.

Last Sunday I met up with Matt, Nathan and Dom to do some dubbing work for the film. I hadn’t seen Dom since the wrap party but we only had a few minutes to record his lines in town before he had to leave. Matt and Nathan came over to my house and recorded their bits and got a quick glimpse at how the film is panning out. I’ve edited in most of the dubs now and they sound okay, although I may just revert to correcting the original recordings (removing hums is a nightmare!) We attempted to record the vocals for the end credits song but a mixture of lack of time and tiredness meant I decided we should just give up. I’ll be using the original end credits song I wanted to use. It’s copyrighted and I emailed the record label, who didn’t reply. If they haven’t even read the email I can’t see them finding out about the film so I’ll just risk using the song.

I am still trimming and snipping the film to make it perfect. I have a huge, long list of problems to fix, so that’s taking a while. The good news is that the Leeds Young Film-Makers Competition replied to tell me that I can still enter if I get them the film ASAP. Hopefully I’ll have a 10 minute segment of the film fully completed before the end of the week to send to them.

I’m also in talks, and have been for a few weeks, with the National Media Museum in Bradford to organise a premiere for the film. I had contacted a few other cinemas but the NMM is definitely the most prestigious, and has a lovely cinema. I’m trying to find a date in late February when we can hold a premiere, selling tickets to friends, family etc.

Now, back to work.

Thanks to the wonderful gift-giving season known as Christmas, I now own Logic Express a brilliantly brilliant music-making program thing. It’s brilliant and I’ve been spending the past 6 days scoring the entire film. I started on Christmas day (not much else do other than laugh at the shit-ness of the Doctor Who special (and eat)) and have been working pretty solidly on churning out the music since. It’s done now, apart from the music for a chase sequence, as I’ve found action music is annoying hard to do. There’s a little bit a final mixing to do, and some of the tracks aren’t quite timed right yet so there’s at least another weeks work fiddling about to get it perfect. Only problem is I don’t have another week – on Monday it’s back to school already and I have an exam coming up.

So to those not already in the know the release date isn’t 10/01/10 anymore, it’ll be more like late February.

In terms of other work on the film since the last update, I’ve refined the edit (which is pretty much perfect now!) and stressed and strained over the colour correction (which isn’t pretty much perfect yet!) I’m basically at that stage where lots of little annoying things have to come together to finally blend into the finished film.

Possibly at the end of this week or maybe next weekend Matt and Nathan will be coming over to dub some lines for me (and if they’re reading this and didn’t know, well, hint hint keep your diaries free) and Craig Holroyd will also be joining us to help create a track for the end credits. Exciting!

I’ll try and update more as the shit goes down in future, without another long gap. Bye!

I hope you liked it and it’s got you suitably excited for the final film! There’s also a Corpses website now which I’ll be adding content to over the coming months. Work is progressing on the film itself pretty much as normal. I’m promoting the film on my friends local radio show this afternoon. Listen live from 4:00 on this link. I’ll post a link to the podcast version as soon as it’s live.

Thanks!

I’ve been busy editing the film and it’s really starting the come together. I’ve made adjustments to the shots, changed some, added some and visually the film is pretty much done. I think I’ve just about cracked the pacing, the film is still 35 minutes long, put everything seems to flow better now. I’ve masked the entire film shot by shot into a 2.35:1 ratio so it’s looking extremely wide and very cinematic! I’ve also been doing a lot of sound work. I always forget how much work sound editing is – there’s only ever going to be one track of video but so far I have over 10 tracks of audio! I’ve downloaded and mixed various ambient and foley sounds from freesound.org, a brilliant royalty-free sound effects site, but I’ve also been recording some sound of my own. Now that I have my own mic I’ve been doing some of my own foley, breaking celery, squishing cabbage, sharpening knives – make of these sounds what you will….! Once mixed into the film they sound awesome and now most of the film is finished sound-wise as well.

I’ve been adding some music to see how the film plays with some sort of rough score. It’s tricky, because I have some amazing songs that fit perfectly and I really want to use them in the film – but clearly I can’t charge people to come see it with copyrighted music in it. (The plan is to have a premiere at a local cinema then screenings at school.) The online version will definitely have these tracks in though. It’s almost time to hand over the work to Greeny, who’ll be scoring the entire film for me.

In other news a brand new trailer, as I mentioned in the previous post, will be released on Halloween! It’s absolutely fantastic, if I do say so myself. I’ve spent God knows how many hours on it, much more time than I ever have done on any trailer before, probably more time than the full-length editing of some of my other films! It has a professional voice-over and some amazing sound effects. It’s been ready for nearly two weeks but I wanted to space out the release of trailers, seeing as though I don’t plan on releasing the film until early next year. Also Greeny has been hard at work composing some amazing music for the trailer. He gave it to me yesterday and I was blown away, it’s a really catchy and completely unique sounding score. I can’t wait for him to do that with the rest of the film.

Which pretty much brings us back to the film itself. Greeny and the music is the next step forward, not counting colour grading which is what I’ll be doing over the next week with some new software, Red Giant’s ‘Mojo’ colour grading software. Considering it took Greeny two weeks to compose 1 minute of music for the trailer, and over the next few months Christmas distractions and then exam distractions begin, I’m glad I set a release date well into next year. The next problem is working out how to send the film to Greeny or whether he should work with me on the music at my house with my software… Decisions, decisions.

And that is about it. Expect a post on Halloween revealing Corpses’ official website and the brand new, full-length trailer!

Sorry for the lack of updates – I did say in the last post I would reveal the film’s title the following day, but being the indecisive decision maker I am – I had to be absolutely sure the title was right. Me and Nathan have gone backwards and forwards between a number of names, altering and changing parts – lengthening and shortening, and finally settled on what I think is a genuinely original and intriguing title.

Yep, Corpses and Other Teenage Problems. Hope you like it! In other news exactly a week ago I met up with Nathan, Jacob and Matt to reshoot parts of a vital scene. It wasn’t until editing that I realized the scene wasn’t working out, so we met to literally shoot 4 shots – culminating around 5 seconds of footage in the edit – but it was needed! I also did a little dubbing work with Matt to squeeze a line that we forgot to shoot into another scene.

Editing is going very well. I’ve been through and done my ‘fine-tune’ edit and am now going back through and making adjustments to each individual scene, whilst also working on the sound, adding foley, changing levels etc. It’s taking a long time, but it should be worth it!

I’m also in the middle of editing a new, full-length trailer planned for release on Halloween. It reveals a lot more of the story and is looking great at the moment! I found a voice-over artist to record a voice-over for it – and he got back to me really quickly so already it’s looking and sounding like a professional trailer!

That’s about it for now, see ya!

I whipped them up pretty quick, but I love how they came out!

Editing is going well. I’ve edited each scene individually now and have put all the scenes together. So far, the total running time is just over 30 minutes, which is great! I’m now going through bit by bit, correcting and changing as I go. I’m wondering whether there’s a few shots I should re-shoot or some new ones I should shoot to put in at the moment, although I’ll probably make that final decision once I’ve finished this fine comb through the first edit.

Sidetracking slightly, I got an iPhone yesterday and in a video I made using it I included a little bit about the film. You can see the video below.

Tomorrow I’ll be releasing a final poster featuring the just recently decided title for the film. And that’s about it – editing is going well and the film is looking great!

I’ve been editing the film little bits at a time as we’ve been shooting. Now the entirety of what we shot is on my hard-drive – 5 tapes, 5 hours of footage, just under 145GB! Because I’ve been editing as we shoot as I write well over half of the film is roughly edited. So far it’s looking brilliant and I’m hoping to have a rough cut of the film done by the end of this week. Then I’ll be going through scene by scene, shot by shot, trimming and adjusting the edit to make it perfect! I’m guessing this will take a long time – as it has done with previous films – it can be tricky because of you’ve got to get the pacing of the film just right to give the film that overall “right” feel. After the fine-tune edit I’ll begin working on sound editing and bring Greeny in (or rather send the file over to him) so he can begin work on the score! Then it’s visual effects, grading and squeezing the film into 2.35:1 cinema widescreen!

I’ll update as I get further along the long list of post-production tasks and let you know how things are going. From what I’ve done so far though, it’s looking great!

I’ll be posting some posters for the film before the end of the week. Thanks!

Much like Friday yesterday we only had two scenes to shoot. We didn’t have any dialogue to shoot at all, but we had two different locations that were reasonably tricky to shoot in. The first was a well-known supermarket (they’ve asked us not to say their name because of the nature of the film, how cool!) Here we shot a number of short shots with Nathan – who was suitably embarrassed about filming with lots of people about. It was pretty cool though and I felt like a real director. We had to sign in to the supermarket and had the manager escort us around the store, ordering people to tidy up the aisles for us! I’m very grateful and the shots we got looked amazing! After shooting here we had wrapped on Nathan. Congratulations!

After Supermarket X we went into Halifax and shot the final scene of the film – a short scene with Francesca in a diner. I hadn’t asked for permission to shoot at the diner until a few minutes before we did. Mainly because I was too scared of asking too early and the guy not remembering when we turned up. Anyway the owner didn’t seem to mind and let us shoot exactly where I wanted to. The diner looks very similar to the diner in Pulp Fiction, and I always walk past it when coming home from school, so I was very happy we finally got to shoot there. Francesca was perfect and before we knew it the scene was shot. And that was a wrap!

Well, not quite, I went up to the hillside overlooking Halifax and got some wide shots of Halifax afterwards. But either way, now the film is finished shooting!

I can’t believe it, it seems not too long ago when we were just shooting the first scene. I am extremely proud of the things we’ve shot and cannot thank everyone who is involved enough for helping to make everything happen!

Now it’s time to get editing!