A short film, very different to my normal commercial work.
A week on a canal side in Manchester in mid-winter, my kind of dream
location, nightmare actually :-)
It was a real struggle, not lighting everything beautifully. Every
shot was lit, but Brian and I found ourselves constantly reminding
each other " It's not a commercial" as an idea for a shot
would appear and then be rejected.
My life was made hugely easier by the assistance of Digital Film
Lab in London.
We shot Super 16 and scanned on a Datacine at 2K conformed in Inferno
and output to a 35mm neg.
This enabled me to cope with the constantly changing light, we were
shooting in winter in Manchester and the sun came out! just as I
needed overcast.
We shaded the foreground on location and reduced contrast and saturation
of the background in Datacine.
The mood was meant to get darker as the story progressed but without
telegraphing anything to the audience, just to influence them. We
started heavily over filtering, an 85B plus heavy Coral, and then
gradually reduced the filter combination so that we were almost
uncorrected at the end. We then corrected these back to "normal" which meant that we start with very little blue and end up with
very little red.
I've just heard that we've won the Edinburgh Film Festival prize
for best short film :-)
Since then it's also won the Manchester Short Film Festival, the
Granada TV short film award and Raindance
It's also won the Turner Classic Movie at the London International
Film Festival
