Misfits: Nathan Out, Rudy In...

So I've been getting back into the whole Misfits thing. Sure, it's a bit pointless, given that I've got about a thousand things to get done and shouldn't really be arguing on IMDB for any purpose, let alone a show that doesn't start up again for like, what? seven months?!

But despite that, there be news, in the shape of confirmation that Robert Sheehan will not be obligingly continuing the role of Nathan, the slightly wrong in the head idiot with a major compensatory complex. No, it would seem he's to make an exiting appearance on a web episode, and then he shall disappear to bigger and brighter things. Unless of course he carries on making terrible role choices and ends up like Caruso did; wishin he hadn't let his giant ego get in the way of level judgement, and instead waited to definitely be a huge film star before leaving the TV show that got him famous, before returning to TV with a slightly smaller and more door friendly ego. I'm not saying Sheehan is as meglomanical as Caruso was, and he's obviously far more talented that the ginger nut, but still... completely leaving a great show to go do the voice of a turtle that looks uncannily like a fish made famous by Pixar doesn't seem like moving on to greener pastures. He made Nathan great though, and we all love him for that.

image by chloealwaysmad.tumblr.com

I have been finding it irresistable to start arguing with those out there who seem obsessed with the concept that Sheehan IS Misfits, and without him, the show is nothing, and will be now be nothing more than tarnished sloppy seconds. Most of these people don't seem to notice the fact that the character was written, that Sheehan had been working before the role of Nathan came along, and that he appeared to be no more spectacular in other things he had done than thousands of other actors in this country, or any other for that matter. And many of them seem completely incapable of accepting that the logical progression of that thought is that there are thousands of incredible actors out there who haven't had the chance to showcase their spectacular talents, but if given a role as well written as Nathan, they could become the new favourite comedic performer, the new Sheehan, so vibrant and delightful they will mourn even the concept of the loss of that character. Some of the characters that were even killed off in one episode I thought were great, could have been expanded on and had loads of potential, felt disappointed when so many died.

Which also obviously illustrates how quickly the Misfits team breathe life into characters in a short space of time, not just the reliably ridiculous Nathan.

Maybe the problem is that people have lost perspective on how much detail has been gained over the two seasons for the character compared with those only guest appearing. Maybe a lot of people compare Nathan to the other characters who've appeared for one episode and think, X must be crappier than Nathan / Sheehan because I've got all these examples in my head of why Nathan is great, but only like, one or two good scenes, one or two hilarious moments for X, that character didn't impress in the half hour he was on Misfits. Therefore thinking they fell madly in love with him and acting like he's such a massive star in such a unique way that it couldn't possibly be the writers and crew who also built the foundations of the character that he so beautifully brought to life in a matter of hours.

But of course it's easy to take the character that has been given all the funniest stuff to do and say for two seasons and say that its the actor who is better than all the other people with more normal continuing characters, and the other stand out one time characters. In fact, it's ironic that this argument is in place about Nathan, the talk of how he is irreplacable, always has been the heart of the show, no-one has ever mastered a character so amazingly and from the first episode blah blah blah - I remember the online arguments when the show first came out, amongst the fans out there who like me, ahem, obsess so much that they are willing to go on the internet and find other kindred spirits who also want to spend time just talking about it - for the first three episodes, at least half of the fresh devotees were actually arguing that Nathan is the weakest link! Mostly citing that he is unbearably annoying, a fucking cliche and creepily arrogant :p Plenty of fans actively hoped that he would be the character who got fazed out by the end of the series.

But there's only so much you can comment, argue, or berate other people in conversation about an actor no longer doing a role. Eventually you have to move on to discussing the future; then I started thinking I had to bring a new dimension to my obsession, so I returned to one of my transient hobbies - bigging up the underappreciated talents of Joseph Dempsie.

For a little background, I'm big on actors. I'm an actors' person. I've been told that my enthusiasm can be cringeworthy and stalkerish, to the point of alienating any chance of someone wanting to work on the project being discussed and instead wanting to drug me, fit a gps into my skull so they can check I'm no closer to them than 120 miles at any given time, so I control it. With people I want to remain friends with I try to temper it, try  not to come off too strong. With people I really admire, it can come off a little bit fangirl, but still a vast improvement on my natural disposition on the subject. Under the surface, it's a big deal for me. I LOVE good acting, I can spend hours talking about someone's performance, and then sure as you're born I will get the urge a couple of weeks later to spend hours talking about it some more. And that applies to thousands of people. If I like someone as a performer, it's not unusual for me to be able to reel off several films or tv shows where they only had a bit part, maybe only a funny expression or one well delivered bit of dialogue, something no other layman would remember unless said person had become a huge star and it had become popular for the average viewer to rewatch everything they had ever done. And when I was a kid, I had an uncanny ability to pick out, from normal TV shows, normal films, or even really bad films and tv, one person doing an average performance with terrible material and say they were going to be a huge star in the future. For years it looked like there was no pattern but by the time I'd hit my teens everyone I'd mentioned was famous. My mother's favourite win was Bill Pullman - I'd seen him in this terrible Bette Midler film, where he played an idiot lover being controlled in a heist. It was terrible, he was terrible, everything was terrible but I told my mother there was something about him people would take to if he got better roles, and a couple of years later he was playing the President of the United States. My favourite is probably Casey Affleck, from his tiny performance in his brother's breakout film. All my friends thought I was weird when I started following his career after he wanked with his brother's baseball glove, but I'm the one who got to do the 'In Yo Face!!!' dance.

I don't quite know why I'm so crazy about great acting. I guess on the one, more logical, hand, it's got to be the mix of two things. 1) the obviousness of how essential good acting is to a good production. It doesn't matter how much money you throw at a blockbuster film, if the acting is bad the audience won't be thinking anything other than how unbelievable the performances are, and equally no matter how cheap a production is if you have engaging content and actors able to make it involving and believable, you might not need anything else. And 2) I cannot act well, and I never will. I used to do improv groups and I was told I'm good, but they were mistaken - I'm good with ideas, not the execution. The full range of acting is hard, and anyone who says it isn't is either a fucking idiot or jealous that they think actors get too much praise for too little training and preparation. They are often people who, if you dare them to perform themselves and they agree but them embarrass themselves beyond all recognition, will still argue that there was mitigating circumstances and that if they had all the perks of an actor on set they would find it easy. Maybe it's partly because I'm a great liar, so I can glimpse the dividing line between performing intellectually and performing emotionally, and I admire anyone who can get across that line.

Of course I don't speak of the habit generally anymore; when you're a kid and you do something like that, it seems incredible, like an idiot savant move, but when you're an adult and you start talking about wanting to make movies some day, the writing side, the production side, it's like wanting a clap on the back cos you did the dishes - having that ability is no longer something outstanding but something essential, only comment if you're the best casting agent in the world, otherwise, treating as just another intrinsic part of the skillset you have to build and move on.

Still though, I have my favourites. When my favourites get all the recognition they deserve, I can keep it in check, just enjoy the show, bask in the sheer variety of stuff available to enjoy them in. When they don't though, that's a recipe for obsession.

Joe Dempsie for me is veering into that territory, and he's one of the few young British actors I've got on the list of favourites. Most are American, probably because so much more good American tv comes out and can be viewed all together in long series' in boxsets, containing many more characters and therefore actors to become fans of than in Britain. Either way, he's at the top of my favourites who are British and not migrated over to America for giant blockbusters after years in small parts. For the uninitiated, he played Chris on Skins for series 1 and 2. I only watched this stuff last year, primarily because it was being treated as a staple of quality British television, and I knew nothing about it. That might sound mental, but it's actually quite easy to get that way when you don't have a television yourself. Plus, I'd obviously gotten into Misfits and I knew Misfits was compared to Skins, thought I should look. Dempsie is why I bothered to get to the end of series 2. He had a massive following, he was much loved, and then... he didn't become the recognisable name of British performance he should have been. He got a couple of parts, but they didn't really require him to do much more than speak. He got some other parts that you can't even see now.

Point being, he should be a recognisable name in British performance. He just should, it didn't make any sense, I figured since I watched it so long after his stuff was aired and finished on the show, when I looked him up, he'd be busy. He's not. I see something in his performance, something that hints at so much more, but he not only hasn't been hired in the intervening years to take his skills to the next step, he hasn't been hired for much of anything at all.

So one of my sidelines is the mission to watch his career until he got where he deserves to be. I know, weird slightly stalkerish, probably revealing too much, but this is one of my excentricities I'm willing to put out there in the world, no matter how embarrassing. I'll even take it a step further - in my continuing big script (the one that is retardedly expansive for someone's hopefully first feature) the second male lead is written with him in mind. Dare I say, yes... I'm writing a role for him. Eeek, it's so wrong.

In the meantime though, I've suddenly realised I've just gone around several of the main sources of discussion re: Misfits and just promoted Dempsie for the role of Rudy. Not out of a belief the producers won't find a fantastic actor to play the part, but because my actor loyalty reared it's head and took over, and now I'm sitting here, wondering if it was strange and bad to do that or not. I imagine this is how it feels the minute you walk away from online poker after having a great time but realising you went all in with four times more than the limit you set for a reasonable game, as well as the promise of your sister's two month old baby.

Oh well, it's done now. I do feel a little stalkerish bigging up an actor I don't even know for a show that might have already cast the actor, but that'll pass.

Seriously though, I think he could rock the character, partly cos I read this description of the character online and even though it could have been another fangirls slightly satirical fantasy of the character, I really like the idea, I think it's so good I'll be genuinely disappointed if the character is totally different and they just made it up.

What I read was a press release style description of the character that he is really up, really positive, really funny and doesn't take no for an answer, but his power has polarised his personality and all aspects of negativity, depression, have split off into a dark doppleganger personality, he goes at him when he gets a blow to his ego and a temporary slump sets in.

While I was pondering all that, I thought I'd go check out some of my favourite clips, but most of them are off youtube, unless you go to 4od and watch entire episodes. Although there is still a clip from skins season 2 with one of my other favourite people Josie Long, where she tries to get Chris to swear less. Adorable. And I came across this, with not just dempsie but several other of my favourite actors doing some more publicity for the Robin Hood campaign building steam - also adorable:





And this is one of the adverts; obviously a great campaign to get involved in:



In completely other news, I've decided to start a second blog. As in me, Helen, not necessarily Ant. Reason being now this blog is listed on the fabulous LAMB (total YAY for that!) I figured it probably would be best to keep this one film, movie, soundtrack and other media related. The other blog will be more specifically for Transplant related stuff, and in tandem with that I'm plowing more time into renal related research and production on the transplant related documentary. So over on that one (when I build it, haven't started yet) it'll be about kidney experiences, networking and research for both the documentary and the script, meeting relevant people, the purpose of the documentary, other people's experiances, the odd bit of editorial on representation in the media, as well as uploading anything made for the documentary.

From now on, I'll only be mentioning all that renal shit on here if it's really media or production relevent : D

Experiences with drugs...

A little list of some of my experiences with drugs... no, not the fun kind:

1) Drug reaction to metoclopomide (an anti nausea drug they give to kidney failure patients when your urea levels get so high that you are, um... being poisoned by your own urine, fun times). This is the cheapest and most convenient drug to prescribe, but I was in an extreme minority of patients who get a neurological reaction where my head tries to turn around and my jaw locks and clamps down with no attention paid to crushing my teeth or breaking my jaw. I couldn't open my mouth for a week after that. I was told that it's very rare and only happens to patients once; a second attack was a one in a million shot when the drug is stopped straight away - I got it three times, and the third time I was in surgery having a dialysis access line put into the big vein next to your groin. Probably my least favourite moment ever in life was my panicked squeal when I feel my head start to turn again, my neck and back twisting with it as the surgeon was about an inch away from slicing into my crotch. Thankfully diazapam works fast in a cannula and I don't remember much else.

2) Gas. Gas is interesting - was given a whole cannister despite not asking for it when paramedics came to get me four days before my third scheduled transplant date, because something had gone wrong and I'd gotten peritonitus. Again. I'd had peritonitus about four times before that but hadn't had much pain, but this time I was on preparatory immunosuppressants for the transplant and it hit me hard and fast and I felt like I was being beaten to death by invisible chavs. The funny thing about gas (and the paramedics even told me this, in these words, before giving it to me) is you still feel the pain but you don't feel anything else. I literally mean, for those of you who haven't had the pleasure, you suddenly feel like Descartes inital assessment of existence - you no longer feel any part of your body, but you know you are a mind and you feel the pain. You feel psychadelically like if it were not for your eyes showing you you still exist, if your eyes were closed, you are nothing more than a consciousness floating in the nothingness of space, but unfortunately with a dislocated friendship with a ball of pain in the periphery of your mind. And the lack of a connected body somehow paralyses your mind to such an extent you can't get your mind to care about the ball of pain, despite how real it is. I guess that's why the paramedics felt no problems telling me I would still feel the pain but not much else - it's sounds offputting but somehow when your in there, you don't take so seriously that it's your ball of pain, anymore than you would care about an embarrassing child acting naughty in the street. Either way I strongly advise anyone in the future - if anyone offers you a cannister of gas for whatever reason, if you accept Close Your Eyes - I didn't but I'm certain it makes the experience far more richly surreal.



And then 3) let's move on - today I decided it would be the best time to move a lot of the crap out of the little room, the room with no purpose, and leave behind some things I had to paint. The first and most important one being the metal filing cabinet. It's a tragic brown and light brown/sage/misery colour, and Ant's never liked it, and I want it to fit with other colour schemes in the flat. So he suggested spray painting it, which hadn't occurred to me, and I set about researching the best way to do this and all the requirements n shit. We decided to spray paint it black, partly because we've got componibilis and one is a lovely black so they would match, and partly because black goes with everything anyway, and I figured I could accent it with a range of mental colours and then spray paint over them if they get boring like touches of orange or electric blue.

Only somehow I managed to get all the wrong advise and I fucked it, and myself, up royally. I would feel embarrassed but given the affect the paint had on me, I'm not sure I can be considered in sound mind for most of this. Spray paint didn't terrify me like my head trying to do a 180, but it didn't make me feel surreally zen like gas did, here I just couldn't tell when things were in front of me on the floor, got a massive headache and my eyes stung like a bastard.



So the process: I left only big items in the room, I covered most of the floor, primarily dead centre, with an old and massive duvet cover we don't use and aren't likely to find a duvet that fits for again. I opened all the windows, masked up, locked the cat out of the room and set to work.

And then discovered spray painting consistency is hard to get right with a minute's worth of practice. I have drips on the back n side. And it takes a whole can to do less than half of a filing cabinet. And there's a fucking shiteload of overspray with these things. And that's just the overspray you see coming back into your face. And goggles should be listed as essential. And having windows open does shit. And even five minutes of spraying makes you feel very weird.


So moved on to my second project, hand painting a coat stand in Habitat style purple, which was easy cos it's left over from painting the living room purple. Not for keeping, there's enough purple in the house. For selling; I want to see if the faux trendy Habitat fetishists will pay more than it's worth for it.

This went absolutely fine despite not priming the wood, so on that front I was given too cautious advise re: painting. Satisfied with my first coat I went to do some other stuff, popped in the bathroom to wash my hands and discovered under my mask that my entire nose was full of spray paint.



BOLLOX BOLLOX BOLLOX! I hadn't noticed the effect cos I already had a cold so feeling bunged up didn't seem strange. Thus ensued much tiresome protocol of checking with the hospital, danger of death signs blah blah blah blah blah blah. All very annoying, but most likely safe. Mostly consisting of me not going near it, staying out in the open in completely ventilated spaces (this ended up being the pub; we figured near the door counts), drinking a lot of water, breathing through mouth, paying attention to whether I start feeling like I can't breathe, or get pain, or my skins starts to feel wierd.

So I tried to stop feeling odd, had a long shower, got dressed, and then Ant noticed something I had not seen at all.

Everything in the room was COVERED IN A LAYER OF SPRAY PAINT!! INCLUDING THE PERIPHERY CARPET NOT COVERED OVER!!

It's grey now, with a almost perfect square of cream in the centre of the room! I are idiot.

To be fair, Ant says he probably would have done exactly the same thing as me, but to be fair again, he's probably just saying that because I felt sick and embarrassed and annoyed. Although to be fair to me, when I sprayed the natural light was very changable and it was hard to see the proper colour of anything when one minute glaring sunlight is blinding you through one window and the next it's overcast. Honest to god though, out of the 12 articles I read online and two assistants I spoke to in the paint shop no one said that the invisible levels of overspray are so extreme that if you spray in the house you better cover every inch of the floor or you can kiss it's natural colour goodbye :(  Surely someone should have known!



Either way, I'm not going near that again, I'm sticking with normal painting >: [ Ant says he'll drag it to the back garden and finish it himself in the next few days, which is very kind of him really, given that he should be harbouring some serious resentment about the carpet and he's fucking busy. He says he doesn't care about the carpet but it's still nice. Either way it doesn't look good that the first day in weeks that I try to get back to the productivity, sticking to schedule thing, instead the living room is so full of stuff from the other room it looks like an explosion in a stationary factory, the little room can't be used and is kept shut, and I've been sloping around acting like I've not just been sniffing glue but eating it, bathing in it and moisturising with it. Spray paint might feel a little groovy (other than the massive headache) but it doesn't help productivity. Good thing tomorrow Ant has his heart set on going to the Odeon for free icecream and stupid movies, means I can stay out of the house.

(pics added by Ant)

Film projectionists vs hard drives...

How many times do you find yourself in the cinema these days and there's something wrong with the projection, or the sound? For me n Ant it's about once a fortnight. And yes, we tend to go find someone and tell them it's wrong. My favourite is when some part of the audio blows out the rest of the audio and you can only tell because you've already seen the film. The staff looked at me very suspiciously at Cineworld last year when I explained to them that there was supposed to be a very famous song playing during a fight scene over the clashing, bashing noises until I told them I'd seen the film before. Other than that though there seemed to be a mountain of problems especially ratio issues. Not sure whether this was in digital rooms running on autopilot style, or normal projection rooms where idiots were running them because all the proper projectionists had fucked off or been fired. Either way this article comments on it, though doesn't seem to have paid much attention to the increase in errors by cinema chains in the past and this year.

Film projectionists are losing their jobs and being replaced by hard drives

Good thing or bad thing? I can't decide... Well, actually I can - completely getting rid of all non digital screens doesn't sound like that good an idea to me, what with so many old films not being updated to even dvd. I don't like the idea of eventually finding a bunch of old films somewhere in the world in the future and nobody knows how to play them or where the hell they would because the last normal projector was dismantled ten years ago. You know it's gonna happen... On the one hand this could be great for huge, and I mean HUGE, film festivals and outdoor festivals of all kinds, where showing dozens of films at the same time for a large audience made up of many niche groups who usually wouldn't congregate together due to their disperate visual tastes, could be managed with a revolutionary level of mobility and flexible design. Other than that though, I still pine for the old fashioned cinemas. Those giant, two screening behemoths. In Cardiff we had a beautiful one with a grand staircase running in the middle of the wide walkway so you could get up to the second screening room entrance, or split around the stair to get to screen 1. The rooms were those canyons, steep enough that some idiots head was never silhoetted against the screen ruining your view, massive screen, booming audio flooding around you, no stupid blue lights on the gangway disqualifying the point of sitting in a darkened room, and if you sat up in the heavens in an unpopular film you could get away with a bit of the nasty as long as no one was sat in the 8 rows in front of you.

I have fond memories of those rooms. And not just because of that last point; very loudly eating popcorn and other munch to ruin the solemnity of the Passion of the Christ with my best friend. First time I saw Fight Club before anyone else had heard of it. Every Saturday on my own when I was in high school, watching any and everything to take the edge off. I loved those rooms, the brilliant acoustics, the total anonymity of being one amongst so many, the ability to be completely submerged in you sat right in the middle, not just of the aisle but stratregically the whole room. The concession stand being so small they never expected people to not bring their own stuff. Sweeping past the one ticket seller down the hall with no one looking at you amongst the hundreds of other people going in.

Then they made it into a HMV. One which I resentfully exploited by constantly returning music I'd 'enjoyed' at home and getting my money back. My favourite and most reliable and trusted reason was 'ah, well see, it was for me best friend's birthday but her bloke got it for her as well and 'course, she don't wanna tell 'im... you know'. You'd think it'd get old quick but that one works every time. And I remained so resentful I did that on average once a week for five years.

Anyway. I want one of those cinemas back. If I ever got into a position where I didn't mind and could afford plowing money into something that might not pay off, I'd totally build one again. Fuck it, I'd probably buy a mansion and turn all but four rooms into animal sanctuaries and one massive cinema, complete with vertigo inducing steepness and an unneccessary but gorgeous giant staircase.

Autopilot - Bollocks to film school

Hello, my name's Ant Carpendale. I’ve been dragging my heels over posting my own blah here, as I’m far more comfortable making films than verbally or textually dissecting them... but figured I might as well post up one of my earliest film efforts – Autopilot – 10 years after it was finished, and fill in a little of the back-story behind what was my own cheap-arse crash-course in filmmaking...

In 1998-99, while unemployed, I cobbled together my very first film - a silly 16mm stoner comedy short called Dole Scum, funded by the Prince’s Trust. It was based on an underground comic strip by the great Nigel Auchterlounie, and included music by Warp Records people, but the P.T. hated the end result, insinuating that I’d cheated them out of funding by pitching it as a worthwhile piece of social commentary when it clearly wasn’t.





Dole Scum didn’t exactly blow everyone’s skirts up, but I made it without a crew (armed with Robert Rodriguez’ inspiring Rebel without a Crew as my bible), on a 16mm clockwork Bolex camera that I had no idea how to use properly, and it amused the handful of non-PT people who saw it, so I decided to keep plugging away with film-making...

Tired of being skint, I got a job working the night shift for an evil firm of debt collectors and letter mailers (sorry, a ‘business process outsourcing company’), an outfit which gets paid lots of money to do inept things like *this*
To pass the time there and keep myself sane, I had a crack at writing something surreal, ambitious, and dark – something that might convey the dehumanising tedium of the business process outsourcing workplace, a film that would focus on a pompous arsehole protagonist (based on several of my superiors at the time), as well as something that would make good location use of the scuzzy concrete shit-tip that is Northampton.





A lot of the script material (such as it is, the plot’s a bit threadbare) came about while exploring the nether regions of Northampton on my own, taking pics of its mugger-friendly backstreets, smashed up cars, and abandoned workshops, while listening to electronica music by some very talented people from an online collective that I’d joined, called TEFOSAV (The Electronic Foundation Of Sound And Vision). I decided that this music (along with some specially composed material by the awesome Elleinad and Precenphix) would make a superb soundtrack, and that I’d build a film around the tracks I chose and the creepy locations I wandered around...







I figured it’d be very cheap and easy to have my paranoid yuppie-wannabe character – Alex DeMello - being chased around these locations by psychopaths working for his company superiors, to silence him from telling the world about some dodgy pictures he found in a folder stuffed behind a boardroom cabinet. This was a time when CCTV was becoming more prominent, so to ramp up the character’s paranoia and hysteria I included lots of references to hidden cameras, bugs, and malevolent watchers. He’s also a character who takes a lot of drugs and loses track of what’s real and what isn’t, which meant I could shoehorn in some random Lynchian weirdness.



It didn’t take long before I’d hammered out a draft I thought was filmable, so I cobbled together a few hundred quid, borrowed an office for auditions, and pulled together a largely inexperienced but enthusiastic cast and crew who responded to an impressive-sounding ad I posted on Shooting People, along with Damian, a fellow minion / cog from my office job.
Alex Demello was to be played by Seth Hardwick, a very pleasant and hard-working Brummie, who also kindly offered the use of his Sony PD100 for us to shoot the film on. Just before the main Autopilot shoot, we got permission to run amok in a C&A that was soon to close, where we made a daft little test film called ‘Shirtlifter’ – based on a small press comic strip by the amazing Ralph Kidson. Here it is, in all its glory...



With locations picked, action scenes storyboarded, and over-ambitious script downsized, we ran around shooting Autopilot over 6-7 weekends in Northampton, and then extra bits in Birmingham. We hit some snags, such as getting kicked out of a house because a bored, snitchy student told the landlord that we were trashing the place (we hadn’t), and being threatened by gypsies after they thought we were attacking their kids (who were watching our violent action sequence based around some car wrecks – cars that their dads had perhaps smashed up).





Apart from my piss-poor organisational skills and general inexperience hampering certain elements, things went pretty well. We shot a surprising amount of action-orientated stuff without anyone being killed or maimed, including chucking Damian into a reservoir with his hands tied, and filming Seth falling backwards off a car park roof.
I learned tons in the process - this was my film school. I’d learned fuck all on my BTEC Media course, and had no other training besides an ineffectual 2-day 16mm course at Panico, so was pleased that just getting out there and making my own movie had probably taught me more than any boring and expensive film school could.





I do regret not making things more pleasant for the hard-working cast and crew. Jimmy and Willy went the extra mile as car-wrecking psychos, Beki did a great job on make-up and set design (and co-produced some of my best shorts after that), and John the sound man was a sound man. As is often the way, I had very little money and couldn’t pay or feed them anything besides pizza and crisps. I was a bit surly at times, and almost purposefully disorganised. But I guess as film-making environments go, it wasn’t as bad as a short film I’d helped out on previously, in which the poncy director sat around on the front of a jeep wearing a bandana and got us to chase sheep around a field on the hottest day of the year without supplying any water. (I got sunstroke and quit the production).

The Autopilot edit was a long slog which took place over a year, on and off. I had no editing skills at that point, so brought in two very patient and hard-working people (Eddie Haselden and Anthony Bennett) to cut the 60-minute piece. The edit was built around the soundtrack, an experiment which didn’t really work as the resulting film is overlong and meandering for what is essentially a simple chase flick. There are some nice audio-visual sequences in there (buried amongst some self-indulgent wankery and clunky dialogue) and it has an effective ending. It’s also worth a watch for the TEFOSAV soundtrack and the commitment of Seth and his co-star Mr Buttons.



Also, if you like car parks and underpasses then you might pee your pants with excitement, as there’s plenty of those.



The finished film didn’t really screen anywhere besides Hoxton Hall in Hackney - a packed out showing, but the audience left looking perplexed and annoyed. Then in 2003 it screened at SciencePlusFiction Festival in Trieste, Italy, to an empty cinema - apart from a bickering Italian couple who wandered in halfway through, then left again a few minutes later. I did my first ever nervy Q&A with some other filmmakers in front of Alan Jones and Kim Newman, to whom I said I was going to try and get the budget back on a fruit machine win.





I felt a bit despondent that audiences hadn't taken to Autopilot and recognised my obvious genius. Did they just not get it? Did the film not blow their feeble minds? I deduced that it might take a while for the film to gain its inevitable cult following and be hailed as something or other. Years later, after I'd made more films, I came to the conclusion that audiences don't like to be bored or confused, and perhaps my film had done both.



So anyways, it’s been 10 years since I made it, I figured I’d finally throw it online for posterity, and it serves as a reminder to me that I’ve not made anything substantial in aeons, so I WILL make a proper feature film this year. Something where the audience hopefully won’t leave the cinema feeling perplexed and annoyed..
Many thanks to everyone who supported me on this and following efforts. :)

Achieve synergy. Here’s Autopilot >

Oldboy article: interesting?

As anyone interested in films can quickly gather from this page, I quite like the Vengence trilogy. I've been a fan from the premiere of the first film, which naturally means that with a certain degree of irony, it had absolutely nothing to do with the organ donation aspect of the storyline.

I'm a big fan of the trilogy, probably because they are each incredible in their own way. With a triptych style group of films, I usually find myself only liking one or two. Almost always I will find one of them doesnt touch me in anyway. But Vengence is different. The first movie instantly became an enduring favourite for it's contemplatative attitude to violence even as it engrosses you in it. Lady Vengence is evocative in about a thousand ways and increasingly satisfying the more you watch.

But Oldboy is... mental? Yes, Mental. In a good way of course. However it was my least favourite of the three for one simple reason - I didn't really love the ending. Or at least, I felt instinctively that the relationship aspect of the ending, I wouldn't have gone with. It didn't stop me loving it generally, just made me notice the absence of that purist sense of satisfaction you get at the end of a perfect film.

But that was before I read this: South Korean Cinema Violence article

Now I'm wondering. That's the sort of cultural allegorical stuff I'd usually jump all over as an example of superior interpretative writing, but clearly my poor retention of historical facts made me miss this bit of correlation. Should I rewatch? Hmmm

A Rare Feminist Post; Porn, Perception, Framing. Part 1.

I started writing this post when I should have been writing several other things much more important (Such as a reply to you Chris about that email, which is on it's way - in summary, totally great idea!) but instead got lost writing a long diatribe about all the thoughts that a Guardian article gave me. But then it turned out I'd been writing all night, ruining my only just fixed sleep pattern might I add, and I hadn't even gotten about half way through what I wanted to say even though I'd hit the 4000 word mark. All stream of consciousness as well.

So I thought I'd better break it down and introduce it as a new blog theme to be regularly added to every week or so. I guess I should leave this until next week because calling it Masturbation Monday would probably make the most sense, but since it's not a Monday, let's just call it my Rolling Porn post.

Yes, porn: I will be writing about porn. Sometimes just about porn there out in the world, sometimes about how Ant has been involved in making porn, and how I almost got involved but never crossed that line cos it was never quite right, sometimes about the philosophical perspectives people argue over, sometimes just plain old criticism, and stuff like that. I am welcome to any and all arguments of any kind, and anyone's own experiences.

First let's start small; let's us begin:

*Disclaimer: these porn posts will be my perspective, some of them will rank as my least objective posts of all time. It's about my own experience, opinion and philosophy. It's not an angry rant, but it's detailed: I strongly advise not to read if the reader has NO interest in porn, and to pause if they strongly feel they don't have any curiousity about what I know of it, and what I think about the people and things I've gotten to know about*

So I was taking a rare look at The Guardian, which used to be the only source of accurate news I trusted, but which for years has been, well... a load of blah? The Guardian has gone to the dogs and I haven't read it in a while. The past couple of days I've been checking in though, spurred on by my utter horror at the 'interactive' type page they set up for any old fucking idiot to write in what they thought the strategy should be for fixing the crazy rod problem in Japan, whether you've any professional knowledge of structural damage, science, containment or, hell, whether you've ever even seen a specialised energy building in real life or not. I expect that sort of thing on crappy morning discussion shows, desperate to fill a lot of their time on air with anything unscripted, even the public talking a load of old bollocks. Not on the Guardian. Since that imbued me with a sense of personal horror much like watching a car crash, I find myself going back. 

And today I saw this: Porn Made By Women For Women.

Now as of writing up to this paragraph, I have not read more than the first five paragraphs of the article. I will read the rest, but even from the beginning I feel confident in assuming that to some extent I will have little faith in the rest. Why would I have little confidence in a huge article based on the first couple of paragraphs? [Edit: have now read all of article, and tis fine about the other people most of whom have a bit of knowledge of and they seem ok, but the following comments about Span I still stick by]

Because I personally know the framing of a statement in those paragraphs is inaccurate. About the stuff in it that I don't have firsthand experience with, I already have a reason to not be sure the rest is accurate and well researched when the statement in the beginning doesn't seem to have been.

What I refer to is the absolutist statement about Anna Span: 'But what she has been doing is not mainstream pornography, but independent porn made for women'. The article then goes on for the next paragraph to say that others have argued against this, and then the writer notes the best way to find out how she is different is probably best done by watching her films.

Watch her films ay? That's how to see how her work is different? Has the writer watched them?!

Now let's get something straight at this point: I haven't seen any of Anna Span's work produced in the last few years. But I don't think that should weaken my point since the comments about Anna Span don't state that there's been a change in direction for her, the statements are quite clearly referring to her career, not a progressive change therein. This is the sort of framing of someone, the lazy sentence designed to have confident punch in as few words as possible, that the statement makes a clear point, even if that point would have more veracity if you took into account the different perspectives. Saying that you'll find out how she is different if you watch her films is a suggestion that if you watch them and don't see how they are different from mainstream, you're the one missing something in your perception, not the films in their content. If a random reader of this article then went off and got some of her older films, said reader could be forgiven for thinking it's themselves that need to think about what's wrong with their own brains because it doesn't seem all that alternative at all. Framing like that just to simplify the context of the article really irritates me in itself.

So to my perspective: Anna Span is not a feminist pornographer. I'm 90% confident that if I watched her newer work I'd still think that, but I'm willing to consider her work has contextually improved since I last saw it. I'm 100% sure that she wasn't years ago though. 

Any statement that suggests she was always making porn for women, and in that sense 'alternative' porn is blatantly badly researched. Or the writer of the article finds the type of mainstream work Span has produced in her career generally to be to her tastes and she feels like advocating for it which is even worse – as a journalist she should set aside whether she finds the depictions erotic and do a bit of research into whether other woman feel represented and catered to by Span more than any other mainstream film. She apparently hasn't checked this, instead choosing to just reference an argument between Gail Dines and Span. In which, funnily enough both of them sound wrong by the very nature of them taking extreme views with no acknowledgement of the middle ground they refuse to talk about. Dines, with her comments about not being able to change something like this predatory capitalist system come off more as fatalistic than considered. For one thing, such statements seem to willfully ignore the history of capitalism, in the sense that in the history of capitalism often a market is invisible until someone starts to tap into it, proving to other naysaying companies that refused to tap the market, that they will lose marketshare if they do not move into this ripe area of supply and demand, an area that often balloons as the possibilities start to seem limitless once you analyse the new buying group. At one point women were not marketed to regarding general lifestyle products, but to a degree it was companies through trying to mine different areas from each other that proved to each other that targeting the specifics of what women want would bring out more obvious ideas of what they want. The same with children, changing attitudes towards making different types of products wouldn't exist it there hadn't come a time when marketing to them became a visible idea, before it had become obvious that children and their relationships with their parents and their parents' relationship with representing their lifestyle and social group to the world around them. Dine's suggestion that trying to change an industry from the inside out by proving mainstream brands need to mine something that they didn't want to admit existed, flies in the face of the whole history of marketing consumer products. Would she say the same of eco friendly and fairtrade homewares and clothing retailers marketing themselves as an alternative to the shops that only think about sustainability as a sideline or who don't at all? Taking away another market by giving people exactly what they want instead of making them compromise by buying something from a big chain that only slightly fits their wants and needs is a notorious way of changing the minds of the larger industry by proving the compromising customers will make a financial difference to their profits if they have somewhere else to leave them for.

Anyway, back to the point of Anna Span and why I think she didn't come off much better. It might be skimming through your head that maybe I have no reason to think I'm in a position to think I have evidence on my side. And sure, I don't have a mountain of experience with her, I've never worked as a porn star in one of Span's films. But I know a damn sight more than a lot of people who would tell me how they know she and so many others are feminist pornographers without any personal knowledge of the industry beyond 'faving' some pornographer they like.

My main reason? A slightly biased one based on some films she made and a film she was planning on making.

I found out about a job she was advertising for, I had an interview with her, she gave me some discs of her work for me to see that she thought she could proudly give me as evidence that she was different (which in the interview is what I said I wanted to do, something more intelligent, different, fresh). I watched the films she gave me. And they were not any different from anything I knew to be marketed as normal, male focussed porn. 

I'll go into that in more detail in a second, but first let me explain the circumstance: This was the time when Ant and I were more intimate knowledgeable of the porn world than just getting that DVD sent to your house and closely watching your bank statements to check that the name of the company really does look as innocent as the website said it would. During that year Ant filmed and edited some stuff, some I thought was on the ok scale, some I had a strong reaction to enough to throw the computer out the window, as did the cat - she tended to sit on his keyboard judging him if a certain number of hours of editing past. My involvement was mostly writing a bunch of different synopsi and treatments for different purposes, given that more intelligent, narratively feminist porn was what I was interested in. A feministic filmmaking process is great on its own too (as in, where the filmmaking process was very feminist but the content didn't break ground), but ingraining it in the narrative was what I was interested in.

One of those treatments was for Anna Span. She put an ad out around the web that she was looking to produce a porn movie made up of several short porn segments each one made by a different new female pornographer. It was a project specifically for finding and giving a platform to women getting into the industry. I applied and got the interview with her, where we had a very nice chat. During our conversation we discussed how I was interested in doing, you know - something different, something more realistic than a lot of what is out there, something more intelligent. She suggested that's what she was all about, and gave me some examples. Such as how having a set where just the pornstars are there is unrealistic, how like, if a set is supposed to be an office, so many other filmmakers won't have any extras, any suggestion that the office is populated. I agreed even though it wasn't entirely what I was getting at. I admitted at one point that I hadn't had a chance to see a lot of her work, so she gave me some DVDs to the films she had specifically talked about in our chat, and she gave me details of the budget, my responsibilities as the filmmaker and producer of my segment etc. She was nice, I went on my way pondering whether we were actually interested in the same sort of thing.

I got home and watched the films, and regardless of how nice she was as a person I didn't like her work. Few examples: the film where there are 'realistic extras'? One is about an assistant to the boss who get's done on a pool table by the boss himself and some other guy who had really bad, flaky skin on his skins (and his part of the position they all were involved in made it hard to not notice this :p ). The realistic extras were just some random people sitting down in the seating around right in front of the snooker game they weren't having, even though we aren't talking about another close room but right next to them in a medium sized room, they act like they don't notice and have a bit of a chat, if I remember correctly..  Another film I thought was quite fabulous was about a woman taking this guy back to her place sometime in the day, she makes him baked beans on toast and then they fuck, pretty standard pron fare, then she tells him she wants him to come on her tits in a northern accent and he does, pretty much end scene.

Those are the ones that stuck in my head. Anyhoo, I didn't class anything I saw as reflecting what I thought we had been discussing.. At this point me n Ant had had enough experiences with people who say you'll get to do something with positive messages, good production values, a more enjoyable narrative and better sex, and then you realise they've set in motion a production that's just the same as all that other shit and your name is definitely on it and there's nothing you can do about it now. So I told Ant I actually really didn't want to write one of my good but normal ideas for the treatment, cos I had a strong feeling if she picked it to go into production and it was even slightly tweakable into a mainstream thing, I'd end up with my name on something that had nothing to do with what I was hoping for. 

So I opted to write the most satirical porn idea I'd had up to that point: My treatment was called 'The Censors', and it was referencing generally both the British and American certification boards, and specifically a few individual cases that hardcore report readers would spot a mile away but general viewers wouldn't even know existed. The point basically was the in joke amongst certain porn centric groups that anything genuinely erotic, porn that is fantastically tantalisingly good for both women and men, would be watched and thoroughly enjoyed by the censors themselves, but then their decision report would order that all the good stuff was too much for the public and had to be censored. [FWI, the British board are actually quite reasonable but at the time there was some contention over films that showed female pleasure which had been given no rating, but in general I was more poking fun at the American board, about which there was a lot more comedy rumours and fodder about the extent to which a certain amount of bias and hypocrisy seems to come into play when they rate highly explicit male focussed stuff vs less explicit female focused stuff]

The narrative itself was that a couple of guys are sat watching a porn movie they are assessing, really blandly analysing each scene, then they discuss how good something just was or is, call in some secretaries and they all start going at it. I wanted the guys to seem just like the porn archetype, bland, expressionless (actually I wanted even more robotic than more porn actors who try but fail to sound really stimulated; I wanted them to seem dead inside), giving basic orders and moving lacklustrely from one position to another. They all finish, the women leave, the men discuss how all of that has to be cut from the movie, and then we move to the women outside casually discussing how crap the guys were, about humouring them, fragile egos, job description etc.

And that was the misogynistic version! Of course if I was making this off my own back I'd go outright weird and it wouldn't be women humoring the men for any reason. At the time I was really into sneaking the message in the backdoor (no pun intended), and I actually loved the idea of filming stuff that was very similar to what is mainstream (like men instigating sex with supposedly passive sex vessel female staff) but mixing it up with some other messages that kind of ruined the usual meaning. And obviously I enjoyed the idea that if it got made it would have to be assessed by the very people I'd taken the piss out of. And the British Board probably would have laughed too. But I wrote it as if the sex scene in front of sex scene would be fairly mainstream looking, just like her DVDs.

In all honesty, I picked that to submit to Span because I consciously figured... well, there's no way anyone can enter into production with this and then somewhere down the line, probably on the first day of the shoot, act like they thought something completely mainstream was going to be the dumb story. And I guess I also thought, if she did like it and commission it maybe she really is different and was looking for stuff like this all along, or at least really wanted to support all different women's perspectives on porn, not just the mainstream stuff she claimed she was being alternative by making.

Of course she didn't want to make it, and she very gently gave me the news. I was fine with that precisely because I only wanted to make stuff where we really were making the films we originally discussed, not some horrifying bastardised version because it seems easier to go with the flow once the agreements have been made. Where Ant ended up, it was kind of like starting your career thinking the job you're entering into is going to be the next Blow Up, and instead you find you're working on an Uwe Boll movie.

That's one thing I learned about being passive about it in the industry. It's not that everyone is going out of their way to be unimaginative, both narratively and cinematically. A lot of people start out discussing stuff that is no more difficult to make financially with a good perspective on men and women and sex than it does with the same old stereotypes. In a lot of cases the person or people actually making the thing (physically I mean, cameras, bodies, lube oh my) can find they are being told they have to shoot something completely normal with no colourful character or story edges because the idea of even one customer being turned off by, you know, artistic flourishes and enjoyable characters makes them bounce off the fucking walls. Even though it doesn't cost more, they picture that archetypal customer who doesn't buy because it's got stuff that might engage that side of the brain that you save for normal culture but you don't want anywhere near porn: that thoughful, engaged, quality checking side of your brain. 

I only wanted to start some kind of film if it was with people who I was sure were going to leave it alone, weirdness and all. Or like Anna Span, not even pretend they like it, not starting production with you sneakily thinking they can chip away at you to make it more basic. I appreciated Anna Span not even pretending she wanted to delve into that sort of odd, offputting stuff, but still that doesn't make her a feminist in my book.

Next Time: Why I think the porn industry is exactly the same as any other industry, so proper regulation of crime within it is the only real issue at hand...

Podcasts

I'm breaking my not posting this week rule to say:

I don't get podcasts.

I really don't; can someone explain it to me?

Maybe it's because what I most do on the internet is read stuff, so if I have one page running a podcast while I read other pages, I find I don't 'hear' the podcast cos I'm hearing the words I'm reading instead. Furthermore, I usually listen to Spotify while reading loads of tabs on web, and listening to music makes me reader faster and more focussed, so the idea of opting to listen to people talking when I won't listen to what they are saying if I do something else, and there's not much I do that lends itself to just listening to a bunch of people talking. I honestly would rather reading peoples' writings about something on a page while listening to music than listen to them chatting about something I'll probably stop paying attention to.

Is it because I don't really like the concept of radio, and something has to be really engaging for me to listen to it sans visual when it's just voices. Blue Jam totally rocked, but I view that as an exception.

This applies to me as well; before I did A-Levels I was on a BTEC Media, which I failed. I personally wasn't bothered I didn't finish, because I thought the course sucked - in the Production Module part, they make you do a project where you make up a production budget. Why I didn't like that? They literally wanted you to make it up... there was zero requirement for you to use any realistic references, if you wanted to educate yourselves in real world knowledge through the module (such as where you get information on the costs of hiring equipment or sets, costings related to health and safety issues or permits, limits relating to working hours or pay to cast and crew, how to relate this to shooting schedule, etc) you were actually discouraged from going into that sort of detail, instead told to just... you know, make up a bunch of numbers about equipment, paying people, locations, then a random number of days to do it, add it up and call it a budget. I wasn't particularly interested in wasting my time of what is fundamentally just a mathematic equation, so I didn't bother. But the bit that did bother was the radio module - I hate my voice, and I can handle that in general conversation, but my voice is like nails on a chalkboard to me so thinking of it on it's own, not bodily factor, freaks me out, and then we had to do a show that was really broadcast across South Wales. I wrote most of it, sorted out a load of the production stuff, picking music, preparing, all that shit, but I didn't get a grade just because I didn't speak on it!

Anyway, back to the podcast.

I really can't see why anyone would bother, and I never have. And it's not just because most of them are nothing more than some people talking to each other, often in a really boring, uninformed way; there are many little 'to camera' editorials I've watched, I've nothing against people choosing to add a really basic video to youtube just to say why they think *some* of the Indiana Jones movies are pure unadulterated genius, but there's something about people doing it as radio. Not exclusively, but ESPECIALLY if it's about films or filmmaking.

Is what I'm missing that most people who listen and promote podcasts are people who, unlike me, do a lot of stuff that requires looking or physicality but doesn't require listening to anything that would distract from the voices chirping in their ears? I mean, I wouldn't listen on the bus or train, because (same as above) my brain works better listening to music, I mostly want to stave off travel sickness and drown out stupid people talking around me or screaming at their kids. I guess if you were a environmental photographer who was so busy they needed to fill all their time with education and networking listening to a podcast while you wade through a forest looking for a squirrel would be a good idea, or you were preparing to rob a bank and for a week all you had to do was sit on a bench and log the times the staff came and went, but generally I can't think of many times I'd choose to listen to one.

Most people who love podcasts, or think their careers would radically change if they made and promoted podcasts, why do they love them, and how do they listen to them? I'd rather a video or text everytime? Explain to me!