Saturday, January 28, 2012

Film poster design ideas for Henry Bramble

This is my photoshop version of the sketch below. I'm pretty happy with the layout  and text positioning I just hope I can come up with a more exciting and creative montage for the imaginary top half.

This was my favorite of four rough sketches I did to help me focus on my ideas for the film poster. It is based on a combination of a Son Of Rambow quad poster design that was never used, the Sugarland Express quad poster and the international one sheet of The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus.

Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Cut 3 - The Cannes friendly version

Henry is left alone in a cold dusty attic room.
Okay so just when I thought I could cut no more out of the film without destroying the emotional impact of the story, I managed to get Henry Bramble down to an incredible 14 minutes and 40 seconds, leaving 20 seconds to fit all the credits in.

Why so precise I hear you say, well Cannes and many other film festivals won't except short films over 15 minutes. I had a meeting a few weeks back with my producers and agreed to try and get the 18 minute film down to 15. I insisted on being brutal about it, but was still convinced I'd never get close to 15 minutes.

To my surprise much of the process was simply removing time wasted by characters travelling from A to B. Often it worked better as a jump cut instead. There was very little cut out that I missed. Some cuts I worry are a fraction too fast for a fresh audience to keep up with, so I may extend these by a second or two, but I'm going to test screen it to a few kids and close critical film friends and see what the results are.

Whatever happens I think we will have a film that will be short enough for Cannes. The only question is whether the VFX boys up at Dundee can deliver everything in time.


Raygo Rattlegum helps Henry Bramble hunt for a Voydarkatron.

Saturday, January 14, 2012

Was David Cameron's advice to the British film industry naive?



There's definately some pretentious art-house films out there that take themselves too seriously that should not be publicly funded (Rat Catcher, Hunger, Bronson) as well as some deplorable 'genre' films (Creep, The Cottage, Hush). I'm not sure what David Cameron meant by his comments this week, but I think the term 'commercial' is often misinterpreted.

A commercial film can be art-house, experimental, drama, documentary, animation, genre or any combination of these. It should be regarded as commercially successful not by how much money it makes, but simply by weather or not it makes its money back (this includes all production, marketing and distribution costs). If it doesn;t have an audience big enough to pay for itself then it should not be financed through public money.

The UK doesn't and will never have the financial infrastructure like Hollywood and therefore can't finance films like Avatar or even 'British' qualifying films like  Harry Potter or Bond. So its commitment to supporting all types of film is actually limited up to a certain level of budget. At the other end of the scale I agree with Julian Fellows that the government should not be financing self-indulgent filmmakers whose films have no chance of making their money back. Despite popular believe, this does not include filmmakers like Mike Leigh, Ken Loach or Anrdrea Arnold who are in fact by the above definition 'commercial filmmakers'.

This out-of-date attitude towards the UK film industry as being only capable of making fluffy period drama, gritty social realism, middle class romantic comedy or east-end gangster films has to change. We need to put more energy into educating British film audiences, by giving them access to the huge variety of wonderful high quality International and British films out there that don't make it to the multiplex. How we do this successfully is any ones guess and is probably just as hard to answer as "What makes a commercially successful film?"