BFI Future Film Festival and my FMP
Over half term, from Thursday to Sunday, I participated in the “BFI Future Film Festival” webinars. This was a series of live hour-and-a-half-long webinars on various topics to do with the film industry. Over the 4 days I participated in 10 webinars, with titles such as “Preparing for your first on-set role with Film Academy”, “Introduction to Editing with DaVinci Resolve” and “How to be a successful Freelancer in the Screen Industries”. But 2 of the webinars that I feel will be particularly useful for my FMP are “Writing for Comedy with Hannah George” and “LUX Artists presents: Demystifying the role of the Art Department in a film crew”.
Hannah George has written for comedy series “Trollied” and “Miranda”. She was fascinating to listen to. She said many useful things, but a key thing that stuck in my mind is that when you are writing comedy, you should show it to people to see if it makes them laugh. And since, as a script, it is going to be heard out loud, it is better to read it out to them so that you can put the timing, rhythm and pacing in as you intended it since that makes a huge difference to the effectiveness of humour, as I wrote about in a previous journal.
The webinar about Art Departments was given by the Art Department of the film Saint Maud (2019). It was particularly interesting to me from a point of view of props and set. One point they made was about using different outsides of buildings to insides. I was already aware of that, but they talked about just how common it is for this to happen. And not only outsides of buildings, but different doors outside a room ending up in a completely different room to where the door from the other side of a room actually goes to. The magic of film.
They also pointed out the importance of knowing what is and isn’t going to be in shot. You don’t want to spend a fortune, in both money and time, on areas that are never going to be seen.
And they also talked about an area that I have been aware of the importance of for a long time. That is, continuity. Especially if you are filming scenes out of order, on different days, and often in different locations, like in the example they gave of starting outside a building and walking through a door to the inside of a house in a totally different location. The actors’ costumes, make-up, hair and any props being held must all be the same as for the shot outside the building.
Some continuity errors are unavoidable, for example trying to get someone’s hair exactly the same as it was a few days ago is hard. When I was recently being a Runner for Damian Power (TOWIE and Made in Chelsea) for a new film he was making, Sam (the other runner) and I were responsible for continuity, and I can confirm it is hard. I looked at the script, to see what scenes were followed by what other scenes and we tried to take photos from several angles of the cast, so that we could make sure they looked the same the following day. There were several challenges. For example, we were filming in snow, rain and mud. This meant that the actors were very keen to get out of wet jackets and into warm dry ones at the end of the day. They were very good at waiting for us, but because Sam and I had more than one role each (small crew due to Covid-19) we were sometimes doing other tasks at precisely the time the actors were finishing scenes. I hadn’t realised before being a runner that this could be an issue that I would have to deal with.
If I’d thought about it properly then I should have realised. I knew that a Runner’s job is to basically do whatever they are asked to, so multi-tasking is necessary. But I didn’t realise until I was on set the full implications of this. Now I am aware. I learned so much from being a Runner on this film, it was an amazing opportunity.
One time I had to take home a pair of Ugg Boots that were part of a character’s costume which were soaking and covered in mud, and get them dry enough, particularly inside the boots, for the actor to put on the next day. Then we had to get them covered in enough mud on the outside again, for continuity.
On a big feature film with a huge crew, there will be separate continuity team. But it’s quite possible that many of my initial roles may be on smaller productions, so this could easily happen again. And for my FMP film, it’ll probably be me who is responsible for continuity, as well as directing, operating the camera, and a lot of other things. So, I will have to be careful about continuity, and this real-life experience will be very helpful, as well as the advice given by the Art Department team of the film Saint Maud (2019).