Production
Film ready for festival submission
Well, it’s taken over a year, but it looks like the film is just about there! Post-production is drawing to a close, as colour grading and sound mix are finalised, and the whole thing is being uploaded to Vimeo, ready for Flickerfest submission tonight! And then, many other festival submissions after that. Phew!
Hopefully, we can soon start listing festivals where it can be seen. Fingers crossed!
And now – TIME FOR COCKTAILS!!!
The Morning After trailer story
While many were taking a complete break over Christmas, I was getting ready for the next phase of getting my short film ‘The Morning After’ ready – the trailer.
I was in the UK, and did have a big Chrissie roast on the day…but the next day was striking out for the wilds of Basildon, Essex, to go meet an editor to work his magic on a trailer for the film. The editor was Aaron Shrimpton, of New Waverley Studios, and he’s done work for the Guardian, Chanel, Fat Boy Slim and Madness, as well as docos and shorts.
We didn’t want to tell the whole story as such, but give a suspenseful feel so audiences would know the tone and genre of the film, as well as showcasing some of the most beautiful images. We used two different pieces of music, one quite uplifting to complement the love story aspects of the film, while maintaining that Khmer feel, and the other broody and suspenseful to kick off the mystery aspect. The former is “Mondulkiri” from the Cambodian Space Project; the latter “Wild Cambodian Jungle Girl Found” by Ricky Rabbit (from Free Music Archive).
And so, the next step is to get the whole short film edited, colour graded, sound-mixed etc, ready for film festival entries.
Stay tuned for date announcements…or better still, subscribe to the mailing list, drop a note on our contact page, or just write to themorningaftersiemreap@gmail.com
Rice Paddy Field
My original script, written in my AFTRS Screenwriting class as an exercise, opened in a rice paddy field. I never imagined, when I first wrote it, that I would ever get the chance to film it ANYWHERE, let alone in the exact location I’d chosen.
Down the line, when I began to question if it was possible to be rewritten as a short film and actually made somewhere, I began to think of budget locations I could use to simulate an asian rice paddy field.
Somewhere in Cairns might be tropical enough, but do they grow rice there? Yes, but differently – not wet paddies. How about Bali? I’d never been to Ubud/central Bali where the paddy fields are, but suspected it would end up being not very budget to get cast & crew there.
In the end, it wasn’t as “budget” as I’d have liked, getting cast and crew to Siem Reap – but I stumbled on an ingenious plan to make it much cheaper than it otherwise would’ve been. This involved the discovery of “Filmmaker Abroad” – but if you’d like to read more about how I got it all organised, please read the post on The Morning After short film, from my Trashtastika blog.
Anyway, this is a pic from our recce day (checking out the location that our on-the-ground fixers had arranged for us). Ticketty-boo!
I’m not sure if those magnificent cows will end up in the final cut, but we sure filmed them. More than once we had to leap out of the way with our gear, to let the enormous creatures through. More on production problems resulting from using a wet rice paddy field to come in another blog post too 🙂
