Author Archives: Julian

About Julian

I am a writer and director of film, TV and radio. Recent credits include "Spooks", "Hustle" and "New Tricks". I'm currently swamped with writing work and using this site as a form of procrastination. For more info, please see the two "About" pages listed above.

Why TV may have become more culturally significant than film…

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In a recent interview Steven Soderbergh observed that movies may no longer be as culturally significant as television. Lots of people have commented on this, using shows like Breaking Bad and Mad men as examples of how television can cater to a much longer, more involved narrative capable of greater nuance. There’s some truth in that thinking but it also misses a larger point.

Culture helps shape our view of the world and our shared experience of it connects us to other people. Television requires a greater commitment from the viewer than a movie and so says more about us: just because someone you meet at a party broadly shares your enthusiasm for Jaws or The Godfather or Django it doesn’t necessarily mean you have that much in common with them. I like Taxi Driver, so did John Hinckley; I don’t think we’d have been friends.

The commitment required from television, however, speaks of broader common ground. If we both loved Friday Night Lights, it means we have both devoted roughly 55 HOURS of our lives to watching the show. To have lasted out that commitment we surely have similar tastes in character, narrative and theme and we likely share the same overall sense of morality that forms the show’s foundation.

If we both loved a show like that, we probably have other things in common. At the very least, we now have a solid, secure base from which to explore other areas of shared experience.

Netflix, iTunes and the box set have made watching television a much more active endeavour than it was when it was broadcast-only. As a result, television drama is now a more powerful medium than it ever has been and the shared commitment to bingeing on episodes and hoovering up whole extended narratives has strengthened the cultural significance of TV over film.

Anyway, get back to work… 

“You have failed and you had better get used to it”

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Every now and then a memory surfaces that you haven’t thought about for years. It just happened to me…

I’m nineteen, maybe twenty, years old. Improbably, I am co-managing a collection of basement rehearsal rooms in London Bridge called Samurai Studios. The place isn’t much to look at but Motorhead (minus Lemmy) rehearse (drink) there one evening a week and one of the damper rooms contains a Fairlight machine that Jeff Wayne allegedly used on War of the Worlds.

The position I hold is unpaid as the place makes no money and is forever on the brink of being closed down. Through a weird confluence of events, some of the diehard musos who work there got in touch with a friend of mine and asked her to help get some money into the place and get it back on its feet. I’d just left a shitty job in sales, which I was quite good at, and I owned a suit so my friend asked me to come and help put together a business plan and talk to some investors with her.

We were there for a few months and we worked really hard and got to know the bands who used the place and grew to love the crusty fuckers who kept it going on a technical level; repairing amps and fixing PAs etc. We put together what we thought was a pretty good business plan and figured out how much investment we needed. Then we went out and met with some City high-flyers to try and raise the cash. We even got close on a couple of occasions but the deals always seemed to fall through at the last moment. I’m under no illusions that this was mostly down to our lack of experience and probably our age too  - who takes a nineteen-year-old in an oversize M&S suit seriously?

We leased the rehearsal rooms from the company that owned and operated the building above us. They were bottom-line guys and they wanted Samurai Studios to start paying them rent or get the fuck out. Fair enough. They gave us a deadline which we persuaded them to extend a couple of times and, that last time, we really nearly made it but not quite.

Came the fateful day when they were going to turf us out. My friend was in tears, as were the crusty tech guys; a sight I never expected to see. I felt guilty. I knew we’d done everything we could but I also knew, deep down, that we had not been the right people for the job and that the staff’s faith in our ability to get them out of the hole they were in had been horribly misplaced. I wanted to do something, some last ditch attempt at a stay of execution.

I called upstairs and asked the landlord’s financial officer, with whom we’d been dealing, if he could come down and talk to me. He duly appeared; a small, balding man, in a much nicer suit that mine. He stood in the main room and stared at a six-foot tall bear of a man with hair halfway down his back, wearing a Saxon t-shirt, who was crying his eyes out. The Bear saw the financial officer, tried to compose himself and said “Please let us stay, this is our home”.

There are a number of ways the FO could have responded to this, a number of understanding-yet-unfortunately-pragmatic ways of letting this crying bear down gently. What he actually opted for was a grimace of disdain, accompanied by the words “People like you disgust me. You’re pathetic.” Diplomatically handled, then. In other, less distressing circumstances, the Bear might well have killed him for those words. But the Bear was broken.

I wasn’t giving up just yet. I asked the FO if I could talk to him in private, man-in-suit to younger-man-in-cheaper-suit. We adjourned to a tiny rehearsal room and I pled my case; could we just have a few more weeks? I understood that the landlord had no immediate plans for the place so could we just carry on trying to find investment if we agreed to hand over every penny we took renting out rehearsal space to the landlord in that time? The bear and his colleagues had agreed an hour earlier to not taking a salary for a few weeks if it could buy one last chance to turn the place around. I thought this show of determination and self-sacrifice might persuade the FO to grant an extension, not least because some rent being paid was surely better than no rent being paid.

I think the FO’s response was a formative moment in my life. He sneered, which I took as a bad sign. Then he stepped forward, jabbed me in the chest with his finger and said “You’ve failed, Mister Simpson. You have failed and you had better get used to it because you are someone who is going to fail at everything you try to do in life. You are a failure and that is all you are.”

I really wish I’d responded with “Is that a yes then?” but I was actually pretty stunned. I mean, I knew we hadn’t succeeded here. We had, in fact, failed. But I didn’t feel like “a failure”. It had never even occurred to me that I might be defined by my failures to the extent that I actually became an embodiment of the condition.

The financial officer left the room and returned to his office upstairs. I never saw him again. We vacated Samurai Studios that afternoon. We said our goodbyes to the Bear and his co-workers and we talked about keeping in touch but, in light of my new designation as “a failure”, I knew I’d never be able to look any of these people in the eye again after having let them down so badly. (This is called self-pity, and it’s never useful but you’re allowed to wallow in it at nineteen). I hope they all went on to bigger and better things.

A few years later, I wrote and directed my first feature film. There is a scene in it where the lead character, played by Steven Mackintosh, is in the depths of despair, having had his life turned upside down by forces beyond his control. At his lowest ebb we find him sitting in the doorway of a building, trying to figure out whether to give in to those forces or to fight against them.

The door he is leaning against used to bear the sign “Samurai Studios”.

It wasn’t a coincidence but, even now, I can’t decide if it I thought it was payback or an exorcism.

Sweet Billy Pilgrim – Blakefield Gold

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Here’s the new video by Sweet Billy Pilgrim, to support their single “Blakefield Gold” from the “Crown and Treaty” album. The video was shot by the band whilst gigging in Scotland and I chopped the footage together on Final Cut Pro when they got back. 

If you head over to their website at http://www.sweetbillypilgrim.com you can join the mailing list and get a FREE download of the song in return.

Sweet Billy Pilgrim are doing an acoustic residency at The Alexandra, Fortis Green, London N10 from next Thursday 6th September for five weeks. 

Fuck the average reader – David Simon

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While reading Warren Ellis’s introduction to American Flagg yesterday, I was introduced to this David Simon (Homicide, The Wire) quote:

“My standard for verisimilitude is simple and I came to it when I started to write prose narrative: fuck the average reader. I was always told to write for the average reader in my newspaper life. The average reader, as they meant it, was some suburban white subscriber with two-point-whatever kids and three-point-whatever cars and a dog and a cat and lawn furniture. He knows nothing and he needs everything explained to him right away, so that exposition becomes this incredible, story-killing burden. Fuck him. Fuck him to hell.”

How to make a music video for 85 quid…

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“Lisa’s asking if there’s any coke.”
“What?! No, it’s not that kind of shoot.”
“No, I think she means–”
“It’s not that kind of band, even.”
“No, I–”
“Apart from that one time…”
“Coca-Cola.”
“Oh. I see. No, there isn’t any.”
“Or chocolate.”
“Chocolate?”
“She said maybe a Yorkie?”
“Do they still make those?”
“Any kind of chocolate.”
“There’s water and there’s some sandwiches, tell her.”
“Right…”
“Because this is no-budget. That means no chocolate and no coke. This isn’t the fucking Avengers.”

This is Day One of what will end up being a three day shoot for Sweet Billy Pilgrim’s “Archaeology” video. We’re in the dilapidated Sergeant’s Mess at the recently vacated RAF Uxbridge, which we have been given use of as a favour and which is unbelievably cold. The aforementioned sandwiches and bottles of water have been bought at a service station on the A40. Over the course of the shoot this “catering” will cost around about £85.00, bringing the total budget for the entire video up to a grand total of… around about £85.00.

I started doing jobs like this a few months ago, as a way to take a break from the big machinery of TV production. On a video like this one, I use my own kit (in this case, a Nikon D800, a set of lenses, lights etc) and no crew, unless you count volunteers Jim (spent the day feeling ill in the car) and Mat (shot the bare-bones of a making-of documentary that would have confused the shit out of Salvador Dali).

The last few years have seen the means of video production become cheaper and more accessible to the point that you really can make a short film or music video for next-to-no-money. I’m certainly not the first person to point this out, but it seems rare that anyone actually explains HOW they did it, so, at the risk of boring the shit out of you, I thought I’d take the opportunity to do just that.

First off, though, here’s the video we made, so we all know what we’re talking about:

It may be that you’ve just watched that and now feel that £85 represents something of a horrific over-spend. If not, here’s the essential breakdown of how we did it:

THE IDEA: I’ve never been the most prepared director in the world but even I know you’d better have a rough idea of what the fuck you’re doing before you turn up on set. In this instance, the band and I threw some thoughts around until we came up with the concept of the ghosts as a way to represent the song’s central theme of memories and regrets. We figured the band needed to be unified as ghosts and that we’d therefore need someone outside the band to be our protagonist; someone who doesn’t know she’s dead and needs to be helped to the “other side” by members of a British electro-folk band (TOP TIP: It’s a music video, not Citizen fucking Kane). My first choice for this ghostly guest star was…

LISA FAULKNER: Another top tip; your friends don’t need paying. If you don’t know Lisa Faulkner, it would cost you an arm and a leg to get her to schlep out to a disused airbase on the M25 and tit around for days pretending to be unaware of her own demise. If you DO know her, it costs you a bottle of Coke and a Yorkie and, as previously noted, even this payment can be deferred. The point is surprisingly valid, though: you know someone who can act, or you know someone who knows someone. That someone that someone knows might even be someone famous. Or they may know someone famous. The mantra that is core to making something like this happen, and is relevant to every aspect of the process is:

IT NEVER HURTS TO ASK

THE LOCATION: RAF Uxbridge is a disused MoD base which is now used as a film location for shows like Silent Witness, New Tricks etc etc. Those shows all pay good money, sometimes thousands of pounds a day, to use the place. However, many locations like this will charge a lot less, sometimes nothing, if they know that you have no money, are going to cause no disruption and are able to work around their schedule. Again, it never hurts to ask. On a previous promo (Sweet Billy Pilgrim’s “Joyful Reunion”) we were able to get the Phoenix Cinema, the oldest purpose-built cinema in London, to let us have their auditorium during off hours WITH a projectionist on hand AND the use of their cafe for a tiny fraction of what they would charge a “proper” production. Even I didn’t think it would be possible until I finally just picked up the phone and asked.

EQUIPMENT: And here’s where it gets a little sticky because on this video I was using a Nikon D800 which is about as good an HD camera as you can get for realistic money. (It costs nearly £3000 so by “realistic” I mean it’s cheaper than the £100,000+ cameras we use on TV and film). The lenses I use were mostly bought second hand on ebay, but they’re still not necessarily cheap. HOWEVER, you don’t HAVE to use an expensive camera. With the right handling and with some creativity, you could shoot a pretty damn good short or music video on a domestic camcorder, a Flip or even an iPhone. The key to doing this is…

LIMITATIONS: Specifically, knowing what your limitations are and exploiting them. The Nikon, in common with most DSLRs, doesn’t like to pan fast. It has something called a “rolling shutter” which makes panning shots judder horribly. There are software fixes for this, but none of them are very elegant. The solution is simply DON’T PAN. In the same way, the Nikon is a pig to operate and focus at the same time, or at least I can’t manage it; I can’t have someone walking directly towards camera and keep them in focus the whole way. That’s a hard thing to do and very talented people are paid very good money on film sets to do just that. I can’t afford to have a professional focus puller with me on a shoot like this, so I adopt a similar solution to the one used in the panning problem; I don’t pull focus. You see those shots of Lisa walking towards camera where she only comes into focus when she arrives at her end position? Well guess what, I can’t pull focus so I fix focus on the end position and let Lisa walk into it. We make a virtue out of the limitation and call it “art”.

EMBRACE THE LIMITATIONS

With a camcorder and a few actors, you can’t make “Avatar”. But you CAN make “Paranormal Activity” or “Rec” if you use the limitations to your advantage.

LIGHTING: For me, lighting has always been the scariest discipline. Standing on a TV or film set as a director, peering at a set of monitors, I’ve always been confident in saying what I do or don’t like about the lighting but I had NO IDEA how the effects were actually achieved. To try and fill this gap in my knowledge, I got into shooting stills a couple of years ago and that taught me enough about f-stops, exposure and histograms (don’t ask) to provide some sort of foundation of knowledge. I’m still barely scratching the surface of what I’d need to know to be even a bad Director of Photography but I can kinda sorta get by. One thing I’ve learned shooting these low-budget bits and pieces is that, if it doesn’t quite look right on the day, it’ll look even worse when you get it into the computer. Spend the time to tinker and get something that looks halfway decent.

Wherever possible, I shoot with available (natural) light. It’s just easier to position people where they’ll look nice in the room than it is to light them single-handed. RAF Uxbridge has no electrical power, so it wasn’t possible to put big lights in there without a generator, which we couldn’t afford anyway, so once again, we embraced our limitations and I brought along three battery-powered LED lights. These things are generally frowned on by professionals because they’re so cheap (only £25-35 each. Weirdly, you can buy pretty much the exact same thing for £1000 a piece and apparently THOSE ones are perfectly aceptable – whatever) but the simple fact is that they work, they provide enough illumination to stop your shadows going complete black and plonked on a stand or on a shelf high up somewhere (in our case, sellotaped to the top of a door) they provide a perfectly acceptable backlight. In the video, there’s a shot of Lisa in silhouette, walking down a corridor. As she gets close to camera, the light from a doorway catches her and lights her up really nicely: that was one of these battery-powered lights, propped up on a broken chair – £35 well spent.

A mix of natural light and these same LED video lamps was used on this video for Piefinger. I mention it here because it was shot on a much cheaper camera than the D800 but I think it still looks good because it’s not trying to be anything fancy; just a locked-off camera and some lip-sync. The video isn’t getting in the way of the song, which is as it should be.

And that brings us to…

BLACK AND WHITE: Given the limitations we have in terms not just of lighting and camera equipment but also make-up, costume and production design, it’s generally a BAD IDEA to shoot colour if you want to be able to control the look of what you’re doing. Colours clash with walls, lipstick clashes with nails; it’s all horrible. More to the point for us cheapskates, colour temperature is a problem when you shoot colour; daylight rates around 5600k (nearly white) while a bedside lamp will be much warmer (more orange). Light doesn’t usually mix very nicely in colour. HOWEVER, colour temperature is NOT RELEVANT when you shoot black and white which means that you can light the thing with a mix of daylight and any household lamps/torches/whatever and it will still look good as long as you give some thought to positioning of lights and subject and exposure etc.

CAMERA MOVEMENT: Unless you have money to burn, don’t spend thousands of pounds on some kind of steadicam rig for your camera. The money buys you the equipment, not the ability to use it; professional steadicam operators get paid a fucking HUGE daily rate on movies for a reason. Most of the “Archaeology” video was shot on a tripod, partly because the ghost effects we were doing need the camera to be “locked off” to shoot background plates (shots of the empty room) that could them be composited together with the shots of the band. The tiny bit of handheld work was done on one of THESE, which costs about £20 and does a pretty good job. Again, embrace the limitations and don’t try to pull off fancy camera moves if you don’t have the equipment or know-how; you’re much better off framing a nice shot on a tripod.

What else? Oh yeah…

PLAYBACK: Music videos normally need to have people lip-syncing to a backing track. In the professional world, that means a sound man, equipment, digislates and all sorts of peripheral bullshit. Luckily, we’re enthusastic amateurs and we can make do with an iPod and speakers or a laptop doing playback. The ONE BIG TIP for this, though, is to have playback loud enough that the microphone on your camera will pick it up clearly. Even though you’re going to replace it in the edit with the real track, that recording on your camera will allow any number of different editing programs to sync the audio waveform from the camera recording to the clean track and low-and-behold, you have perfect lipsync without breaking a sweat.

Okay, I’m bored writing this, and I can only imagine that the three of you still reading must be suicidal by now, so I’ll save editing and post-production for another post if people are interested.

If you take nothing else away from this, PLEASE remember the mantras:

- EMBRACE THE LIMITATIONS and plan your shots accordingly

- DON’T BE AFRAID TO ASK for locations, for actors, for equipment; you’ll be surprised at how many times you’ll hear “yes”.

Okay, wake up. I’m done. It’s over.

Go make something.

P.S. If anyone does want to know about editing/post-production or how we did the ghost stuff, leave a comment or tweet me and I’ll write something up.

A couple of portraits…

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By way of posting SOMETHING on this blog, here are a couple of portraits I shot whilst tinkering with lights on the set of the new Sweet Billy Pilgrim promo shoot (the video is for “Archaeology”, released June 6th, the second single off the “Crown and Treaty” album)

The first pic is of front man Tim Elsenburg (@sweetbillyp):

Tim Elsenburg Uxbridge 2012

The second is of impro-guru Jim Libby (@jimlibby) who was helping out on the shoot:

Jim Libby Uxbridge 2012

The Archaeology video, which features the band and guest star Lisa Faulkner, should see the light of day sometime in the next week.

WORK-IN-PROGRESS

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Hi

I’m doing a little fiddling and tweaking to the site at the moment, so if you’ve arrived here and it’s a mess of poor design and broken links, that’s why.

Normal shoddy service will be resumed as soon as possible.