Blog Posts

Production is Complete!

19/5/2014

We are glad to announce that the shoot of The Alpha Invention is complete! There should be some behind-the-scenes goodies coming soon which will demonstrate how professional, fun and absolutely awesome each member of the cast and crew was. We shot Monday through to Wednesday and finished ahead of schedule, which is a testament as to how hard and passionately each of these wonderful people worked.

There was a fair amount of laughter and stress, some department confusions (having a person called Art on set can have that effect) and plenty of dialogue! There was even an Alpha Invention cake (thank you Saff & Sam)!

Also present on set was an unofficial, unspoken of but universally recognised competition to see who could tweet the coolest photo which everyone had a fair chance of winning until Billy snuck this one in on the last day...

Makin movies. #thealphainvention pic.twitter.com/cfHCC3eMel
— Beecake (@OfficialBeecake) May 14, 2014

Yup, everyone else, go home.

Anyhow, this film couldn't have been brought into existence without the wonderful aforementioned cast and crew whose passion and pure hard work helped to get everything planned into the can! Thanks to you all. (some of whom weren't on set on photo day, thanks to you too!)

Swiftly, we move onto post, I started transcoding proxies yesterday actually. This phase will undoubtedly bring fresh new challenges of its own nature but the plus side is that it's equally as fun as you craft the movie and begin to see the animal it is meant to be. Stay tuned. MT

S-Day is upon us!

4/5/2014

Yeah, so where have we been?

Well, we are getting very close to the shoot dates of The Alpha Invention and no matter how hard you try and do all the groundwork ahead of time there is always absolutely loads to do at the last minute. From the ordinary - organising crew availability, organising backups, arranging insurance and being on WhatsApp constantly so you can approve every bit of set design that Anna takes a photo of; to the more unusual - posting questions on Reddit and programmers' forums to find software that emulates code on a computer screen.

On Thursday night we went through the shoot from start to finish with all the Heads of Department at a very noisy pub in central London (that's what you get for having a meeting on the first day of the month). The purpose of this was to go through the shoot schedule and if one department had a issue/challenge/problem/flash or pure terror they were to say "We're doing WHAT?!" or something to that effect. We then would discuss how we can execute said "WHAT" without this department hating us for the rest of the shoot.

Needless to say, it went swimmingly and thankfully there were hardly any "WHAT"s from anyone. I even double-checked to make sure that this was indeed due to quiet confidence rather than Sam Smiths beverages.

So as the days draw nearer this blog should receive a big fat injection of activity and if we aren't too exhausted after each shoot day there might even be a production diary of sorts. For everything else, there's twitter...

Star Wars' cast meeting photo is about to get overshadowed. World media, I present #TheAlphaInvention HoD meeting. pic.twitter.com/PQArrOYxPh
— Mark Towers (@MarkDTowers) May 1, 2014

See you on the battlefield.

CAST: Billy Boyd joins The Alpha Invention

11/3/2014

We have the great pleasure of announcing that Billy Boyd has joined The Alpha Invention in the lead role of Guy.

As far back as writing this film I knew the biggest challenge for us was going to be finding someone who had the dramatic sensibility for Guy and could pull off a fifteen minute film where they are the only person on screen. It was clear the performance requires someone extremely professional and of exceptional acting ability.

I've been familiar with Billy's work for a long time and a big fan, right from the early days when he was in a small independent horror thriller called Urban Ghost Story. Of course we all got to see him really shine in Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings as Pippin which, for my money, is the best film trilogy in existence. I knew Billy was my man so, without any sense of confidence, we approached him.

Thankfully, he got the idea, liked the story and dug the script and we're privileged to have him on board. With almost everything in place now, we can't wait to shoot and see Billy bring the character of Guy to life.

CAST: William Hope joins The Alpha Invention

20/1/2014

We are very happy to announce that William Hope has joined The Alpha Invention in the role of Walter.

William is a tremendously talented actor who many of my generation first saw (and adored!) in Aliens as Lieutenant Gorman. Alongside this role he has a vast list of other credits which span a huge variety of characters. This is what made William, in my mind, the ideal choice for Walter; a character that both Guy and the audience should find very hard to read and define his motives.

Walter therefore requires an actor of great range and ability, moreover because he is never on screen - his voice is the character. So it is excellent that we have William on board and I very much look forward to see what he brings to the character.

Studio Searching & Script Lining

3/12/2013

November was a busy and productive month for us. Amongst a whole list of pre-production duties one thing we needed to tick off the list was booking a studio for the shoot.

Amongst a list of beneficial properties that we were looking for (i.e. being based in or around London) there are two which are absolutely essential - it must be large enough to house our set;
it must be sound proofed due to the film being so dialogue heavy.

Waterloo Studio 2.

Our searches with these criteria eventually lead us to Waterloo Film Studios which houses four studios. We looked at a smaller (and obviously therefore cheaper) option, and the larger studio 2.

Which we end up using remains to be decided however what has been is how long we are there for. In a previous blog I talked about creating a story board which of course gives you a rudimentary shot list.

Michael and I looked over this shot list and guesstimated that the whole shoot should take about three days which we have budgeted for. But you can't rely on guesstimates, so with that in mind we have begun script lining.

"Script lining" is a very appropriate name for a process by which you draw lines all over your script. Their purpose is to mark which sections of the script require which shots.

So once that's done we can see how long the camera should be running for each shot and with some simple mathematics that take into account retakes you know roughly how long you will need for each set up, setting up that set up and moving between them. Add lunch and other small breaks and you have your shoot schedule. Next is to fine-tune that schedule...

NEW: Concept Art

29/10/2013

Credit goes to Sam Mardon. Head over to the concept art page to see it along with the rest of the work.

Single Locations and Genre

21/10/2013

It took me rather a long time to come up with the concept of The Alpha Invention. I knew that I wanted to make a short movie set in a single location with only a few characters, preferably two, three maximum - what is known as a chamber piece.

The reasons for my desire to do this are twofold. Firstly, it saves money and time, as you only have to hire one location or build one set and you reduce the number of necessary company moves (transporting all cast & crew).

Secondly, I love those kind of movies. In everything from 12 Angry Men and Rope to Moon and Buried (which is arguably the uttermost example) there is a palpable sense of drama in every scene driven by an uneasy feeling of something close to claustrophobia, because the outside world remains just that, on the outside, unexplored and therefore unknown.

For this reason, single-locations are a device used to a great extent in the horror genre. Sam Raimi even put the audience in the shoes of that oppressive "outside world" in The Evil Dead with his famous "Shaky Cam". However, I knew horror was not the genre I wanted to tackle, not because I have any less respect for it than other genres but simply because single locations are such a tried and mastered technique in horror I felt there were greener pastures elsewhere.

Initially I wrote a gangster short which never really took off. I also wrote something of a heist scene, but it felt exactly that, a scene from a feature film rather than something that deserved to be a short in its own right. The same was true of the next short I wrote which had a science-fiction twist to it; it became much too big for its own boots and has since become a feature length screenplay.

Heat (1995); Dir: Michael Mann

It was somewhere between revisiting The Big Sleep and Heat that I recognised a potential ground for exploiting the single location technique - in noir fiction. Now, both of those films have many, many locations which the protagonists leap to and from as they solve the case, but both equally have beautifully quiet moments of stillness. Staring out at a gloomy ocean or entering the suspect's silent house moments before he arrives back. The bittersweet melancholy that these scenes evoke are something of a noir genre trope and you almost wish that they would linger for a little longer like a painting or an entry in IWDRM.

And in a single location movie, even a short that lasts no longer than fifteen minutes, you do get to linger there. Every corner of the set will be visible at one point or another, the audience can get to know the main character's apartment just as well as he does. Meanwhile, the lashing rain enforces the oppressive nature of the unseen world outside which renders it as unfamiliar to us as it is to a hermit obsessive computer programmer like Guy.

Noir jumped out as the perfect platform for the single location short. Onto writing it...

Designing the Look - Concept Art

9/10/2013

Last week I talked about the test shoot that we conducted to find the appropriate look for the film. The basis of which came from the concept art that Sam Mardon created for us.

I found Sam’s website and liked the look of his other work so simply sent him an email explaining our project and if he would be interested in working on it. He did and we got straight to work developing the first piece of art.

Most of the film will be shot from behind Guy’s computer so I wanted to get a visualisation of that first to show the crew. To form a brief I sent Sam notes on the colour, the props and Guy’s build and appearance. I also sketched a very rudimentary map of the apartment (this is before I’d made a 3D model) so that Sam understood the geography of the set that was in my head, and attached a mood board which is an assortment of photos, all from other films, to convey the… well, mood. It looks like this…

Finally, I attached the script to give Sam an understanding of what he was drawing – some context. This is what I got back…

Which obviously looks great and ticked most of the boxes right out of the gate (many more so than I was expecting actually). I just gave a few bits of feedback regarding the windows being bigger, the light being emphasised, a few more details on the computer and giving Guy a notepad to draw on. And…

Perfect.

The second piece of concept art had to convey two key things – a reverse angle which is naturally another important shot; and a key piece of set dressing, the map on Guy’s wall. Without giving too much away I can say that this is a “tree of life” of sorts that Sam designed and dropped into his artwork.

This will be made into full scale mural by the art department for shooting and placed on that very wall. It will serve us well for inserts and cutaways and once you've seen the film it might make a bit more sense on second viewing.

Test Shoot - Creating Noir

30/9/2013

The key aesthetic aspect of The Alpha Invention which I repeat to the crew just as much as I repeat on this blog is the shards of light coming through the Venetian blinds. It immediately signals the genre to an audience and cues expectations of the story (which we can play with!).

Therefore, I wanted to ensure that we can achieve a suitably noiry look ahead of time - when we get to set it's vital that every moment possible is spent capturing footage, time can't be wasted testing out different gels on the lights or smoke intensities - so Michael and I went about finding a place to perform a test shoot.

We eventually found a ground floor apartment where we could set up a single key light outside. Once that was done we ignited a single smoke pellet which I bought from a local DIY shop. You can see the results below.

CTB gels.

This is no where near a "final look", it simply allowed us to experiment with different aperture and ISO settings and confirm that we definitely can see those shards of light.

We started bright for the first take as that is when there was the most smoke in the room. You can see the shards but there's not a lot of contrast in the image, everywhere is well lit, and those who know their noir will tell you that you need areas of the image that are as dark as possible juxtaposed with those which are well lit.

For the next take we altered the ISO setting and now you can see those areas of black, however, it's still not quite right. It's only in the last take that the camera settings and the gels have a hit a sweet spot. The table surface is not too bright and there are long shadows being cast onto the floor. Either side of the frame the blacks are now contrasting very well with the centrally lit areas. The only thing lacking in this shot is the smoke, which has dispersed quite a lot by this time. On shoot day we will take the set up of shot 4 with the smoke intensity of shot 2.

You may also notice that the last two takes are actually bluer. This is due to us placing CTB gels over the light outside. For those who are unfamiliar with the term, CTB gels are, for all intents and purposes, sheets which alter the colour temperature of the light. We upped the amount of CTB used until we found a look that was near enough to the colour conveyed in the concept art.

Storyboarding

23/9/2013

Look at his face! He’s bloody petrified! That’s because he had to spend hour upon hour with me as his omnipotent god in FrameForge 3, a piece of software I would highly recommend to any filmmakers out there who, like me, struggle to draw curtains and a bath let alone 48 different shots.

Last week I did a blog on art direction and mentioned that I'd storyboarded the entire movie from beginning to end. Well, this is what I used to create it. Designing a virtual model of Guy's apartment was easy peasy - you don’t have to be a CAD engineer to do it - and then positioning the camera around that environment is quick.

I’ve also exported this storyboard, along with shot notes and headings as HTML files which I’m uploading to the web so all cast & crew can access them any time of the day if they need to revise how things are happening on shoot day. It's "in the cloud", as they say.