Friday 11 June 2010

Borderline Final collaboration project


Borderline!! Well.. this was the final project for my course and I collaborated with Sam Galantini. It's a project that we're both really proud of and we're happy with the feedback we have received. It was chosen amongst 4 other films to be screened at the BFI in London Southbank June 09 which was a great achievement.

The film is a docu-drama style, and is about the relationship between two characters who live in a house on a border between two countries.

Writing the project was quite difficult to begin with, we had so many ideas of quirky little things that could happen and it all became too much. In the end we had to strip it all back and work out a formula, and once we did that we managed to write the script up in no time.

Of course me and Sam had creative differences at times, however we worked this out with an agreement that we had discussed before we began that project which is we had to have a reason to back up our creative idea or disagreement. This worked out really well, however we still had some disagreements which was only natural.


Our biggest challenge was finding the perfect location that looked like we were shooting abroad. It took a lot of effort and we did a lot of research and contacted a lot of people, we even went around door knocking hoping that some one would just let us use their house. In the end we found help with Stoke Property shop, they managed to find us a good location and even though it didn't look like what we had written down in the script, we had to work with it and it worked out really well.

We were lucky with two fantastic actors, Keir and Simon were a god send. Keir wasn't our original cast for David. The actor who we did cast broke his leg a week before, and felt so bad that he helped us find a replacement. He gave us Keir's number and we cast him without auditioning him simply because there was no time. Luckily Keir was fantastic so it worked out so well.

The shoot its self went splendidly well, we were on schedule that we even had time to shoot improvised scenes. We did try to employ the tactics of 'Curb Your Enthusiasm' and just give them the gist of the scene and told them to improvise. We put the actors up in the location for the night as it was a two bedroom flat that we had access to. We provided them with bedding and entertainment, luckily they got on really well so they were both happy to stay in a flat with a stranger.

Post production was difficult because we ended up having so much funny material that we wanted to put in, our original edit was 17 minutes long, and the brief was 10 minutes. We managed to strip it back to 14 minutes easily, but cutting it down any further proved to be really difficult. We had to be brutal. I asked other people to watch it to see what they would cut because I didn't have the heart to cut it any further. Gradually we made smaller cuts and we managed to get it down to approximately 12 minutes.

Hope you enjoy.


1 comment:

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