Tim here.
Whilst in the brief lull between production and the process of media conversion that will allow us to happily enter into full swing on post-production, Miriam and I thought we'd answer the question that we've been getting asked quite a bit as to why we chose to name the Selective Listening production company All On Five.
In order to dedicate myself to a filmmaking career, I left my previous job in 2008 (just before the economic downturn). Between that time and early this year, I completed four feature screenplays – a high-budget martial arts/action story, a mid-range-budget horror and two low-budget comedies – Tall, Dark & Hopeless and The Guest List. We also completed four short films.
Knowing that any first feature would be hard to raise the budget for, we temporarily placed the action and horror scripts on the shelf and, in 2011, set to work on developing Tall, Dark & Hopeless but, even with what is considered in film production terms to be low-budget, and a terrific fresh and talented principal cast in place, we exhausted every route we could, approaching those who could help us get it made.
Therefore, in 2012, we created The Guest List, a comedy that could be made on an even more modest budget. After a period of development, we could sense that we were once again in a similar situation as with Tall, Dark & Hopeless and so Miriam decided that we needed to create a story that could be produced without any outside help.
Logic would say that I should have done this in the first place but... I didn't. Firstly, I had developed ideas for the action and horror films for years before I wrote them. Also, I was not 100% confident in any of the micro-budget/non-budget ideas we had discussed up until that point.
Fortunately, an idea that I'd had some years ago for a short film came back to me and, with a great deal of development, together we arrived at the story for Selective Listening.
We have both given up secure employment and, over several years, have dedicated ourselves to getting our film careers moving forward. Financially, we've put more into this production than most sane people would but, in order to prove to those who might help us progress and make the great stories that we have ready to go, we've had to put everything into Selective Listening.
Needless to say, we would not have been able to make this film without the time and talents given to the project by the cast, crew and others who will be named on the film's thank you list, who worked for much less than they deserve. That said, the reason for this community effort is that we all hope that each of our careers will benefit from the end result.
So, for those reasons, five years down the line, because (counting our short films) this is our fifth production and our fifth feature script, we chose to name ourselves All On Five.
Oh, and the loaded die in the logo? Well, that just indicates that we've had to fix "the game" ourselves!
