It's here!

Hi! Miriam here...

So, after 15 months, the moment has arrived. The film is finished! As for us, the job continues: press kits, designs, festival submissions, DCP creation... but at least we have the final product and are very happy and proud of it.  

It has been such a roller-coaster and so much work that it feels unbelievable that we are writing a blog post instead of being out there celebrating. I guess that the big celebration will be when we do our cast and crew screening - I can't wait!

For now, thanks to those who follow us and spend time reading our posts. We will be in touch!

Almost there...

Hello!

Tim here. It's been quite a while, so I thought I'd write to say what we've been up to since we handed in the work-in-progress to Raindance and the BFI film festivals.

Well, it's been a mixed bag. We've been working hard and diligently alongside Ean Currie (for the sound mix and original score) and ONSIGHT (for the grade and visual effects) to ensure that we're producing the best end product possible.

For quite some time the creative process has been over and it's been more of a process of eliminating technical issues and ensuring that we get the highest quality of sound and visuals possible. The call of duty has been exceeded all-round as hours and days of effort have gone into meticulous details and it's been great that no-one was happy to rest until the highest possible standards were met.

My computer broke down in the midst of three more sets of visual effects, which put everything on hold for a couple of weeks. This coincided with a ripped muscle in my back that put me on the floor for over a week and got me used to sleeping on the floor. This may have had something to do with spending days with my eyes glued to a computer screen in a posture reminiscent of Gollum (as illustrated by a candid photo taken by the producer).

I cannot count the amount of times Miriam and I have watched the film from beginning to end, with eyes and ears focussed on any tiny anomalies that might have crept in.

Many lessons have been learnt about the sound process, the post-production process and the processes that computer repair shops use to extract money from you when they believe you to be ignorant.

Anyway, the news is that the final tweaks are now happening and the cast & crew screening will be appearing on the horizon soon!

Last leg of the edit...

That's a wrap...

...and a blooming big spider.

G'day!

Regular readers may have thought that our shoot was finished after the pick-ups that we shot in October, but no! There was one final elusive shot that we managed to grab today, with the help of Reptile Kingdom, Surbiton.

Now, we shan't give away the subject of the shot, but suffice it to say that when the shop's manager Oliver casually asked if we'd like to hold one of their Chilean Rose tarantulas, the director felt compelled to casually accept. This may not be a big deal to some, but was a first for this director. Thankfully, Chilean Rose's do not react unfavourably to palm sweat and a convincingly confident pose was assumed for photo-documenting purposes:

Oliver assured that their bite is no more painful than a bee sting, however, they do have fangs the size of samurai swords with which to administer such a sting.

It felt great to get the last shot of the film, which looks just as it was envisioned, and it has to be said that both producer and director felt a sense of closure, getting it 6 months on from the main shoot.

That's not to say that all is now finished – the main edit continues, additional voices need to be recorded and the sound mix is on the way......

Intermission...

...not in work, of course – the editing continues!

Tim here.

I thought I'd jot down a couple of things that I've learnt along the way and direct you toward some entertainment...

1. Thank the Gods for DVD commentaries.

Ridley Scott once stated that he was jealous of the actors that he works with, in the sense that they can finish one project and move onto the next. They can, in effect, get four or five projects done in a year, whereas the producer and director stay with one project from beginning to end. Depending on the project, this could be between one and five years.

I'm quite impatient when it comes to getting on with our other scripts, but I know that if anything is worth doing, it's worth doing with 100% of all efforts. Therefore, nothing on Selective Listening will be rushed and, in the meantime, future projects keep percolating, maturing and improving.

Fortunately, when the day's edit work is complete and I can look at design work that allows one to listen to music or speech, I am regularly entertained by Ridley Scott, Martin Scorsese, James Cameron, John McTiernan and others thanks to the marvellous invention of DVD commentaries.

Who came up with this idea?! It's brilliant and so lucky that it caught on! (Yes, I'm a movie nerd – Get Over It!) While I am in script-writing, development, pre-production, production or post-production stages, I can always get reminded that the great directors have to have the same patience.

This is why it's so important to choose the right pictures to work on and, with every day spent editing, I'm very happy that we chose Selective Listening to be our first feature!

2. Don't store your stuff in damp and leaky sheds.

When moving home, one thing that is surprising is how your possessions appear to multiply as soon as you unpack and the amount of things (such as books) that are taking up space, that you haven't used in over 15 years and will probably never look at again but you keep them due to sentimentality or because they look nice.

When preparing the flat for the film, I was determined that half of the stuff I was putting in storage, wouldn't be reappearing. And a good job, really.

As the plan was to complete a rough edit in order to know that we could reset the location and let some of the props go with no qualms, and because the journey to begin the editing process was a lengthy one, certain items have been stored in a shed since sunnier times. 

To quote those who hire out the shed, "If it leaked, we wouldn't hire it out."

Not the case. And we kind of suspected that we shouldn't take their word for it when we first opened the shed, due to the mould and mildew on every visible surface. Our first task, then, after clearing a couple of decades-worth of cobwebs, was to cover the floor and walls in plastic sheeting, after which it resembled a Dexter Morgan ritual murder scene. BUT, it was reasonably thrifty compared to other storage options and so we went with it.

Five months later and the shed is nearly empty again. Although we have had to say goodbye to a bookcase, a desk and a couple of smaller items of wood-based furniture. 

All books have needed to sit atop a warm radiator and consequently get flattened to reduce concertina-like shapes. But, as part of the cleansing experience, yesterday we made a quick trip to the Cancer Research shop with two suitcases full of books to donate and they seemed very happy to get them!