Jack Nash (Tiago Morelli) is a Portuguese/American filmmaker, musician and game designer currently working as a sound recordist in London, UK.
It’s been a long last couple of weeks so let me see if I don’t leave anything out in this recap.
Last week, I finished up the translation I was doing for BAMM before moving on to another CSSD shoot. This one is called ‘The Beginning’, and was directed by Rebecca Gatward. We shot most of it out in the Finsbury Square Occupy camp, some in their Geodome (pictured below), and the it is about a rookie police officer and her relationship with one of the occupiers.
Unfortunately, they received an eviction notice, while we were still shooting, and had to leave the place a couple days ago. I got to meet a few of the protesters there and some have me that the presence of the Occupy movement had gone down a lot. Many of the remaining people there were disruptive, resulting in protesters having to tend to people with mental, drug and alcohol problems, instead of focusing on the movement. I don’t need to explain how this affected our film shoot, which was already difficult enough, trodding through mud in the cold weather until 3 o’clock in the morning. Overall, these disruptions attracted enough negative attention for them get evicted, similar to what happened at St. Paul’s. Hopefully, the movement will move on and find another place were it can function properly.
After a day of rest, I was back on another CSSD shoot on Monday for the film, ‘I Met A Man Who Was Not There’ by Smita Bhide. It’s about a group of friends who find out another friend of theirs had been lying about his identity, so they confront him about it. A lot of the actors from the CSSD had been on the previous shoots and it was really nice to have worked with them again.
Afterwards, I helped out Spike and Ali record some rehearsals for a series Spike is trying to get produced and had a couple days off to rest before jumping on to the next film I’m working on.
Oh yeah. I saw Nick Frost near the LFS a couple days ago, too.
The Sci-Fi-London winners were announced a few days ago and I’m proud to say that ‘Eight Items’ got third place! Above is the winning film, ‘Future Inc.’, which I think really deserved it. I already knew it was going far, even before the top 20 list came out, so congrats to them.
I could make this post about a number of things but an article about the award ceremony has has already posted, and Jake (director), Alex (AD/2nd Unit) and Will (writer) have already shared their thoughts on the making of our film. So, go read those if you’re interested in knowing more about the process and some good tips on speed-filmmaking.
Anyhow, I want to dedicate this post to sharing a few of my own experiences with 48 hour competitions and how I got involved in this one.
Back in 2008, a good friend of mine was part of a team entering a 48 hour animation competition, which was actually being hosted at the school I was attending at the time, and had one of their team members drop out last minute. She asked me to join them and I thought it was worth a go, since one of the prizes was a chunk of money redeemable at the school (meaning, I could use it towards my tuition fees). We were given a pretty vague theme, Metamorphosis, which didn’t really help much, being such a common theme in animation. Fortunately, our team had two more extremely talented individuals on board and we came up with a very simple concept, opting for a quick and easy style of animation (one team chose to do stop-motion and didn’t finish on time). I think these decisions were key to our success, resulting in a polished 30 second clip that we finished with a couple hours to spare and ended up grabbing first prize.
The next year, after finishing my studies at the aforementioned school, I enrolled in a new university and ended up being asked by some colleagues to help out with the sound on another 48 hour competition (very similar to the Sci-Fi-London one). Now, I had already been through one of these, knowing that speed and efficiency were of the utmost importance, and tried to point this out to our huge crew. Unfortunately, being just the sound guy, they didn’t really listen to me and only picked up on this hours before the deadline, when it was already too late. The result was half the crew being sacked or just not showing up after the first day, which was one of the worst experiences I’ve ever had on a film set and won’t go into detail because it’s just too sad. We basically shot two films: one the first day, that got scrapped, and a hasty production on the second day (I got a full 30 minutes to do the sound edit). I’m sure that if we had started off with a more focused crew things would have gone differently. A lot of our initial crew were mostly students who thought the whole thing was “cool” and didn’t take it seriously enough.
After that shoot, I ended up hating a lot of my colleagues, which is not good, and grew fed up with the ambient at my uni, leading to me dropping out after the first semester. This actually turned out to be a good thing, since I moved to London later that summer and am still here, working as a sound recordist (who would’ve known?). However, 48 hour competitions became synonymous with unnecessary frustration and anxiety to me, so I vowed never to do one again.
Fast forward a couple years, and here I am doing another 48 hour thingy.
“Why did you break your vow?”, you might ask. Well, the main reason would be that I don’t really care for it anymore and restricting yourself based on past experiences is not the way to go. I’ve realised networking is the way to go, and those who have met me know I make an effort to stick to peoples’ minds. You don’t make contacts by standing in the corner, going through sound files with your headphones on.
But how did I get involved with ‘Eight Items’?
Twitter.
That’s not the whole story though, obviously. A while back, I found out that Katie, an old acquaintance from my younger years, was also in London, doing production design, and got in touch with her. Apparently, she is very active in the tweeting filmmaker community and we ended up meeting at this networking event she helps organise. So afterwards, I started actually using my Twitter account and kept in contact with a bunch of people I met there. Eventually, Jake, who was preparing for the Sci-Fi Challenge, tweeted something about needing a sound recordist, offering on set massages (which I sadly only found out about afterwards). Katie saw this and, being the awesome person she is, passed on my details.
This brings me back to my reason for doing the shoot: networking. One of my policies is to always, if possible, accept work people you respect recommend you for. If you don’t do that, your reputation won’t grow and people will just stop recommending you. I was especially interested in working with Jake after seeing some of his work and knew right away that the project would be nothing like my last 48 hour experience, however, I never expected to be involved in such a great film, much less one of the top 3. The shoot went incredibly smoothly, probably due to the fact that a lot of the crew had endured past competition entries that fell short for one reason or another. I remember Jake saying something along the lines of me being one of the “most chilled” sound recordists he’d met, but I think that’s just because I wasn’t up for stressing out for 48 hours again. I really don’t deserve that much credit, since the whole thing really came out of the rest of the crew (I was busy fiddling with my equipment while they were brainstorming). I still can’t believe how lucky I was to work with such great people.
So, inevitably, I am going to have to end this super long post with a huge THANK YOU to everyone involved and suggest a few Twitter accounts you should definitely be following.
Jake Wynne, Alex Richardson, Jamie Quantrill, William Goodchild,
Morgan Watkins, Alexis Rodney, Katie MacGregor, Martin Stirling
P.S. Check out the film Katie worked on, ‘Eradicate’. It didn’t make the top 3, but really should have.
Yesterday I helped out Rob Savage on a new music video for Dear Reader’s ‘Mole’ (you can watch an acoustic version, recorded in Paris by Le HibOO, above). The shoot was a lot of fun and, even though I was just an extra, mucking around, I think the crew worked really well. The set was amazing, I met a lot of interesting individuals and got to dance with the lovely Sinéad. I’m sure it’s going to look great.
After the shoot some of the crew went to the Let’s Keep it Short event, were they screened the London Sci-Fi 48 Hour Film Challenge Top 20. I wasn’t able to attend, but ‘Eight Items’ made the list! Afterwards, we met at The Dolphin for some drinks and nice conversation.
Days like these make life good.
‘Rodger’ by Thom Dobbin and the Project Trident gang in online now. If you remember, it’s the one where I got to dress up as a creepy clown (I think I’ve got a theme going on here). I can’t get enough of theses guys’ work and am looking forward to when ‘The Purple Fiend’ goes online (if it ever does) so I can show you just how epic and funny it is.
If you guys don’t know about this yet, keep your eyes peeled. My friend Jan Kwiecinski made one third of ‘The Fourth Dimension’, along with Alexei Fedorchenko and Harmony Korine. The trailer really tickled my curiosity.
