The making of Starter, Main Course and Not So Sweet

To BIAFF 2016 results| To Full Making Of Index

Bob Rowley and Martin Sunderland won 5 stars at BIAFF2016

Martin and Bob at BIAFF

Starter

It all started many, many years ago when I was a young soldier in the army based in Germany. I had made arrangements to see a young Fräulein at the Black Cat Night Club on our Thursday night pass, having forgotten I was taking Lorna, one of the girls from the camp NAAFI, out on the same night. Having taken Lorna to a different club near the Black Cat I had to make my excuses and run backwards and forwards between clubs until I decided how to deal with the situation. Fortunately for me the young Fräulein I was meeting turned out to be married and her husband turned up at the club. After a heated discussion I went back to find Lorna except this time I was sporting a fat lip and cut eye - only to find out that she had got fed up and had left.
The moral of the story is "DON'T TAKE ON TOO MUCH OR YOU'LL END UP DOING NOTHING". Ever since then I have always tried to apply this in life and even more so when it comes to film making.

So one evening I decided to sit down and write a script. It actually only took me two days to write, spending no more than a couple of hours each day on it. It was the ending that probably caused most concern. By the time the script was being story boarded I had come up with three different endings. One of the endings is obviously the one used in the actual film. One of the other endings will be used in the play when I get round to writing it for the stage.
It was weird because when I started writing the script and fictionalising it to make it more comical I used various things that had happened to me over the years and then enlarged them. As I wrote one excuse, an even more ridiculous one would crop up in my mind.

Before I started writing I had to imagine the type of actors I needed. Comedy is one of the hardest things to do as it all depends on timing. I have been involved for many years in the amateur dramatics community and further with semi-professional acting at large theatres in Leeds. During that time I met many amateur and professional actors but there was one person who I felt could pull this off better than anyone. That person was Adrian Wales so I had to secure his agreement before I even started. I then wrote the script around Adrian who plays Matthew in the film.

As those of you who use actors know, getting them all together is not the easiest of tasks, so we struggled. We could only use the restaurants when they were empty so again we were constrained. We ended up filming over 6 days. It was then that we discovered that you really need a few extra days to get all the shots you want.

The location was quite easy to find. We needed two restaurants close together. Just down the road from where we live are two restaurants, an Indian and an Italian (this one has changed hands twice since we filmed there). We had numerous problems whilst filming which we didn't realise until halfway through - such as the noise from the drinks cooler in the Indian Restaurant. No sooner had we turned it off, than the owner turned it on again without us knowing. There was an overhead fan that we could hear only after we had finished filming. There was a lack of people in the restaurants. While we were filming in the Italian restaurant (during the day in late autumn) the sun played havoc with one camera and not with the other one, giving us over exposed shots. On one shoot we actually continued filming while customers came into the restaurant and began eating. They all thought this was good until we had to tell them not to look at the camera. We then found after filming that you could see an Indian waiter watching from across the room. Lots of little things that you should think about but sometimes forget.

MAIN COURSE

I wonder why everyone thinks their film is jinxed? Maybe we always want something or someone to blame when things go wrong. I know that most film makers have problems during the course of making a film. With the amount of technology used today we are relying on a lot of different parameters just to make one film so of course things go wrong. But believe me, my friends, when I say that there are things that go wrong and then there are THINGS THAT GO WRONG!
Having acquired all the film clips we thought we needed we trotted back home pleased as Punch. This film was shot more than five years ago so it was all done on mini DV tapes. If I remember correctly I ended up with about 20 hours of footage, which of course equates to 20 mini DVs that had to be captured in the computer. At that time I had never made any films for public viewing. I was not even a member of any film club. Then the slog began. Having captured all the film I was excited to get going. I thought I should be able to have the film finished that week if all went well.
It actually took months, I think I worked on it on and off for about six months.
The Indian restaurant where it was filmed was one of our favourites. But every time we went into the restaurant we were asked whether the film was finished and could they have a copy. In the end we had to stop going in there.
Things did go well to begin with and I had decided how the story should begin. I kept editing and editing and editing. I was using Avid Liquid and as the timeline got longer the computer went slower until finally after several weeks it wouldn't play any part of the film or any other film. I was advised that the processor was probably not fast enough to run such a large program.
I bought a new processor which was much faster, but alas more things then went wrong. Yes I can hear you all shouting out to me: "New processor, new motherboard" At this point I thought that if I was going to do all this I really needed to build a new computer. However, before all this happened my computer was severely infected with a virus known as a Trojan Horse. This wiped a lot of my drives clean. Even with recovery software I was unable to get back all the work I had completed on the time line over the last six months. I was devastated, I had all the clips but it meant starting all over again - and it had taken me six months to edit about half the film. I lost interest and shelved the whole project.

Martin asked if I wanted him to do it and I agreed. I know Martin worked many nights and days over the following year trying to put this film together. It was awkward for him as I knew how I wanted certain sequences to work so we had to liaise on numerous occasions to get it correct. A long time later Martin asked me to go round to see what he had done so far. The night before I was due to go round to him there was a huge storm with fork lightning. A thunder bolt came down from the Gods and struck Martin's house totally destroying his computer and all the work he had done on the film.
That was when we both decided that maybe, just maybe, the job was too big for us and that was how we were being told. The film was once more put on the backburner as other projects took over.

SWEET

Last year I decided to have another look at the Starter, Main Course and Not So Sweet project. I had only just started putting the clips on a new time line when I discovered that my computer was not working as it should have been. At this point I had moved up to Avid Media Composer and had made a few short films with it but there seemed to be a shortfall. I pushed on but had trouble all the time and eventually decided enough was enough. At this point I built the biggest fastest computer I could, using the best motherboard, processor etc. Now things started to come together. Martin and I decided to edit different sections of the film and then put them all together at the end. Doing this, we found numerous faults with our filming and audio which over a period of several months we corrected. Gradually we started seeing that there would be a light at the end of the proverbial tunnel. Soon after that we were able to burn the first copy only to find syncing problems. Once again we corrected and finalised. Then the God of Jinxing hexed my computer once again preventing me from using the time line and causing me to lose everything I had done. But, having learnt from previous experiences, we had it all stored in smaller sequences on external hard drives. Good advice to all: save your sequences separately on an external hard drive just in case.

When we had completed the film we realised that it was to long to put into our club competitions. We were way over the 20 minute time limit and were not really able to reduce it. Then we saw the advert for BIAFF. We thought that our film was no nearly good enough to put into a competition of this level. Then we thought that if we entered it we would at least get good constructive criticism to help us on our way.

Achieving a 5 Star award was unbelievable, but it just goes to show that it is well worth entering your films into competitions even if it's only to get that final constructive criticism.