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The making of Listen!!
Listen!! received a 4-star award at BIAFF 2008. We asked Jim Walker to tell us a bit about it …
Listen!!
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  In Listen!! apart
from me and the woman at the bus stop, everyone is a trained actor. Some
are amateurs but Tim Scragg (playing Richard Benson) is a professional
TV actor. If you have seen the film you will know how important this is.
One word of caution - stage actors do it with their bodies - film actors do it with their faces.If you do have a stage actor watch out for a little bit too much flamboyance, it works for the back row of the stalls but probably not in a film. Get them to calm it down. |
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| The next most important item is preparation. I always do a storyboard
and group the shots with the same locations, costumes, etc. It takes a long
time. The first draft script of Listen!! is dated June 2007
but the film was only shot (over one weekend) in November.
Another key issue is continuity and you would be surprised (or perhaps not) how many continuity errors only hit you when you have already been editing a scene for hours. You can't be too careful with continuity. I understand why commercial film makers have people doing nothing else.
The final general point will probably also strike a chord:
You have got to be ruthless. The first cut of Listen!! was seven minutes twenty seconds, the final cut is six minutes eighteen seconds and I still worry about the long time Richard is alone on the screen towards the end. |
A bit about me
Practical lessons from making Listen!!
-
For my first ever tracking shot (over the top of Dr Lug to reveal the Patience
cards) I made a wooden dolly with 100 mm diameter nylon wheels. Rolling over
a carpet, it was not smooth enough. Next time I will have some sort of
rails.
-
We found an old lady with a budgie but she had a tapestry picture on the
wall above the cage where Richard talks to the bird. Clearly the picture
was wrong for Richard, so I took it down. Unfortunately, when that scene
was edited there was a big area of white wall right in the middle of the
shot which distracted the eye. I chose a picture of my own, shot it at the
right angle and matching lighting, cropped it and stuck it in on a layer
above. I bet you never noticed!
-
As part of the opening credits, the main title is shown over
a diagonal shot of a bus going uphill. This is deliberate. In the excellent
book Cinematic
Storytelling1 by Jennifer
van Sijll (which I bought after a review in Film and Video Maker)
she explains that screen movement on the four diagonals each carry a different
meaning. Top left to bottom right - movement is easy, perhaps inevitable.
Bottom left to top right - movement is hard, perhaps unsuccessful. Bottom
left to top right (the bus in the film) suggests things are difficult, as
Richard (a bus supporter) experiences.
-
As for locations, for the bus station and bus stop we just turned up and
shot it. For the Doctor's surgery and Dr Lug's treatment room we used two
rooms in a local alternative therapy clinic. We filmed on the Sunday when
there was no-one around. They wanted money, but it looked right and there
was no NHS bureaucracy to contend with.
- I work on the basis that the thing that looks most like reality is reality. The Dr Lug 'brass plate' (actually plastic) is real, likewise the robot arm is self powered, not being pulled about by threads. The plastic ear was bought from a medical teaching aids supplier by a friendly doctor.
 Despite this the total budget for the film was less than £300.
Overall I am very pleased with the film but audience reaction has been mixed. The film is basically a black joke, and it seems that some older viewers can't quite cope with this. I intend to put German sub-titles on it and take it to the Eulenspiegeleien comic film festival in Berlin in early 2009.2 It will be interesting to see how well it matches their sense of humour. |
And finally!On the day of a shoot always set two alarm clocks! On the Saturday morning we were starting filming at 8:30am in Keighley. Tim Scragg was coming all the way from Manchester and Andrew Cockerill, the camera man, from Wetherby. I woke up at 8:20am! It was just like the scene in Duck Soup where Groucho Marx jumps up in bed in the middle of the national anthem - but not so funny. Luckily, by missing breakfast and the magic of mobile phones I was only fifteen minutes late. - Jim Walker |
| 1 | Cinematic Storytelling: The 100 Most Powerful Film Conventions Every Filmmaker Must Know by Jennifer Van Sijll (Michael Wiese Productions, 1995) available on www.amazon.co.uk at £13.49 on paperback. |
| 2 | Eulenspiegeleien Festival takes place each February in Rahnsdorf near Berlin. Details in German on www.videoclub-fivia.de. |
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