Clapperboard Carnage
It’s been a busy February as we’ve finally got some time to produce our own comedy drama, Lucy and James. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for a while and we hope to write and produce an episode every month to 6 weeks (schedules permitting). My interest in comedy goes way back to 2004 when I made my first comedy short – Murder Game. It was made in 24 hours for the 24 hour film challenge and was the first drama I’d ever shot. It was a bit of a mess but extremely fun to make and to be honest I’ve not made enough films of my own since then, being a full-time editor and then running Picnic Films had left me with no time or energy to write anything. But fortunately all that changed last November.
I worked with Lucy and James on Sami’s comedy Sayings That Are Wrong.
It was shot one Sunday afternoon in November last year, and I really enjoyed the experience, shooting drama is a dream on the 7D especially in “no lighting” way that I prefer to work. I’m really chuffed with how it came out but moreover I loved the chemistry that Lucy and James had, it’s rare that you see that with actors that you can actually believe they are a couple. They also both extremely funny and fun to be with people and that’s what lead to Lucy and James.
We filmed the first episode last week over one day and one late evening, just the four of us and some shots of vodka (for every scene we finished!) and it was really fun. Hard work to shoot 26 pages of script in 2 days but we got everything covered and it’s cutting together nicely.
We’re currently editing a 3 minute version for the reed short film competition and I’ll post the link for it here soon. But even more excitingly we’ve shot a 20 minute version, the first of a series that we intend to make. I’m being really ambitious with this one because it’s great to have something to throw yourself into completely. Short films aren’t really my strength because they are really short poems, lyrical and light on story and character, which is really not me! I’m all about character, people you can believe exist in the real world and say real things and that isn’t what short films are about.
We’re cutting the first episode entitled Bloody Mondays at the moment and it’ll be up here as soon as it’s done, along with some behind the scenes and some deleted bits (which you’ll see why they were deleted) and then we’ll start thinking about the next episode.
Lucy and James is about a couple, it’s filmed in real locations based on real situations and some absurd things that we get up to in our late 20′s. I think there’s a real gap in the market for this sort of comedy, about a real middle class couple (not rich and not poor really!) but struggling to get by, to get the washing done, and to figure out what they should be doing with their lives.
I’ll keep updating the site with links to the episodes and write ups, got some more stills to add later on too, so keep your eyes peeled.
Lucy and James investigating an iceberg