R.A.M. ZEE MUSIC FACTORY!

Hey dudes!

So sound-wise all I needed was only three musical tracks and a few stings.

The music I needed was the openning club scene, chase music and a stirring romantic theme. All the music was done using Apple's GarageBand and Soundtrack. The stings were taken from various royality free wav sample sites on the internet.

The first choon (I know it's spelt 'tune' I'm just being urban, shitheadz) was done totally on GarageBand - I wanted it to have the Ed Banger Records sound (French Dance label famous for JUSTICE, SebastiAn, exc exc) so lots of drum samples and glitch FX.

The second one was HAAAAAAAAAARD! I tried so much on GarageBand and Soundtrack to make something cool but it all sounded crap. So I called up my mate Neil who recorded a emo-tastic, driving riff for me at his house and emailed it to me. I felt like I was Timbaland or something when I got it and layed drums on it! LOL

The third and final track was the romantic ending theme. I wanted it to sound like the last song on the classic musical episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer called 'Once More With Feeling'. I kick started Soundtrack and found the most strirring MGM orchestra sample and mixed it with another one that sounded like the one at the end of E.T. It had the right MGM tearjerker film score theme that I was going for.

So, all the tracks were layed down - just! I had this really cool yet totally pretentious idea of seeing that I was doing everything on a laptop which is portable - why not do a 'final mix' at location that is cool/famous/funny?????

Instantly I thought - BOWIE PHONEBOOTH!!! I'm a HUGE fan of David Bowie (From the albums 'Hunky Dory' to 'Scary Monsters...') so I grabbed my laptop, digital camera and Oyster card and took a 45minute bus ride to do a 5 minute final mix on the street where Bowie's classic album - and milestone in Rock 'N' Roll history - 'The Rise & Fall of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders from Mars' cover photograph was taken.

Actually I did the mix in the exact same phonebooth that Bowie/Ziggy was in waaay back in 1972!!!! It was an amazing thrill - kinda like scoring a goal in Old Trafford wearing George Best's old footy boots! LOL

The phonebooth was a bit of a Mecca, the inside was decorated in various fans dedications to Bowie and that gender bending rock messiah called Ziggy Stardust. I was in hallowed turf indeed.

It's all in The EDITING!!!

Okay, so I was freeking out because I thought that I didn't have all the shots in the can - turns out I did, they were - on the whole - framed just how I 'boarded them and every short sequence I edited I was grinning from ear-to-ear because it was all coming off.

Then - SPOIIIINNNNNNNNGGGG! - a big spanner flew in and gummed up the works!

The Spidey shot - a jokey reference to the upside down kiss from Spiderman (2002) - totally fukkked up because the brick wall background made it obvious that I didn't really hang Bananaman upside down by digitally flipping him! A good Puppeteer should never let you see the strings and I instantly heard the words ''RE-SHOOT!!!'' like how Missy Elliot says ''RE-MIX!!!''

I now edited it like Bananaman was tripped over instead of hung but it felt phoney to me. I was already planning a definative cut in my head that would be slightly longer and have ALL the jokes that I originally intended.

But I didn't want to be a crybaby about it - I wanted to make the first version still be fun even though it wasn't a full vision.

The editing was done and now it was time for the MUSIC!!!

SUPERRAM RETURNS!!!

Okay so after the debacle that was TOUCH DOWN BAY (last post) I was ready to pack up on a filmmaking career BUT after a while I thought to myself ''Chin up, Ram' Make another film and shoot it on your own without any other voices in the mix and see if you got The Right Stuff!''

So I wrote a super-short mini movie called 'Saturday Night Superhero' - a 90 second Rom/Com .

The premise was: A fashion disaster brings two unlikely people together.

So I dreamt up the idea of this guy who goes to a club thinking it's Superhero Club Night but it's not and he gets turned away. At the bus stop he hears a SCREAM for help and he chases a Hoody Theif, hilarity and romance then ensue.

The script was just 2 pages long and I found it not tough at all to make the whole action and dialogue fit under the strict duration time.

The storyboard came easy too. I set it arounf the Covent Garden/Charring Cross area - which I know quite well - and I drew as I remembered it.

I don't think I was thinking too much about arty framing but I was keen on using a super fast succession of shots to keep the viewers gripped visually.

After that was done it was time for finding actors.

I remembered this actress that I was going to use for the first movie but couldn't because of scheduling and decided to email her and ask if she had a guy pal who was also an actor and wouldn't mind being in the film. She had a really cool fellow in mind and he was great in the part with his ideas and took direction wonderfully.

The shoot went great and I was practically skipping home I was so chuffed.

I just hope the shots came out alright because I shot them using my viewfinder instead of using a monitor to frame the shots.

FINGERS CROSSED!!!!!!!!

XOXO

What Happened Next

Okay, so the short film was made and the whole shoot can be described as ''TOO MANY COOKS'. I, like an eeeeeediot, hired actors instead of just using just my Gang of 2 and it when all Honey Nut Loop-y.

The original synopsis was a Alien holiday video of London which turns out to be really an invasion guide but the actors weren't feeling it and the story turned into being about these four Aliens who had been castaway in London, thier experience of this city and them finding each other but I got home looked at all the footage and thought to myself ''this is just arty farty bollocks! BRING BACK THE COMEDY!''

I should have stood my ground and gone for the original idea but I was trying to be Mr. Nice Guy and get the actors more involved in the creative storytelling process but the film was full of this theatre school body acting which I thought was total wank!

So I needed to think of a way to make it cool and less pretentious.

Whatever happens I knew it had to rely on narration to explain most of it because thier was no sound (I could use titles or music I suppose but that would of made it more up its on arse) so I wrote down all the different ways you could use voice-over narration in a story (which was alot) and tried to find some that would open the story up.

I remembered the films of Chris Marker ('Le Jette' and 'Sans Soleli') which, yeah, are arty and kinda show off-y but I liked thier gusto and how playful they were and they had some cracking lines/questions in them.

So with those movies swimming in my head I mapped out the story as follows. . .

1. TRAFALGAR: An alien girl explores people in Trafalgar.

I thought that I was going to right this as a postcard home and it would be spoken in a Southern American accent (Tennesee Williams not Montezuma) because se was supposed to of been transported to Atlanta, GA but ended up in London.

The actors performance was really soulful and I thought it would be boring to follow that so I made it like she was disgusted by the niceness of people and crudeness of thier civilization.

2. ST. JAMES PARK: An Alien girl wakes up in the middle of the park.

This one I wanted it to have two voices in it and it would be a debrief between the alien and her android boss after she was picked up by her space craft. The images are not a flashback but her streaming her memories into the alien hard drive.

I wanted it to be funny banter and I was thinking 'His Girl Friday' meets R2D2 & C3PO! LOL

3. CHARRING CROSS: An Alien boy gets off the train and into the big, scary city.

This was, like, tha hardest one and easiest one to write. I had the idea of it being a 3rd person narration like a novel but the footage I got was BORING! I had zilch to really play with so I turned it into a 1940's detective film about an alien looking for his lost comrades.

Getting actors was easy and recording was a cinch too.

Editing was tricky - getting in the photoshop images and FX for the last few parts but I didn't care because there was nothing of me in this film so it was all put together dispassionately like math homework or like when married people have sex! LOL

I haven't releashed the movie yet to anybody that helped make it coz I'm still waiting for some big idea that will come to me to make this project exciting but I think I'll have to let it go and move on to the next movie with hindsight.

LEAVE IT TO FATE

PREVIOUSLY ON 'DAY FOR NIGHT'

Okay, so two key crew had to pull out from my team for the competition and now I've decided to push the filming back because I kinda like the story and it's not going to be too tough to shoot and put together so I've rescheduled a production Pow-Wow for Tuesday night.

END OF RECAP.

Okay, so now I was on the way to have dinner in YO SUSHI! @ Russell SQ with some friends on thier last night in the glorious UK and I was struck with this idea as I marched up Bloomsbury - 'Why not ring Miran and ask him to bring back our old filmmaking double act for the film contest?'

It was a good idea because I was more than a little put out that I couldn't make the mini-movie that I planned on doing but I knew that we have a speedy, tough work ethic when we are under a tight deadline, plus we've got simular story tastes and are very open & ruthlessly truthful when it comes to story ideas. We could make something very commercial or perverse at a drop of a hat.

So I called him up and was basically like ''Hey, lets make an off the cuff Genre art mini-movie - something really noirish about street magicans, huh?'' and he wasn't too keen on that story or even having a story for that matter, he wanted us to go into this contest green and thump out a story as soon as we got the guidelines on that Saturday morning. I was taken aback by this but a little excited at the prospect - it was a huge challenge to my overthinking brain and if I was going to make this leap into the unknown it would of been perfect to jump with Miran because he's as story literate as me and is open to crazy, artsy filmmaking and risks.

Now I'm ready to just turn up with a crazy mind, pen + notebook, credit card, a video camera, a digital camera, tripod, two full batterys, a charger, a skateboard and a powerful torch with some diffuser to bounce off. Total Ghetto filmmaking.

A N Y W A Y. . . .

I've also come across some snazzy French Electro - YELLE, who's this potty mouthed Nouvelle Rave mash-up between M.I.A. & France Gall. KAVINSKY (pictured) who's very dark, John Carpenter meets JUSTICE beats to an Eighties TV show that never happened. It's edgy, experimental stuff that I've been trying to get my head around. The artwork looks like Tobias Jones' work on 'Does It Offend You, Yeah?' meets 80's MARVEL Comics which I LOVE!!!!

Okay, I'm going off now to eat, watch Hitchcock's 'Shadow of a Doubt' and read some Scott Pilgrim.

P E A C E O U T

- RAMZEE

TOO MUCH TOO SOON?

Don't you just love it when a plan doesn't come together?

Two Mondays ago I heard it thru the grapevine that the SC-FI channel were running a 48 Film Challenge so I pounced on it like a Somalian on a Red Cross Food drop. I emailed, phoned and googled and I managed to get a skeleton crew, actors, props, costumes and some of the locations but the crew seem to be asking for a new shoot date and the remaining key location remains elusive. I bet Hannibal from The A: Team never had such trouble.

But lets rewind to more happier times when I actually thought this project was a go and I was writting it. The story was a mish mash of horror clique, comic books (actually one comic book: Uncanny Xmen # 170), indie music videos (Yeah Yeah Yeahs 'Y Control'), Sk8 Board tapes - all stirred up into this DIY Gondry-esque film making etchic where CGI effects are replaced by imaginative homemade constructs. I was having a whale of a time devising the whole thing.

Production was my Achilles Heel. I basically had to drop the writing pen and drawing pencil and start organizing things to make this film happen the way I saw it on the slim shooting & completion date of JUST ONE WEEKEND. I openned up Google, cracked open my notepad and started putting a serious dent into my phone credit to russle up a crew, actors, props etc etc yadda yadda. It was a bitch and next time I'll get somebody else 2 do it coz it leaves, like, ZERO time to work on a script or storyboards or character designs.

For me money wasn't a huge issue - I worked it out that the film will be done cheap 'N' cheerful - but it was street cred. Any major studio or minor production company has a rep, cred or a name that will make people who can give you a location help you out and stuff but when you're just a Ramsey and a one man production company they play you off like a snooty hot girl @ a club, LOL.

Right now I'm trying to decide to a go still for the 48 Hour Film Challenge and put out a film that I didn't envision or write a completely different plot and start it all over again. Problem is I have a liking for the one I've already written - it's wacky, fun and pretty imaginative. Or maybe do I screw the challenge and film it at a latter date so I'll have more time and I can shoot it the way I wanna?

I'm starting to sway toward the latter.

I like to listen to stuff when I'm being creative - it inspires me lots - so here's the playlist of music (or choooonz) I was playing in the background whilst I was ferverously plotting out the story and the look of my short film.

EVERYBODY NOSE - n*e*r*d
AMERICAN BOY - Estelle Feat. Kanye West
BEARS ARE COMING - Late Of The Pier
RUN - Gnarls Barkely
ALWAYS WHERE I NEED TO BE - The Kooks
A-PUNK - Vampire Weekend
CREATOR (Vs FreQnasty + Switch Mix) - Santogold
BECKY - Be Your Own Pet
4 MINUTES (Radio Edit) - Madonna Feat. Justin Timberlake + Timbaland
HITTEN - Those Dancing Days
CHASING PAVEMENTS - Adele

PEACE OUTTTTTTTTTTTTT (2B Continued)
- RAMZEE x