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.