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.