The Making Of A Zero Budget Movie
This is the story of how I shot Third Contact with nothing more than a household camcorder, funded with my wages from working in a cinema, and found myself rubbing shoulders with some big bucks film makers at a prestigious festival in Germany.
Up until 2007, I was professional composer, earning a modest living writing music for TV and corporate video. Then one day a few unfortunate events conspired to compel me to get a ‘real’ job for the first time in 20 years. First, Woolworths went bust. And Woolworths just so happened to own one of the biggest music distribution companies in the UK. CDs containing music we had spent the last 3 years writing, found themselves locked in a warehouse somewhere and the gatekeepers were asking for £30,000 to lend us the keys. Second, the guy who owned the publishing company died.
Cutting a long and sad story short, I suddenly found myself without an income. That’s how I ended up working at a cinema in South London, selling tickets and popcorn. I chose a cinema because my dream, since I was 8 years old, was to be a film director. I’d even done quite well writing some scripts. My most recent effort was compared to Blade Runner and Memento by the UK Film Council’s script analysis guys, who also said it was a ‘killer idea for a movie’. Unfortunately, the UK Film Council deemed it not worthy of their attention.
So it was, after a few months working at the cinema, something mysterious happened which would change the course of my life and inspire me to have a go at chasing my dream.
All the staff at the cinema received an email from a set up identifying itself only as Film In The Make, asking all those interested to form into teams. A series of emails then instructed the teams to complete a set of short film projects.
Somehow I had got left out of this endeavour — I hadn’t received the email. A message was sent to the mysterious organisation, asking if I could join one of the teams. The cryptic reply was no, I couldn’t, as they had ‘other plans’ for me. Eventually, I got an email asking me to write a short 4 minute script, which must abide by the Dogme 95 rules.
As the deadline to turn in the script approached, I was sitting in the loft of my house, which I had turned into a (very) small office, at about 10pm, still trying to find inspiration. The deadline was midnight. I had two hours to come up with something.
I suddenly remembered a real story I had read about, where a group of homeless people had got it together to find the money to pay off the pimp of a 13 year old girl, so she could have a chance at a life off the streets.
Problem was, I knew I couldn’t fit that into 4 pages. So instead I wrote a script about this homeless guy who had gone crazy and was re-living the moment where at some point in the past he had tried to pay off the pimp. I typed in a frenzy and mailed off the screenplay at 5 minutes to midnight.
If I hadn’t, I might not be writing this now, having made a feature film and got it into a major festival in Germany.
Staff received their final project: to make my short. Unfortunately, this email fell at Christmas and a lot of the people involved would be away. It looked like the short wasn’t going to get made. So I decided I would make my own version, with anyone who wanted to get involved. Pretty soon, I had an enthusiastic crew of 15. We cobbled together an HD camera and a mic and shot the film, which turned out to be pretty good.
So, I realised it was possible; I could make a feature the same way, I just had to extend the process to 90 pages.
In 2009, I wrote the screenplay for THIRD CONTACT and was very strict with myself about locations and cast. I had to write a script that it was possible to shoot without any money, so no fancy locations, no crowd scenes, no spectacular car chases.
In March 2010, we started shooting. We filmed over the next 11 months or so and, although I had many kind and wonderful friends helping, I tried to take on as many roles as I could. I knew I had to rely on others as little as possible to get this done.
I bought the most expensive camera I could afford (a Canon HV30 from ebay for £600). My friend would record sound, although he’d never done so before. When he dropped out, halfway through, my girlfriend took over. Another friend found the head of a photographer’s light in the back of a BBC cupboard and asked if I wanted it. I bought a stand for it (about £20). This would be my only professional lighting equipment.
I scheduled each shoot to fit around the actors and small crew, as and when a location opportunity arose. Bit by bit, we worked our way through the (now 85 page) screenplay. Finally, in January 2011, Tim informed me he was leaving to work in India. We had to get the last scenes done before he left, otherwise the whole thing would have been a waste of time.
A big problem was some tricky makeup that had not come out as well as we’d hoped. In fact, it was unusable. But the location — an underground cellar — where we shot the original scene was no longer available. I had to re-build that cellar in my dining room and re-do the makeup. We shot it in close up and then a friend used his CGI skills to place Tim’s head with the new makeup on Tim’s body in the wide shots with the old makeup.
With everything we needed on tape, it was left to me to spend the next year or more hunched over my power mac putting all the pieces to this huge jigsaw together. The film made it to the 46 Hofer Filmtage, where it stood alongside great films like Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio.
The next step was to get the film into a few cinemas. I started this because I love cinema. I’ve loved it since I was 7 years old and used to write the synopsis of films I’d seen in my school diary. To get Third Contact into a cinema or two, well…that would be the final part of the dream come true.
