Adelaide Premiere

Wow... what a weekend...

The premiere and everything that went along with it was a fantastic experience. There was a really good buzz about the film and all 3 screenings had sold out well in advance. That was a good feeling in itself...

Much, much more to write, but right now... I need to sleep...

Ya Nervous?... pt 2

Just three more sleeps till the (SOLD OUT) prem in Adelaide. I wasn't really nervous (read entry below) but it's really starting to kick in now. It's a difficult thing handing something you love dearly over to someone else, let alone a whole bunch of people. I got a sneak preview of this a few months ago...

Towards the end of the edit we organised a little test screening. Just to see if we were making the film we thought we were, and to try and answer a few questions that we were not sure of. We hoped a small audience would help point us in the right direction. It was a really successful screening in that those questions were answered, and the discussions afterwards helped us focus on a few other things that we were not aware of as well.

But the really strange thing was, all of a sudden I had 65 other opinions to consider. Not that I had to take them on board, that could have been perilous, but the reality of them being there at all, I found quite overwhelming in itself.

Making Last Ride has been hugely collaborative. However, the process, particularly when I got into post, became very insular. The film exists amongst a handful of people. This is definitely the way it should be, but it makes handing it over to the outside world quite a strange idea, even though it's the very reason we have all gone on this journey. Why make a film if you dont want people to see it?

This Friday night there will be 400+ opinions of the film (and by the end of the weekend close to 1000). It's not so much that I care if people think it's good or bad or whatever (although of course I hope they do like it). It's more the idea of releasing it out into the world where it can be judged and also have a life outside of the strict confines of the post suites where it's lived quite happily for the past 7 months. I've been trying not to use the cliche about 'it's like giving birth to a baby', but alot of the same fears and paranoia apply.

While sitting here thinking and making myself more nervous I received a lovely message from a friend and wonderful actor Amber Clayton. She wrote...

"...Enjoy that you have such an amazing project that you have worked so hard for. You cant control what others think, just how well you've done! This is my new philosophy in dealing with the constant approval, disapproval, rejection and rejoicing in everything that we do as artists. It can send you seriously bonkers. So I try to enjoy the fact that I have something worth being terrified about."

It such a good way of looking at it. It IS a wonderful thing to have something to be terrified about in this way. The whole idea of being an artist is about taking risks and they wouldn't be risks if they were not scary to some degree. In this way I feel so fortunate that I have been able to create the film the way I wanted it to be in the first place. Where as so many amazing would be artists are fearful to make even the first step. The fear of failure, or exposing oneself sets in before they even commit pen to paper, or paint to the brush, or act, sing, photograph, dance etc. (Kind of on this subject, this talk by Author Elizabeth Gilbert is well worth the 20 minutes! thanks Struth!)

And speaking of handing your work over. Denise Young who wrote the book The Last Ride which the film is based on, handed her work over to the producer Nick Cole about 8 years ago. She came and visited us on set during filming and it was very cool having her there. She has written a very thoughtful and eloquent recollection of her experience of not only her visit to the set, but about the process of handing your work over to other people.

Crackbook

Now there is one more excuse for you to waste your time on Facebook.

We have launched a Last Ride Facebook page. It seems like a great place to make announcements, and communicate directly with people. Anyone can post photos, videos and news directly. There is a discussion board and a few 'fans' have already posted some of their own photos which is great.

Please do join in.

And on other geeky fronts. I've seen the working Last Ride website via Madman and I'm really, really happy with how it's coming along. Not sure when the full site will go live, I'm sure it will be sooner, rather than later...

"Ya Nervous?"

Perhaps not surprising, but now that the film is finished people keeping asking me if I'm nervous. I think I'm equally parts nervous and excited. I'm totally excited about the screening in Adelaide next week. Alot of cast, crew and friends are making the trip over and that's really exciting, I totally appreciate the interest and their continued support. It seriously means alot.

But I think the nerves kick in when considering the longer term goals of the film and it's eventual release (on the 2nd of July). I had a great catch up dinner with producers Nick and Antonia the other night before we watched the final print and we sat around for a couple hours and I think everything we discussed was pure speculation. What if? How about? What happens when? If this happens what then? We talked ourselves around in circles.

The next few months are really important for Last Rides life. And although I believe in fate and destiny, my fingers are crossed so tightly my knuckles are white. One thing I'm sure of is, is that this film has been looked after from the start. We have been very lucky throughout the entire process, so I trust this luck continues.

Finished.

2 boxes. 6 reels. 100 minutes.

Best Graffiti. Ever?

Off topic perhaps... but my sometimes assistant and now projectionist at the Kino Cinema here in Melbourne Dustin Feneley sent me this snap of some graffiti he found on the back of a toilet cubicle door.

"Fuck Digital. The future lies to Analogue Loyalists"

Dustin points out perhaps it should read "The future belongs to rather than lies..." which makes it grammatically correct, but I'm feeling it none the less.

I'm no Luddite and love most of the goodness that digital brings, but give me the warm crackle of vinyl any day over an mp3, pencil and paper over a keyboard and I will forever love film far more than I'll ever love a megapixel.

Finished... almost.

I wanted to be able to write that the film was officially finished today, but a few minor issues have popped up just to make it exciting for everyone involved... Nothing to worry about really. Especially as there are so many people with real worries at the moment due to the horrific bush fires raging about a half hours drive from where I'm tapping. Everything gets put into perspective when tragic things like that happen for sure.

Today we had a screening of the complete film in a Gold Class cinema at the Jam Factory. Really nice to see it so big and lush up there on the big, big screen. It's a beautiful thing, but I must say it's very hard for me to watch. I'm so attached to it, and so aware of all the glue thats holding it together, but others who have been working on the film all the way through were definitely drawn in, the way an audience should be. Which is a very good thing.

I have spent the last few weeks putting the final tweaks to the grade. We were fortunate enough to have Olivier Fontenay do a final pass over the film. Olivier is french guy who graded the film Breaking The Waves by Lars Von Trier, a film that totally changed my life. It forever changed the way I see things, and how I would begin to approach every aspect of my work as a director. It was really cool talking to him about. I thought he might have thought it was daggy, me asking stories about it and all, but I was quite surprised when he told me that working on the film had also changed his life and work process in many ways as well.

But, I don't necessarily want to single out Olivier, because Ian Letcher and the whole team at Deluxe have been a pleasure to work with and have been very supportive of the film from the start.

The Burning Leaves

I was passed some demos by a band called The Burning Leaves about a year ago and after listening once, I knew straight away that they had to play a part in the film in some way. I wrote them a love letter and asked if we could use one of their tracks in the film. They have been a pleasure to work with since.

The Burning Leaves are a young duo from 'The North' of England that are currently building a whole lot of buzz. Their delicate and haunting songs are all recorded on their home 8-track studio. It's this lo-fi approach that helps capture a certain warmth and immediacy in their sound. The kind of quality that gets bled out of the majority of recordings once they enter larger 'professional' studios.

I'm really pleased that these guys are part of the film. They will have an album out soon it seems. I hope it's real soon... I want to be their biggest fan!

Adelaide Screening Announced

Last Ride was partly funded by the Adelaide Film Festival Investment Fund, and as part of the deal they get to sneak a peak of the film first. Today the full program of the festival was announced. You can now book and buy tickets to see Last Ride on the 27th and 29th of Feb, after that it wont be till mid year until you can see it in theaters. SO if you have been searching for an excuse to visit rAdelaide, here it is.

Hallowed Halls

As I mentioned below, we did our final sound mix at the South Australian Film Corp sound studio. It was good to return to the building we did our pre-production out of 6 months ago. This time I could lift my head and have a look around at where we were, I wasn't burdened with the stress of the impending shoot.

As weird as it has been spending alot of time away from home and family, I really enjoyed returning. I don't know much about the history of the SAFC, but a walk around the corridors with their halls hung with rows of film posters that have been in some way influenced by the SAFC or in particular been created in part in the building, it felt great, even a little humbling. Perhaps I'm overly sentimental and too much of a fan boy, but I love the fact that some of the films that have influenced me over the years were created within the same walls where I was now attempting to make my own film.

One of the posters that kept jumping out at me, no matter how many times I walked past, was Storm Boy.

I remember clearly seeing Storm Boy at the Tamworth Regent Theater when I was about 7 or 8 years old. It connected with me the same way that it connected with everybody who saw it, it was such a simple story about a lonely boy and his friendship with a pelican (Mr Percival). I remember being totally aware of it's use of visual storytelling rather than dialogue. The film had a lot of space and Storm Boy as a character had this universal appeal of being every child. We all knew how he felt.

It's funny how these sort of stories bury themselves deeply within your psyche. I know for sure that Storm Boy has had a deep influence on me as a filmmaker. When it became available on DVD years ago I re watched and even though it was a little more rudimentary than I remembered there were some beautifully poetic sequences and amongst some clumsy plotting towards the end, was a film that felt cinematic and still universal in it's portrayal of childhood. Very much in the same vein of The Red Balloon a film which is a great influence as well. Interestingly like The Red Balloon, Storm Boy was directed by a french guy Henri Safran. Perhaps it's a European sensibility and an outsiders eye to the landscape and story that brought that special quality to it.

It's no secret that one of the things I liked about Tom Russell (who plays Chook in the film) when I saw him the first time was that he reminded me of Greg Rowe who played Storm Boy. So much so in fact that when I cast him we decided to cut his already long hair into a very similar style to that of Greg in Storm Boy. It's a very heartfelt and sincere reference and perhaps even a homage to a film that planted one of the earliest seeds of film making deep within me. Last Ride and Storm Boy are very different films, but thematically and in a desire for simplicity and visual storytelling they are quite similar. I can only hope that Last Ride shares some of the endurance and a place in peoples hearts and memories the way in which Storm Boy has.

Chook vs Storm Boy

The other film poster that I almost bowed to every time I passed it was Rolf de Heer's Bad Boy Bubby (click if you dare). Man, what a film. I went and saw it soon after I moved to Melbourne in 93. I went with my friend Hools to the Hoyts on Bourke Street and we sat in the back row. I don't think I blinked for the first 30 minutes. Surely the first act of that film is one of the most brutally intriguing openings to a film. Ever. It's one of my most fond cinematic moments. At the end of the film I don't thing Hools and I said anything to each other for a good hour or so. We were just so stunned... and I still am just thinking about it.

Everytime I see, hear or think anything about that film my heart beats a little faster.

I also love this french poster for Breaker Morant. Co-incidentally I saw Bryan Brown in the halls while we were in pre-production in June and he was half way through shooting Beautiful Kate in the studio. He asked me how long we had to shoot our film? "Six weeks." I said. "Six weeks eh... allot of film makers complain that six weeks isn't long enough to shoot a film. But we shot Breaker Morant in six weeks and we had the fucking Boer War in the middle of it!" It was a hilarious comment and a very encouraging one. It filled me with some confidence, what ever we were heading off to do for the next six weeks, at least I didn't have to worry about staging a full scale war in there somewhere. Thanks Bryan.

And speaking of Bryan. Another film I love, that was also based out of the SAFC in the 80's and that shares some similarities to Last Ride, particularly in it's themes and locations (and that Antonia Barnard, co-producer of Last Ride was the production manager of) was The Shiralee.

ps: I wonder where Storm Boy is now...?

The Sound Lounge

Last night we finished the sound mix. In some ways it feels like a bigger milestone than locking off the edit. Not sure why. Perhaps it's because even after the edit I still knew there was a long way to go with post, sound being the biggest of all the jobs. I've been obsessed with the sound and music for the film for the past 8 or 9 weeks. Literally. Every moment of my day and night, including many weird dreams and nightmares have been caught up in the sound of the film in one way or another.

And even though I'm feeling a little unsure of what to do with myself now that the mix is set in stone and I cant do anything else to it, I ultimately feel really good about it.

Craig Conway and Paul Shannohan did the initial sound edit at their very sexy new studio Final Sound in Melbourne, and Craig took on the overall sound design as well. I think they worked seven days a week for over a month sourcing, creating and editing 1000's of individual pieces of sound for the film.

John Simpson who co-incidentally lives in Quorn S.A , where a chunk of the film was shot, took on the foley. Check out his cool studio literally in the middle of nowhere.

And as discussed previously Paul Charlier composed the music in Sydney.

We all met up with Gethen Creagh in Adeliade at the South Australian Film Corp mixing theatre and mixed away for 3 intense weeks. I say intense even though most of it for me anyway was spent sitting on a couch drinking gallons of green tea, while others beavered away, pushing buttons and tweaking knobs. But it is an intense experience none the less. I love sound, I think I love it more than image. And I definatley feel more confident talking and discussing sound than I do pictures.

If the films pictures was an apple I could describe to you what the apple looks like, whether it was green or red, or a mixture of both perhaps. How big and or round it is, if it had a stem, and how long that was and which way it bent etc. But if the films sound was an apple, I could think about and explain in obsessive detail not only the colour and shape, etc, but I could discuss the spots and blemishs on the skin, every ripple and dimple, what the stem looks like and how far it reaches inside the apple, how it would feel like in your hand and what it would taste like if you took a bite out of it. (Is that a really crazy analogy..? I think I'm losing it...)

I can just see and hear the detail in sound more easily than I can pictures. And I believe sound is a far more powerfully emotive element than a picture can ever be.

So it's intense in the way that every decision we made was a really important one to me. And for every tweak and modification we made, I wished we could have done 10 more, and then another 10 after that. I think in this part of the process, we didnt so much as finish the mix, but we abandond it when we absolutley ran out of time and could do no more. But as I have mentioned many times on this blog, time is not something you have much of when making a feature film of this size.

Anyway... I'm really happy with the result. And very proud of the talented and colaborative team I had around me.

Adrian Medhurst(Assistant Mixer) Gethen Creagh (mixer) Craig Conway (Sound Designer) Me (in need of a haircut and shave) Paul Charlier (composer) Missing from this picture - Jack Hutchings (editor) and Antonia Barnard (Producer behind the Lens) and also Nick Cole (producer) who graced us with his sage like wisdom and guidance for a couple of days as well.

Paul and I. And Craig obsessing over some minor EQ of his own in the background.

Just a few more weeks to go...

What's The Sound Of Music?

Assistant Steven is smiling cos he can finally get some sleep!

This is a shot of the music cue that the film ends with. It has kept me and others awake for many nights for many different reasons...

Tonight we finished the music. Paul Charlier has created something quite special. In very little time I might add. It's probably been the trickiest part of the process for me personally and I wont say it's been an easy run.

Music is such an intangible thing. Everyone has a different opinion of what they do and don't like. Finding a common language to discuss the intricacies to creating a piece of music is something that will continue to frustrate, confuse but ultimately intrigue me for the rest of my life.

In the end for me it comes down to the fact that all the other aspects of the filmmaking process I can physically get my hands on. I can bash away on a keyboard and write. I can make decisions about casting. I can search for and choose locations. I can attempt to direct. I can physically place a camera and make an assessment on what lens should be used. I can assume people share and understand my vision for things. I can bash and crash an edit together. I can hold a microphone, I can even make the sandwiches if I have to.

But essentially when it comes to music, I cant play an instrument (despite my father and brother being very talented musicians). So I physically cant grab a guitar or a keyboard and play it like I'm hearing it in my head. AND THAT KILLS ME!!!

Jack, Greig and Jo and others that I have worked with over a long period of time, share a common language and set of experiences and references that allow us to communicate in a kind of creative shorthand. It's very easy for us to discuss things of a visual things amongst ourselves. But, I hadnt worked with Paul before and this placed us in the tricky position of finding this language in a very short amount of time. And in my opinion it's far harder to discuss sound than it is pictures.

Perhaps thats why Werner Herzog said he would give 10 years of his life to play the cello. Not so much as to be able to play an instrument but to be able to cut to the chase while working with musicians and composers. It's interesting watching Herzog in that clip. He famously said once that making films is a physical activity more than any other. And there he is in the studio sitting quietly in awe of what the musicians are creating. It's the least active I think I have ever seen him. BTW that clip is from the extra features on Herzog's GRIZZLY MAN one of his most accesable and best films. I highly reccomend it!

I'm obsessed with sound and music. I think about it perhaps more than other other element. In fact if I am really honest, I think I make films cos I can't play an instrument. After all film has much more in common with music than any other form, as like music, film is linear and time based.

I've been in Sydney for the last week working with Paul and we finished today after two days of track laying at Sound Firm. It was such a pleasure to finally hear the tracks being layed down. I cant wait to get to Adelaide now and get into the final mix with the others now that we have all the ingredients to finish the film.

The end is in sight!

SOUND

Right now it's all about sound and music.

Paul Charlier is creating the original soundtrack in Sydney and right now he has his head in a vice trying to squeeze out aural gold! Keep it up Paul!

Final Sound is working on the sound mix in Melbourne and the foley is being created in Quorn, South Australia with John Simpson.

SO the sound elements are currently spread across three states. But I'm glad to be here in Melbourne for this week at least.

I did an ADR session with Tom in Adeliade last week but today I spent time with Tom doing some extra ADR here is Melbourne along with a bunch of lines and some huffing and puffing I tried to get some sounds as if he was drowning without actually drowning him.

Tom chillin at Final Sound like a rock star...

Picture Locked!

This entry is a week late but we LOCKED the picture last Friday.

All the tweaks and final decisions seem to be a bit of blur now, and I know Jack and I will go back in and massage a couple of the edits to add an extra beat here and there. But essentially Last Ride is cut.I'm very happy with the edit and the film we have carved out of all the footage. Jack has done an amazing job. Even though the process has been stressful at times and both Jack and I have had quite a few sleepless nights worrying about the film, I think over all it's been quite an enjoyable experience.

I began reading the Faber and Faber book Minghella On Minghella during the last few weeks of the edit. I'm not a huge fan of his films but his writing and thoughts on the process of making films is a revelation. His approach was so simple, yet it;s really inspired me. A few of the things I read really help me find some clarity and understanding of the process we were deep in the middle of.

One thing I really found helpful was his approach to cutting s

cenes that you are really attached to. I've heard people describe this as 'killing your babies'. But I don't think it's right. The film is the baby, not the individual scenes. jack is quite the butcher, he'll cut anything without hesitation if he thinks it will make the film better. I must say it might take me a little longer but I'm all for getting rid of things if the film might seem stronger without it. Minghella and his editor (the legendary) Walter Murch had a really interesting approach to it...

It's just such a great way of letting stuff go, because essentially it's still there.

And thats kind of where the film is at the moment. The crust is forming.

Now my head spins into sound and music...

Slashing and Burning...

I was well aware of the concept that the edit allows you to re-make your film (again). After writing it once, shooting it second and then editing (re-writing) third.

But what I wasn't aware of was that I would actually go through the process of making it again. The same levels of inspiration, exhaustion, excitement and anxiety...

Jack and I have had a few dark days and sleepless nights piecing together what is essentially a very simple story. One thing we have learnt, particularly at this half way point is to trust the script. Something I have had to do at every stage of the production so far. Especially when confidence is low and confusion abounds it's essential to go back to the written text and use it to navigate your way through.

We are still reducing scenes to their essential and bare minimum, but the beats and their function are still there on the screen. When we do totally cut (as in delete) a scene, particularly ones that I love, I know it's for the greater good for the film. Thank the lord for DVD's and 'deleted scenes', that way I dont have to ever let go totally.

We had a very special guest come to The Butchery this week. Super star Tom Russell popped in with his family to have a sneak peak of the edit, while they were in town for a weeks holiday from Adelaide. Tom was his usual self, unphased by the process but kind of curious to see himself on screen. He blocked his ears to the swear words and complained at the amount that appears to have been cut from the film. It was great to see him and family.

It was a weird experience for Jack to meet Tom in person, as apposed to watching him on screen for the past 10 weeks. "He's much shorter than I thought he would be. I felt a little starstruck." Jack said after they left.