I jumped at the opportunity of producing another preliminary task, this time with Nicholas Ashurst, as work on my first effort with Avraj and Ryan was a success. However this time I hoped to broaden my horizons and explore various different cinematic techniques that were not possible with the time constraints of the first one. On the whole, this second preliminary task was indeed a resounding success and I very much enjoyed filming, editing and watching it.
Similarly to the first project, it was in our's and the audience's best interests that we only use the brief as a guideline to the making of the preliminary task. Of course we had to stick to some of what it asked us to include: for instance, the opening of a door using match-on-action and examples of shot-reverse-shot and obeying the 180-degree-rule; but for the most part the preliminary task with Nicholas was a beast of its own.
We went with a simple premise - a secret agent infiltrating a heavily guarded house in order to locate a high value target - this premise allowing us to explore the aforementioned techniques, but more importantly so we could include a number of action packed fight scenes in preparation for our final opening. We arrived on the day of shooting with only this basic outline of a plot and thus we went about crafting an eight minute action packed short film on the go, using only three or four possible actors on screen at one time. We then came up with the ingenious idea of donning each of the actors playing the bad guys with balaclavas, therefore making the need for any more actors irrelevant.
Akin to the previous task, we suffered the reality that cast members had to come and go, therefore we arranged the sequences appropriately. Fights were given to available actors and we experimented with a variety of different types of fight sequences in order to give them their own unique feels, which meant each would have its own distinct challenges. The primary method of shooting the fight sequences, which comprise almost the entire eight minute running time was to simply shoot, shoot, shoot...and shoot again. We choreographed the fights in stages, then shot each section from multiple angles, so we cut together the shots to make the impacts look authentic as well as provide a rapid pace to the proceedings. I was the main camera man for the majority of the film due to my lack of skill and laziness in the fighting business and I experimented with various shot types in order to capture a cinematic visual aesthetic.
Over the course of the day shooting the preliminary task we decided to discard the serious atmosphere to the film and adapt a more ironic, comedy style approach to the films. Thus the fights become increasingly comic as balaclava, fez and monkey-onesie wearing henchmen come into play, making for some of the more interesting sequences of the picture. By the end of the filming - which was done in chronological order due to our lack of preparation - we were all tired and ready to go home, somewhat worrying myself and my fellow director over whether we had captured enough footage (despite their being over an hour's worth). Once I had arrived at the editing process, however, I discovered we had plenty of clips available to form an epic eight-minute preliminary task the world had never seen before.
But it was then that creative differences struck a momentary division between myself and Nicholas. Disagreements over the way the film was to be edited meant that we each approached the post-production of the preliminary task separately resulting in two alternative edits of the film. Both myself and Nicholas have differing styles and approaches to this, so it was interesting to see the creative and technical disparities between our final cuts (discussions led to each other adopting some similar editing techniques such as the use of the same musical score during the kitchen fight). However by the release of each of them, we had rekindled our professional relationship and are ready to embark on our final opening piece, hopefully with all the skills and knowledge we have gained from producing this preliminary task.