It was late April when I came up with idea of making a film about festivals shot on mobile phones. I quickly spread the word around the office and everyone got pretty excited about it. A few weeks later news came through that Spike Lee had teamed up with Nokia to do something similar and I instantly got that feeling you get when you go to a party and someone is wearing the same shirt as you..thunder stolen, pocket well and truly picked. It's inevitable that mobile movie making is going to be big, I just didn't want the floodgates to open until I got my film out the door.
When I discovered a week before the premier of Shoot The Summer that Spike had finished his film I was pretty keen to see the results. It was a strange position to find myself in. Here I was like a school kid in the exam hall peeping over the shoulder of a class mate to compare work... only this time the class mate was Emmy Award winning Spike Lee. Regular readers of this blog will know that earlier in the summer I found myself pitching a comedy idea to Bafta winner, Emmy winner and Golden Globe winner Stephen Merchant. The film has put me in good company and I feel I've faired up pretty well. After a difficult start Stephen got the idea and liked it when he saw. As for Spike, I like his film, it's great, but it's only 7 minutes long. I wanted it to be longer because I wanted to see what he'd do with it. As it is I've learned little. I wonder if he's sat there with his Emmy looking at mine thinking 'shit, glad his film is an hour long, I've got loads to learn from that'? Doubt it.
So what were the learnings from Shoot The Summer.
1. An hour of mobile footage IS watchable. The quality of the footage captured by the Nokia's N95 is incredible. 5 mega-pixel camera and 8 gig memory means that you can capture a full hour of 'TV quality' footage on your phone. Even on the cinema screen it looked great. If you've ever full screened a youtube clip you'll know how much quality can be lost but it was barely noticeable. As for shaky hand shots causing nausea whilst watching, its a myth. Most people filming themselves are focusing on their faces. As their face is attached to the same body as the hand holding the camera there is no shaking. The foreground remain still whilst the background moves.
2. The general public are beginning to think editorially. People are getting the habit of using camera phones to make movies of their own and as a result they now think about what they will do before they press record. Some of them have a good editorial idea about what they want to do and plan it beforehand. This is why I didn't end up with a load of footage of people wasted in tents or other nonsense. This will get better over the years... think about the effect the arrival of digital SLRs had on photography.We'll soon be a nation of Coppolas.
At the start of the summer I had a bag full of phones to give to strangers at festivals. Everyone thought a majority of them would be stolen by the end of the summer. None of them went walkie... OK, I did have to go chasing around Cambridge one night to track one down but that's because the guys that had them had over indulged in something stronger than Pimms. The reason none of the phones vanished was because the value of 15 minutes of fame for the audience far out-weighed any monetary value the phone could bring. People want to be on-screen. People want to be more than just themselves when the cameras are on. And people want to be a part of something interesting. All these factors worked in my favour. As for the artists, they tended to gravitate towards the safety of performance. There were a lot of improvised songs and spoken word... all good though.
3. Choose your UGC subjects before a frame is filmed. The general model for UGC is based around skimming the best from a huge number of participants. This model doesn't work for me for 2 reasons. The first is the time it takes to go through thousands of videos. The second is that you end up with thousands of disappointed people. My first memory of UGC goes back 3 decades to a TV show called Vision On which starred Tony Hart. Each week The Gallery gave us, the general public, the chance to get our painting shown to (probably) millions of viewers. Now I was no van Gogh but each week I'd see a piss poor painting of a tortoise appear in the gallery thinking 'if Jim aged 9 can get his painting in the gallery then surely my battleship should be in too'. It never was and how I hated the makers of the show for that. That's always the danger of UGC, someone ends up feeling like their work is inferior and unfortunately the bigger the call to action the more resentment there will be.
The model that worked for me was heading out to the festivals, spend some time meeting people and when I thought they were interesting enough and had something to say I'd then asked them to film something for me. It was a lot easier than sifting through millions of clips and allowed me to keep tabs on how my film was going to look as summer progressed. It also gave me the luxury of finding someone else at the festival if the people I chose didn't capture anything good. The other great thing about this method is that you get to meet lots of interesting people who will eventually star in your film. Ben and Alex, Chris from Aylesbury, even Gary Numan, great to meet them all.
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