A few things make this an unusual project. It was devised in collaboration with my friend Will Whiting, and was our first project working together. First we locked a date in the diary to stop ourselves from procrastinating and making excuses. We decided on February 2020 in October 2019, as it seemed like ages away. Then we structured the story out together on post-it notes. We knew that we wanted it to take place in one room (it ended up being a hotel suite, rather than a single room per se). We location scouted and then Will sorted the permissions for the hotel and I wrote a draft of the script. Then he did a draft and we batted it around over four or five iterations, taking it in turns to tweak things.
The shoot was quite early upon us, but we didn’t want to delay because we knew that we’d never commit otherwise. This was prescient, as the pandemic lockdown started a month later and it would take us ages to get out again. The filming itself was quite straightforward. Three consecutive days in the suite with Ali Rodney and Sean Pogmore performing, Will operating camera and directing, Kat Munden on sound, Mike Ferris camera assisting and me script-supervising and assistant directing. In retrospect, we would have loved more time, especially as our climatic scene on the motorised head came at the very end, and we were not confident at using it when the critical moment came. A lesson learnt.
The post production took considerable time. Will was editing it during the pandemic, but a film in one room is not the best project to work on when you’re locked in your own house. Meanwhile, I was writing a musical score. I enjoyed working in the theme of threes (3/4 time, three parts, triad chord patterns etc) but a lot of the music didn’t make Will’s final cut. I can admit that it was quite avant garde and lacking in tonal continuity. It didn’t help that Will was lacking in confidence with the cut of the film too, fearing it was too long (it was) and deciding to go black and white late on, despite it being filmed in colour.
The end result is unusual, as I wrote at the start. The film is 41 minutes, which is a graveyard length for a film (too long for a short, too short for a feature) and it struggled to get into festivals. This is a shame, as there are aspects of it then I am very proud of, especially the concept, Ali’s ability to perform in the different styles and the motorised camera moves that distinguish the different strands of the story. The apparent weaknesses were learning experiences too, so I am fond of the project as a whole.