About Halfway

Last week I discovered Ridley Scott making his new movie, Gladiator, about a mile from my house!  The contrast between that production (with its 100 million dollar budget) and Foiled (without any budget) couldn't be greater.   They've cordoned off a large area of woodland and a huge field, put up massive temporary buildings, employed literally hundreds of extras and seem to be working from dawn through to dusk (if not more).  There are traffic lights up to allow vehicles on and off the site, huge wind machines, and cars everywhere.  When we went to nearby woods to film there were half a dozen of us in a remote part of the woods where no-one would disturb us, no preparation, no extras... but at least we had the sense to film in the summer when it was warm!

I've now reached approximately the halfway point in editing the film together.  This is just an estimate based on the number of pages in the script - the second (and very bizarre) dream sequence is complete after about a week of working on it.  The original plan to make a movie lasting the full 90 minutes seems to have gone out of the window though; total length so far is only 30 minutes!   The last few pages of the script have flown past - action edits down to a fraction of the time that dialogue does.  I'm not too bothered if it turns out at an hour in length, as we've got lots of amusing behind-the-scenes footage we could include on the tape, as well as a few ideas which may or may not come to something.

I recently edited a short special effects sequence for the Pizza Delivery Man transformation scene - this involved some frame-by-frame editing which is painfully slow but produces interesting results.  I'll keep special effects to a minimum or Foiled won't be appearing for a few years!   I've also discovered the drawback to using cheap videotapes.   Drop-outs.  Not bad ones, but occasionally a dark line will appear across one or two frames of a sequence.  Fortunately editing on my PC means I can retouch frames where necessary to remove these drop-outs!  There's no way I could have done this if I wasn't using a PC...

This last weekend a number of us involved in Foiled went on a short trip to Leuven (the beer capital of Belgium) to visit Mark Flitter, who is currently working in Brussels.  We travelled over on the Eurotunnel train in a couple of cars - Dave, Ian and myself in one, and Mark Stalker, Mike and Sue in the other.  Highlights of the trip included Mark S's uncanny impressions of Michael Caine (Dave couldn't get enough of them), Mark F's astounding collection of books and DVDs, an impressive amount of beer drunk by all (especially in a bar full of crazy students), Belgian waffles, a mad clock tower which instead of chiming played cheesy pop music, and the weird Atomium structure in Brussels...  Sue and Mike stayed an extra couple of days to travel into Holland for a radio interview to promote their new album, The Services of Mary Goode (check their Janison Edge web site for details).

Photos from the Belgium trip

PS If you get your hands on a copy of the February edition of "Yahoo! Internet Life" magazine you'll see a brief review of this site, including a picture of Foil Man, on the last page.