Lee Kemp

On my way home last night on the train last night a guy walked past me with a dog. He looked slightly outdoorsy and relatively normal. His dog looked well bred and apart from the thick, fetishistic, studded leather collar there was nothing untoward about either of them. Though I couldn’t recognise the breed it was about the same size as a big bulldog though more naturally dog shaped.

You can’t possibly think a bulldog is dog shaped?!

He then went into the toilet with his dog. It did occur to me to offer to hold the dog while he went but indecision on my part about the social acceptability of doing so meant he was secured in the loo, with pooch, before I could decide. It wasn’t that unusual. I would probably do the same thing. The thought of leaving Alfie to run loose on the train while I point Percy at the porcelain sends shivers.

Then he didn’t come out.

He was still in there when I got off the train forty minutes later. There was no noise, no whining, in fact no sound at all. There was only that little red marker that indicates ‘occupied’.

I approached the guard on the platform and had this conversation;

Lee: “short explanation of weird events, vague concern about total silence”
Guard: “it’s probably the dog washer.”

Long pause.

Lee: “I’m sorry?”
Guard: “The dog washer. There’s some guy who gets on the train, locks himself in the toilet and washes his dog. Leaves the place in a right state every time.”
Lee: Blinks.
Guard: “Thanks. I’ll go and check”.

It was a quiet drive home after that.

Billy on sound

Phil Wood on cameras. Sony HDW-790s with Canon HJ11 x 4.7 and Canon HJ22 x 7.6 lenses.

I was on a job today and here’s how it went in reverse order. I was kind of directing, but only in the sense of trying to steer interviews in the right direction. I’ve been in situations before where I’ve found myself as someone who knows a little bit about a lot of stuff and ends up doing six different jobs on any given shoot.

In this case we had someone from the agency (big London agency by the way, which bittersweet as we were incognito for our client) who was doing the interviewing and steering content and a rep of my own client who was mainly concerned with framing and the quality of the key. So I was able to narrow down my own role to some very small specifics.

Doing the pre-interview brief. Telling them what to expect and how it was going to work. Do this, don’t do that. If you think you’ve got it wrong relax, we’ll edit it out. If I think you’ve got it wrong I’m just gonna jump in and stop you. There’s no point wasting anyone’s time or HDCAM tape which isn’t cheap.

Then once the interviews started I was just watching the monitor and listening to the answers. Not in terms of making sure they hit the brief but just making sure they made sense. They answered the question and rolled the question into the answer and didn’t look at the sound guy for approval at the end of each question and paused at the beginning and at the end and all of the other stuff that makes the edit harder if you do it wrong.

The interviewees looked good, the client and everyone else down the chain seemed happy. Again, it was just a small job but it was to have it done well and leave with everyone pleased.

Arrival was under very tight security. The eventual client is a company that has people in the world that don’t like thatm so we went through all the insane security. Once inside the fortress I realised I didn’t have all the usual stuff to crack on with so I could just be a pair of hands lugging boxes and rigging lights and tidying up. It needed doing.

I had a green screen job that didn’t go as well as i’d hoped recently and looking back I realised it was the first time I’d done any green screen at all. Welcome to the twentieth century Kemp. I have two regular DPs that I work with and I took advice from both of them. Then I took more advice from the one that was actually available and got some quotes for HDCam setups. Eventually rented from Pro-Motion in London after another rental house spiked the price. Miles at pro-motion was very helpful so when the client came back a week or so later to request two more interviews to be filmed with exactly the same setup I was more than happy to throw the business Miles’ way. Great service counts and put and extra £1k+ pro-motion’s way in return for being a little bit helpful.

In your face ‘other rental house’.

We used the Sony HDW-790s so we could get the most out of the key. Or at least our client who’s doing the keying could get the most out of it quickly and easily. Apparently the HDCam makes it much much easier as it contains far more colour information. I looked up the 790 and the review I saw said it was 3:1:1 but I think it was an old review and I quickly got bored of looking.

Crew was Phil Wood as DP and Billy Bannister on sound. And me lugging boxes and being generally satisfied. If you ever get chance to drink or work with Bill Bannister, you ain’t going home early. That boy’s got some stories.

And I managed an hour’s writing on the train home.

I found all manner of things to keep me from writing today, like tidying your desk again when you should be revising a day before your final exam. That was my day today but I got through it and added two lots of three pages to my short. The first lot got written. I didn’t need to re-read it to realise they were pump but they’d got me to where I had told myself I wanted to be when I stopped.

But I didn’t stop. I simply carried on, deleted the three crappy pages and made the transition work. I suppose problems can be like free standing walls. They will fall over if you run fast and hard enough at them. Especially when you can’t work out how to get over them.

I’m feeling quite pleased with myself. Who knows if the new pages are any good but the hard part is always getting to the end of the first draft. Then you can decide what its about and go back through and make it really about that.

I sometimes find that a struggle if I know where the story’s going. In this case I know what I want it to be about but I don’t know the story yet. A weird situation but I feel so good about having got here I’m not even gonna proof read this I’m just going to publish and be damned and read a bit more Cryptonomicon before I fall asleep. That boy can write!

Finally thanks to James Hull at Story Fanatic. Not only did I discover a great resource today that informed my writing but I found it because he linked to my blog. I couldn’t find an email address to say thankyou properly.

Another day’s shooting in London tomorrow.

Writing’s hard. I guess everyone knows that but it always surprises me just how hard it can be sometimes.

David Eddings, whose books I adored as a teenager, once told me that to be a writer you need to write a million words. Then crumple them up, throw them away and start writing properly. (When I say he once told me, I mean I read it in a book, I just always assume famous people are talking directly to me, otherwise why are they talking??)

Unfortunately I don’t have time to write a million words of shit because I’m pretty busy so i’ve decided not to bother with that and crack on with the good stuff (if there’s an global shortage of arrogance you know where to come looking). My plan to make four films this year has fallen by the wayside somewhat because i’m unfocused, ill-disciplined and a bit whingey sometimes. But i’m back on the boil. Here’s where it went wrong and how it relates to my experience of writing.

I have three good short scripts in my head. One of them complete to a standard i’m happy to share with others. None of these would make a good first short film. Each is 20-30 pages long and somewhat complex. So I needed something smaller to get my teeth into. Something that I could keep the whole thing in my head. If some kind person finagled into giving up their weekend to help me make a short film were to approach me with a question on set I could fire off a decent, well thought out and well reasoned answer built on a foundation of intimate familiarity with the concept and script.

I wanted something small. Lars Von Trier says “love your boundaries”. He doesn’t really make films I like but he makes films so he’s worth listening to. So I had something small, two people, one room, a topic of interest, a neat little twist and boobs. I could make it in a weekend with very little money. I’ll call it Socks because that’s one of the names it had during its troubled upbringing and i’m referring to it again later. Can I make the thing work? Can I bollocks. I’ve been arsing around for six entire menstrual cycles. Half a dozen full moons have gone by without success. Every time I try and write I write that. Whenever I’m laid in bed at night and i’m not thinking about the Battlestar Galactica finale I’m thinking about Socks. It’s subtly niggling away at my conscious and subconscious minds like an axe in the face. I took it to my writer’s group recently and everyone recognised the obvious problems. Then they started making suggestions; try this, done it, try that, done it, have you considered, yes, you could try this but its the most ridiculous contrived and cliche’d technique imaginable, yeah, tried that too. Then last time I pitched it to another writer who responded with “hmmm, not sure, sounds a bit shit”.

So when do you stop? Does the idea not work or am I simply not good enough to make it work? Has it been worth taking six months on a ten page short that probably doesn’t work? Have I learned from the experience?

Don’t know. Don’t know. No. No.

Then there’s the one i’ve written that I really like. I wrote it during a period of particular annoyance with Socks, the five good pages mocking me from a corner of my hard drive, insinuating it shouldn’t be hard to fix but also the obvious gaps taunting me. The new one was twenty two pages long and it flowed out of me most of it coming in a single weekend. I’ve reached another peak of annoyance with Socks and started writing something else. It’s not coming as fast but its coming out well. Really well in fact. Thanks to Matt Lund who said “why don’t you write about that?”

He was probably right. But its not the kind of thing I can make in a weekend. So it’s true, writing is hard. Except when it’s easy.

Fazeley Studios, where Fullrange is based, runs a yoga class on a Tuesday night. I’m genetically, politically and historically predisposed towards not doing stuff like yoga. It’s the kind of thing that people who read the Guardian do and, you know, I was in the army, grrr gung ho bollocks etc.

But I went for physio about 8 years ago after a car accident. Another car went into the back of mine at speed and I was hit hard enough for the stereo to fly out of its housing and into the back seat. I went to physio feeling generally fine but with sore muscles around the neck from the whiplash. After the initial consultation I felt like a wreck. Not just because the physio, a waif-like pregnant woman, had used my body for origami practice but also because she had identified a series of other problems. My left hamstring had become much shorter than my right, I wasn’t breathing properly out of my left lung and my awful posture had set in motion back problems that would likely plague me if I didn’t resolve them sometime in the next two decades.

All this made me realise that we are very good at compensating for stuff. Over time we develop little physical problems from bad posture or unresolved injuries that don’t score highly enough to need medical attention but do affect us in some way. So we compensate. When you tie your shoelaces you find somewhere to sit, you don’t crouch down or bend at the waist anymore like you did when you were a kid. Your ability to sit cross legged for hours has long since disappeared so you don’t do it. I’m probably about 60% as flexible now as I was twenty years ago and those are just two points on a downward trajectory towards a wheelchair in old age. I don’t imagine it needs to be like that.

I think, hope, you just need to give your body some attention.

I don’t mean like running, which is giving your cardio-vascular and leg muscles attention. That’s fitness. I’m talking about just concentrating on your body, how it works and how it moves. Or doesn’t move. Hence going to Yoga.

I’ll tell you about it later. It hurts.

I went to an RSA event recently as a guest of a fellow and got talking to someone from the Birmingham Book Festival. He was telling me about writing stuff that I didn’t know about and I was telling him about things that he didn’t know about. So I thought I’d put it all in one place.

Coming Up: Channel 4′s scheme is open to writers without an original single, series or serial broadcast on telly and directors without a primetime credit. Someone I know on the scheme a couple of years ago went on to write a film called Outpost. It got made by the same director and got theatrical distribution last year. The scheme’s definitely worth a look. It is aimed at writers with something of a track record but I know for certain that they’re simply looking for talented people.

The chap I met told me about the Birmingham Book Festival. The event is geared more towards novelists, poets and non-fiction writers but there is some scope for screenwriters so worth keeping a weather eye out.

Shooting People is  something some people rave about. I think it’s worth joining for a year and making your own mind up. The guy that runs the writer’s list, Andy Conway, lives in Birmingham and his website is worth reading. www.andyconway.net

Film Forum West Midlands. I’m a member but haven’t yet managed to make it to any of the events. They used to be on weekends and then when they held their first midweek event it was on the same night as my own embryonic writer’s group. But i’ll be along before too long.

In other news, we had a Canadian music video director called Jazz Virk come into the office. We sat round for  a while swapping favourite movies (anything by Park Chan Wook) and watching each other’s films. I was lucky enough to have some stuff with guns and explosions in but I couldn’t really compete with his Jazzy B video that contained a couple of Rolls Royce Phantoms, two Bugati Veyrons and a gulfstream jet.

The lovely Simon Cox, director of cult movie Written in Blood popped in too and I might have my first interview on here soon with him. He’s currently seeking funding for his sci-fi movie The Kaleidoscope Man.

Something substantial next time. See you soon.

Bear with me, it’ll take me a couple of paragraphs to explain why I’m annoyed. But it’s to do with my dog’s arse.

Dogs have glands in their arses. Two small anal glands manufacture a particularly awful smelling liquid that is unique to your dog. This is the aroma your dog is seeking when it smells another dog’s arse.

When your doggie does a toilet, the poop will squeeze against the glands and force some liquid onto the excrement  and essentially barcode it with his own aroma. It’s a statement that tells other dogs “not only have I dropped one here, I want you to know that i’m the one wot done it”. A canine sociological researcher would be able to identify all the areas related to a particular dog’s poop just by scent,  like twitter hashtags but for shit.

If your dog’s diet isn’t perfect he won’t digest food properly, the poop won’t solidify properly and it won’t press against the glands as it comes out. The glands will fill up and become prone to infection. My dog hasn’t got an infection, but you do occasionally get this disgusting metallic stench emanating from his general direction. If your dog is nipping at his hind quarters regularly its often a gland problem and you should take your dog to the vet to get him checked. Your vet will stick a rubber begloved into your dog’s anus and express the excess liquid from the glands.

Tonight we were having a conversation about Marley & Me. It’s shit, don’t bother watching it. But we were talking about how awesome it is having a dog and how completely unconditional a dog’s love is for its owners when a particularly powerful disgusting metallic stench began to emanate. Alfie was laid looking up at me with his gorgeous, expectant brown eyes. He was laying on my new favourite woollen jumper. When it comes to favourite clothes I’m like a kid with a spiderman costume. I find something I like and I wear it continuously until someone responsible peels its decaying mass from my skin.

It took me about half an hour to work out that Alfie’s ass had actually leaked onto my new favourite jumper. Ordinarily you shouldn’t be able to smell what is produced by a dog’s glands. Tonight I could see it.

Alfie’s going to the vets this week. I love my dog more than you would believe, but right now I’m in the market for a vet with really fat fingers.

The other end of Alfie

Writing, yay.

This blog has been very quiet recently so for the 8 of you that do subscribe, my apologies. Mostly it has been due to work which has been extremely busy recently. I spent a week in Amsterdam shooting tractors for AGCO with DoP Ed Moore and camera operator Phil Wood. There are more details of this over at Ed’s website The DoP Diaries and on Fullrange’s website and work at Fullrange. I had another shoot with Bedford County Council for Bonfire Design. That’s a company I’ve been trying to do work with for about 3 years now so that was a little bit of a victory. Then we managed to get a competition in the Birmingham Post giving away three films and loads of other exciting stuff. So yes, busy.

The second reason I haven’t blogged is that I had a particular blog post in mind and it’s taking a little bit of time to put together as I want to give the season 5 and series finale of The Wire a really good close up look. Subconsciously this became one of those ‘big jobs’ that just seems bigger and bigger the longer you leave it. But i’m going to make a start this morning.

Finally I want to mention that the writer’s group I was talking about a little while ago launched last Thursday. I’d had it booked in the diary for a while so I was disappointed that the Birmingham Filmmaker’s group launched a midweek fixture on the same night and I couldn’t go to that too. I met with another writer, David Wake, who has previously run another very successful writer’s group called PostSCRIPT and we put together some ideas for what we would like this one to be. Our aim is to provide an open, honest forum to critique each other’s work, learn from each other and I would hope that eventually we will be able to give the members a sense of community. It was decided that we should keep this group small until it finds its feet.

I was fortunate enough to have one of my short scripts analysed. I had put forward one that is a finished first draft that I’ve had two working screenwriters that I know look at. They’ve both given me good feedback, pointing out flaws but being encouraging of my abilities as a writer so my ‘magical shield of self belief’ was in place. As it turns out it wasn’t needed. We went round the room saying one thing we liked and one thing we didn’t. It’s a useful exercise to enforce both parts of that. Then we began looking in detail at 9 point story structure and applying the various break points to my script. Here’s where the fun started. Two of us couldn’t agree on where various break points were and in the ensuing discussion it became apparent that there were two areas in which the script could be improved quite dramatically. I didn’t have to agree with what was said but it so happens that I did and I’m looking forward to making those changes.

The group meets on the last Thursday of every month so we’ve decided to call it Last Thursdays and once the feet are found, i’ll start inviting people.

Bore off

…annoy me. I fidget. I fuss and I deliberately analyse. None of which are ‘good things’.

I’m there to watch a film and even the very best title sequences simply elaborate on the themes of the film. Frankly, a little bit more thought by way of actually elaborating on the themes of the film, within said film, would be much better placed*.

What about the recognition of the artists and artisans who have slaved tirelessly? All the cast and crew on a film have worked very hard. You can tell that because they didn’t get fired and stuck around long enough to get their name in the credits. But I really don’t need to see their credits at the start either. There is genuinely no requirement whatsoever to delay the start of the film with names, even if it’s to say A Stephen Soderbergh Film. I know that. It’s why I’m there. If the person is even semi-famous, even in giant movie geek terms there’s a good chance that the people that care about that kind of stuff (me) will know about it already. Save the credits for the end. I’ll sit and read them. I promise.

Then there are those people who’s names you don’t know going in. The not yet Soderberghs, the never will be Tom Cruises and the grips and juicers happy to be getting paid. Perhaps some star turn from a lesser known actor or a half recognised face under a metric ton of superb prosthetics, maybe it’s music that makes your heart pound or writing so good it blisters your ears just to listen. Save it. For the end. Again, those people who care (me) will sit and wait. They won’t even wait until they go home to check imdb. They (I) will sit in the theatre and wait until the the relevant name turns up in the credits and they’ll keep it there.

Save the credits for the end. Please. And don’t get me started on James Bond credit sequences.

I’d be really interested in a list of credit sequences worth watching though, or ones that actually add something to the film. Any suggestions?

Go Dave!

*David Fincher’s Se7en is automatically excluded from any diatribe.

Like most other people I (possibly) found out who the Stig was this week and felt a little bit less once I knew. I liked that there was a secret and if I was going to find out, I didn’t want everyone else to know.

This brings me far from neatly onto Battlestar Galactica. It’s been a long feverish wait after the mid-season break following the WGA strike in the states. I don’t care if you’re not a fan, you should be. The writing is excellent, the themes are complex and intriguing and the approach is utterly fearless; no character is safe and no topic is taboo. The second half of season 4 is now showing and it’s the last season. Ever. The end is coming and I feel like a teenage mixture of quietly sad and completely joyous. The impending resolution, no more secrets, all the answers will be mine. But there’s another ten episodes or so and apparently the last one will be a three hour special. OMFG, as they say. The end is coming, the secrets will be blown wide open and I can’t wait.

Then there’s Lost. I got bored around about season 3 and then picked it up again recently and now have the last 2 episodes of season 4 to get through and it’s looking pretty damn impressive. The character’s have remained mostly the same, Kate is annoying and wet and suddenly a crack native American tracker, Locke needs to realise respect is earned and not given and Jack needs to earn it and not be given it. Sawyer just gets better and better. In my frankly not that humble opinion. But it has just got so damned good recently. I think the reason I’m enjoying it so much more now is that for a while the prospect of questions without answers, or answers that just lead to more questions was just irritating. Now it feels like there is a plan, there is an answer and they’re drip feeding it to me. I’m sucking at the breast of JJ Abrams and the experience is much more comfortable than the image. The show’s gone in directions I never expected  but at least it’s going somewhere, not just meandering. The weirder it gets the better it gets. It feels like the end is coming and that anticipation, no matter how long it takes, is where the excitement comes from.

Finally I’m on the last episode of season 4 of The Wire. I believe season 5 is the last one ever. I love these characters. Literally. Their actions are completely dictated by who they are and they still manage to surprise me. In this case it’s just the plot that’s a secret but the unfolding of it and the trajectory the characters are on is intense and addictive.

I have complete faith in the writers of all 3 shows. They’ve brought me this far and haven’t abused my trust, where they’ve faltered they’ve brought me back and I know that whatever answers they choose to give me will be surprising and satisfying. But when they’re finished I’m going to feel completely full and a little bit empty. This lack is what will drive me to find the next series, the next Quality American Drama. I’ll become entangled once again, hopelessly addicted. Yearning for the answers, worried that I might actually get them and scared that I won’t.

Wow this sucks, but isn’t it great? Ed and Tony have both told me I should be watching Mad Men next. God bless you writers of Quality American Drama. God bless you and all who sail in you.