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.

Whenever the MOD announces further deaths in Afghanistan I check the BBC news website to see if it’s anyone I know. It’s not that likely because I didn’t do that kind of job, which means mostly my friends didn’t do that kind of job either. But I look, just in case. So I saw that another three blokes got the good news this week in Helmand bringing the total to 199. Between landmines, ambushes and just taking the fight to the enemy in a most aggressive fashion the casualty rate was always going to be higher than people had perhaps expected, or were used to. Particularly when our own, distant, experience of “war” is driven by the two Iraq conflicts.

A couple of years ago a friend of mine, recently returned from Afghanistan, told me that a British soldier was more likely to be killed or injured over there than an American soldier had been in Vietnam. I’ve no idea if that’s true but the fact that it might be is pause for thought. Particularly as you rarely get to see the wounded. That’s why I found this article at the BBC particularly interesting.

Marine Mark Ormrod stepped on a land mine and lost both legs and one arm. Apparently it didn’t hurt and I always find it interesting when the greviously wounded say it didn’t hurt at the time. But if you consider that landmines contain high explosives. This is material that burns at more than 3,000 m/s as opposed to a low explosive that burns less than 3,000 m/s. If you consider that gunpowder is a low explosive then you have some context as to how fast Mark’s life changed.

Please go and have a look. You get an insight into the guy’s life. He’s 5’6 now because of his prosthetic legs whereas he used to be 6’1. Having gone to a bad taste party in high heels recently I worked out that actually it’s pretty cool to be taller. Mark would probably appreciate that, my experience of marines is that they like to dress in women’s clothing. If they’re not naked at least. So being tall is cool, that means it must be quite shit in reverse. Mark finds it harder on very hot days because we lose a lot of heat through our skin and he simply has less of it. His new legs measure his gait and bluetooth it to a computer to help him improve his walking. The technology is fascinating and the determination of the guy, and many, many others like him is extraordinary.

He now works for the marines and Help for Heroes.

Finally, while I was poking around the MOD website I found this fascinating story about army divers working in Afghanistan.

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.