Beer, skittles, meat, bones, melting bums

We finally got approval from Paul Welsh today for the ‘Deliver Me’ cut, which means that we can start moving forward with the dub and the grade. Unfortunately, we’ve lost quite a few days out of the time that we’d orginally planned for Grant (our sound recordist/designer) to do the sound mix, so we’re going to have to try and reschedule those and find a new date for the dub, potentially pushing it back to the end of February. I should be feeling happy that it’s all moving forward again, but with all the stuff to do on ‘Mum and Dad’ coming up over the next couple of weeks, plus a Cinema Extreme workshop, losing time to work on ‘Deliver Me’ recently due to waiting for feedback, has left me feeling detached from the project. It’s been hanging around for so long now that trying to keep my enthusiasm and focus on it during periods like this – when it feels like it’s nobody else’s priority – has become increasingly difficult.

(Obviously, moaning about the fact that I’m getting the opportunity to make films (and, in the case of “Mum and Dad”, brutal and perverse horror films at that) is not the most endearing quality in the world, so I’m going to try and keep that to a minimum here, but I did think it worth mentioning that the world of Uncinema is not all beer and skittles. Or dildos and Pringles tubes, for that matter.)

Looking back at the edit, I think there are a lot of good things to be said about it, however much I’m finding it hard to even look at at the moment.
1) The performances are all great, really digging the meat and bones out of the script (and also adding some to it);
2) I got to shoot, and cut in, The Infamous ‘INT: Vagina’ Shot;
3) The flexibility of digital cutting means that I have had the opportunity to create shots in the edit which we didn’t originally shoot – one close-up in particular, which I had to steal from another scene, then play in reverse (one of about 4 backwards shots in the film, none of which, hopefully, are noticeable as such)…
4) … as well as a shot which is blown up to six times it’s orginal size, then cropped and tinted to become something else entirely and solved a problem which I had thought about before the shoot, then forgotten, then had an aching moment of cold dread about during the edit, before having a moment of left-field inspiration. (Or desperate clutching-at-straws luck. Whichever.)
5) The film really seems to work at its length – it’s currently running at 17 and a half minutes, but doesn’t feel like it – it feels like there’s a sustained tension all the way through. Of course, we haven’t watched it with an audience yet, and that’s the real test, but I don’t think that’s going to be happening any time soon…
6) Aaaand it’s back to the moaning already…


On a positive note, while scouring the charity shops in Sherwood yesterday I came across a big box VHS of a film called ‘Street Trash’, which Cooke has often told me about (and which I once saw at a car boot costing £4, when I only had £3 on me, and there was no haggling to be had). It’s an 80s low-budget horror, promoted as ‘the ultimate melt movie’ and one of the first reviews I came across online contains the words ‘completely indefensible’, ‘exploitation gorefest’, ‘insane cannibal Viet Nam vet’and‘incredible melting bums’. So, I don’t think I can go wrong with it, really. Or at least, not wrong in a bad way...