Just a quick note to say that we are still busy slaving away on The Borderland State – the script is getting some serious work and the trailer is so close now – just going through some of the final processes which are proving to be quite lengthy!

Back with more blogging shortly.

Of course we know this is only one instrument in the attention grabbing process, so while I have nothing better to do, like get paid and stuff, I’m working on some early pitch material. And Dave is about to delve into a whole ‘nother dose of script reconstruction, even though he’s got work way up past his eyeballs. He’s a wanted man.

Here’s some sneak peeks from the editing suite just to sate your hunger!

Oh and by the way if you’re in Melbourne, our lead actor Mike Whalley is on the stage here for the next couple of weeks, in Skin Tight. Check it out!

Apart from that I’ve been in holiday mode and in case you missed the news. there was a huge earthquake here back in September. There’s been over 4000 aftershocks since with another big one (4.9) on Boxing Day.

So what to do but survey the damage? We headed out into the pouring rain to scope out the destruction of Kate’s home town.

It’s weird coming back to somewhere where you spent a good chunk of your life (five years in the garden city!) and all of a sudden it looks like a warzone or a third world country.

After the last big aftershock there are new fences going up everywhere and a whole tonne of buildings have to be re-assessed by the Earthquake Commission – which is the government department that pays out to repair damages in the case of an Earthquake. Good thing to have apparently.

Luckily the local cafe industry are moving themselves from destroyed building to destroyed building to keep the citizens of Canterbury in coffee and muffins.

So we’re about to head up to the Marlborough region for New Years and then it’s back to Melbourne a week after that. Then back on the film!

At last count The Borderland State trailer is going to clock in at around two minutes… And is looking great… It’s a funny thing though when you spend an extraordinary amount of blood, sweat, tears and time on something that winds up coming in at two minutes.

My day job is all about mileage with content so for a few hours of shooting and a day of editing you can get out ten minutes or so of content. A day in studio even more. So this months of effort for two minutes thing is still a little weird. I, of course, have never worked in advertising but I’m sure those guys get it. The whole thing is supposed to be an investment to a greater cause though and I hope we’ve managed to get the plot and tone across while being entertaining and making you want to see the movie (or in this case, get it made so it can be seen.)

We are in the final editing stages now and our graphics have just headed off to our visual effects artist. The grade is scheduled for February so we look on track!

So far so good, here’s some more pics from the shoot, cheers to Orson Kent for the following shots!

Let me let you in on a little art department secret. We are not unfamiliar with time pressure. For some reason, all too often, there is that last minute panicked frenzy to get the last screw in, the last ribbon on, that last dab of paint. It must have something to do with that old adage that an artwork is never complete. There’s always something more that could be done. That, and for some reason the job is possibly always underestimated. The pressure can be exhilarating, but can also feel like a high pressure weather system is brewing inside your head.

So the crux of it was that on Saturday morning I still had to fill 15 diaries full of Nick’s dreams by the end of lunchtime for our suspended dream diary scene. Problem! But pressure forced out a great idea. The scene before lunch was the pub scene, for which we had rounded up a herd of around 15 extras. Obviously the maths section of my brain can function without coffee, because I managed to calculate that if I divided the 15 diaries up between the 15 people sitting at the pub waiting for crew delayed up the road, I could have them all dreamed up before lunch! Luckily they were an obliging crowd, and dutifully filled the pages with dreams. I had been a bit flexible with my brief as I just really needed anything written, so some ended up not dreams at all but letters and random trains of thought…

Turns out it was quite a curious exercise! Because they are rather amusing, I shall now share with you some anonymous excerpts:

“22 Jan ’09 I was walking down the street and I saw a dog and his name was Kevin Rudd. Kevin went into the forest and he saw a bird. It was the first time Kevin had seen a bird. The bird made a sound… tweet tweet… went the bird. Then I went to a football park and my school teacher was there. He took a specky and then he was aboriginal. He kicked a goal and then won the game.”

“….It’s time for a lighting check. Thank God! Good news, Dave just said that we are getting real beer.”

‘…What I found out is that public toilets are out there and they are valued! Clean, accessible toilets and baby change facilities are utilised by international travelers, interstate visitors and Victorians alike. There are 59 public toilets in the city of Melbourne – 28 on the street and 31 in parks and gardens.”

“…I can’t actually remember any specific dreams at the moment but I do often dream of carnivals (in particular the Royal Melbourne Show), spiders (which are supposed to mean money), and tidal waves which always crash but never kill me…”

” The dream started with a triangle falling from the sky. It was so large that it covered the whole of my mind.”

” I saw the news today oh boy. Few thousand holes in Collingwood. It was weird and then I saw Josh.”

“8 August 1983. I was on a mountain with Led Zeppelin. We played some song together. It was fun and then I ate a sandwich. Led Zeppelin had sandwiches too.”

Weird… Anyways… what I really wanted to say was, thanks extras, for saving my ass. Muchos gracias!

But it’s not THAT interesting listening to me wax lyrical about how amazing everything is. How about some suffering? With the weather hitting the thirties the non-airconditioned, boxed-in edit suite I’m using is making focusing hard. If we’re lucky, as summer kicks in I’ll get heat stroke and cut the film so it’s completely illegible. Sweating like a dog through your palms makes it hard to cut but I like to feel that editing has an element of physical challenge. Until they get that wii / editing hybrid software sorted, sweating my body weight is the closest I’m going to get to post-production being exercise.

With Christmas coming up it’s getting hard to fit in the time to make sure this project is on schedule but we will!

Even if I have to bust out the salts.

Here’s a few more pics from the shoot!

And what a shoot it was, it’s hard to communicate the feeling  but seeing something you’ve toiled away on for over a year come to life is an amazing thing. It’s gone from small scrawl on a piece of notepaper to full blown production: an amazing cast, a professional crew and the city of Melbourne collided to spit out the oddball world of The Borderland State. Watching the footage back confirms one thing for me – we are definitely in the running to get finance going for the full feature film. That’s the objective and I am now one hundred percent convinced it’s a real, tangible possibility. It’s definitely early days but I am indebted to a lot of people for getting it to this stage, notably Kate, our DoP Brent Crockett, our Associate Producer Dave Dellar and a crew of thirty incredibly talented and amazing people that gave their time because they believed in the project (and/or I bullied them into it.)

Also worth a mention are the amazing cast that brought the characters of Nick, Genevieve, Logan and Becky to life. Michael Whalley, Hollie Andrew, Ben Prendergast and Jessica Lee Fortune really honed in on the characters – which aren’t the easiest of roles given the world they inhabit. Special props to Hollie for suffering carpet burn during some stunts and having her head completely submerged in sludge four times. I should probably also mention Mike for going above and beyond the call of duty… Mainly when we set his hair on fire. Sorry about that.

Filming ‘properly’ was definitely an educational experience, I’ve done a lot of television, but shooting drama style in the middle of town with all the permits, parking reservations, risk assessments, site plans and pedestrian control that goes with it was a crazy process. Props to Dawn at the City of Melbourne for being helpful with this kind of thing. It may have only been a three day trailer shoot but the multiple locations, fast pace and producing it ourselves definitely made it a seriously epic undertaking. But hey, we finished on schedule, with everything we wanted and everyone was happy at the end. We even preserved small amounts of our sanity in jars for later.

Now we enter a post-production phase and to be realistic I think we should be finished at the end of January, along with all the pitch documents and materials required for us to find a real producer and funding.

More photos to come as the post-production process unfolds. These ones were taken by the gang on set and the awesome Kirralee from Grand View Photography.

I couldn’t be more happy with how the whole shoot went. And we’re just getting started.

I should get back to work. I’ll be tweeting throughout the next few days of prep and filming under the hashtag #borderlandfilm – let’s see if it sticks!

It’s probably time for a recap. We are filming a trailer for my feature film ‘The Borderland State’. We are undergoing the exercise so that we can show the concept off in slick fashion to people with money. These people will then be so impressed with the concept and the trailer that they will decide to invest their hard earned cash into the feature film shoot. That’s the plan anyway.

The trailer shoot began as a small project, it was going to be guerilla, be shot on a small camera with a scaled back crew of about ten and financed with hopes and dreams.

With three days to go until we roll we have a crew of about twenty-five, a camera truck, several vans and a serious camera (and camera crew) working for us. Given that we’re bringing the full noise the guerilla option has become less and less realistic. Enter expensive permits, forms and red tape. It has been an interesting and expensive excercise so far but all signs point to a seriously high-spec trailer that I think might – just might – sell this thing.

Here’s a few of the locations we’ll be visiting for our shoot:

And in other news… This, ladies and gentlemen, is the Bathurst Island Airport.

I know, right?