1994. City street maps are printed on robust paper and bound into books. No-one I know has a mobile phone. Universities still accept typed and even hand-written assignments.
I was nearly at the end of my bachelor’s degree, and wanted to do something a little different, a little creative, and which didn’t have an end of semester exam. Screen production!
This is my final assignment – transferred from the original SVHS tape to DVD and now to the cloud.
The assignment was to produce a one minute trailer for a potential longer film. Earlier in the year, or perhaps the year before, I’d written a short story about a young couple going to visit their friends for dinner, but getting lost in the maze of streets. Each time they think they’ve worked out where they are, and drive in what they believe is the right direction, they get lost again.
Finally, in desperation on a rainy night, they pull into the driveway of a house and Pardelo goes to knock on the door. While he’s waiting for a response, he turns back to look at Mary in the car. The car, and Mary, have vanished.
It was “based on a true story” to the extent that I once got lost driving to dinner with friends at their house, and then several times thought I’d found my way only to lose it again. A maze of tricky little streets, all alike.
I condensed the story to enough of a screenplay for the trailer, and set about organising filming.
Emma and Andrew were kind enough to play the main characters. Emma was extremely generous with her time since she was in her last year of high school at the time, facing end of year exams, and preparing for her conservatorium audition as well. She did get into the ‘Con’ the next year, and I believe went on to do honours.
Andrew was also incredibly generous. He supplied us all with dinner – he’s an excellent cook, by the way – and also allowed us to use his car and carport for the car scenes.
Kate, credited as the “Rain God”, was incredibly helpful and supportive throughout. Getting the rain – well, more of a flood – right really adds to the atmosphere. Kate also kept me company in the editing suite a few times as I assembled the final cut frame by painstaking frame.
Bevan and Debbie allowed us to use their house for the scenes where Mary and Pardelo are getting ready to go out.
Thank you all!
Competition for use of the university’s camera and lighting rigs was pretty fierce. Of necessity I think we did all the “principal photography” over the course of a single weekend. Actually, it might even have been a single day – the indoor scenes in the morning, and the car scenes that night.
Everyone was exhausted, especially Emma. She was such a trooper – enthusiastic to the last though she was dead on her feet.
Time in the editing suites was also hotly contested. I was driving delivery trucks for a bakery at the time, so I’d often book editing time in the very unsocial hours before or after work when most of my fellow auteur-apprentices were still at parties or very sound asleep.
There’s about an hour of raw footage. The sixty second final cut for the assignment is 1500 frames of SVHS PAL video. Every frame has to earn its place. Remember, this was all on analogue equipment where you had to wait for the tape to wind back and forth. Editing took hours!
The one screen production lecture I’d missed was the one where they explained that we should take a copy of our raw footage and use that for the rough edits, only using the original to assemble the final cut from a final edit decision list. I naively edited from the original tape, and just as I got a final edit I was happy with, one take developed a tape glitch, and I had to frantically re-edit to use different takes.
I made three or four slightly different versions of the final cut. I think this version is the best overall, and “Company” (Rickie Lee Jones, 1979) suits the story so well, it could’ve been written for it:
I’ll remember you too clearly
But I’ll survive another day
Conversations to share
When there’s no one there
I’ll imagine what you’d say