GFF2012 Trailer

Here's the little trailer I directed for the Glasgow Film Festival with the brilliant help from Joanna Susskind and Savalas. Further to my previous post about the concept I thought I'd share a brief piece about the production.

PRODUCTION

As well as running creative duo Hole in my Pocket, I'm also an architect by day so the quick turnaround required for the project was going to give me a few problems (especially as the nights were fast drawing in and the chances of grabbing the right location photos were disappearing in the darkening evenings and miserable weather). The first thing then was to find a talented animation collaborator who could interpret my thoughts and stitch the whole sequence together. Joanna Susskind was the ideal person and I was hugely lucky that she was both available and interested in teaming up on the project. I really like her work: she's made some brilliant trailers for lots of different people including one for The Citizen Theatre's production of A Clockwork Orange, which used a similar technique to what I had in mind for this film.

After our first meeting it became clear that we were both on the same wavelength and that my two years of thinking meant we had a strong plan of exactly how to structure and sequence the film. A couple of long days photographing later and we had all the components in place to make the piece. (Special thanks to Roddy and Bruce for their roles in capturing Glasgow's very own Gene Kelly. His outfit was spot on.)

While Joanna put together some mock drafts for the GFF team to review I got chatting with Savalas who were due to mix the Dolby Cinema track for us. They liked our idea and very kindly offered us the use of their studio and sound bank to produce the audio. This was a big life saver as there wasn't a budget to hire a composer to produce a special piece of music, as I had originally intended. As a compromise we came up with the idea of the tuning radio sound with the images fading from one to the other like the channels are being changed. A couple of days in a dark sound studio in Govan and we had the rough audio bones for the final piece. We then spent a very enjoyable day in Savalas Dolby Studio (the only one in Scotland), where we played about with the directions and locations the sound hit us from, making little helicopters zooming round our heads.

We were really pleased with the final piece and think it looked good in a test run on the GFT screen but really looking forward to seeing it properly when it runs before movies. For fun we hid a few wee things in some of the shots for the more eagle eyed film geeks to spy. So keep your eyes peeled when it hits the screens later this month. We are also working up some other film scenes for a series of stills and possibly an extended trailer. Once we started coming up with ideas we just couldn't stop!

Here's hoping it will get people thinking about Glasgow as the setting for films - a new generation of stories set in our fair city, creating the myth and legend of what the Glasgow of the next century will be - and not just the set dressing that it has been recently for the likes of Batman, Cloud Atlas and Brad Pitt's World War Z.