DIGITAL, the Quiet Revolution in Filmmaking from Script to Screen. a Case Study Called VIOLET CITY John Maxwell Liverpool John Moores University
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AVANCA | CINEMA 2015 DIGITAL, The Quiet Revolution in Filmmaking from Script to Screen. A case study called VIOLET CITY John Maxwell Liverpool John Moores University Abstract of Play, The Other Boleyn Girl, The Walking Dead). I’d come off the back of several film festivals, BBC From 2010 to 2014, John Maxwell produced, directed broadcasts and sales/distribution/exhibition for the two and edited a dark fantasy feature film called Violet pictures that had been made back-to-back, no let-up City, shot entirely on a 40 metre long green screen for a combined budget of £250,000 between 2007 and constructed in disused canteen in Liverpool. 2009. Peanuts in terms of independent film budgets The first film of its kind to be made in academia but we had some of David’s chutzpah to propel the and harking back to German Expressionism and films into a strong critical and commercial place. Pressburger & Powell, Violet City is a trailblazing We’d raised the money via Enterprise Investment project that uses accessible Visual Effects and 3D Schemes (EIS) and using the new 20% ‘cashback’ animation software to create a world of carnivorous tax break awarded by the British Government to films plants and inter-dimensional demons. demonstrably made in the UK. It felt like the first steps From the production processes to a forthcoming towards bigger budgets and audiences, but then the worldwide release that eschews physical media, credit crunch crunched, the UK Film Council – who had distributing through an aggregator via iTunes, also funded my career up to this point – folded and the GooglePlay and games platforms, this project will find priority for National Lottery Funding in the UK shifted and market to its genre audience directly with a unique towards the 2012 Olympic Games. viral campaign using long tail marketing. Instead of going bigger, I had to go smaller or stop The paper will chart the making and distribution of making films entirely. Even with tax incentives via EIS Violet City and what it will mean for independent and the 20% cashback, no-one was putting up the filmmakers and their relationship with their audiences. cash for new, independent projects. Television seemed to be growing whereas film was being hit by the same Keywords: Animation , Fantasy, Gothic, Micro-budget, malaise as music in terms of piracy and a resultant Lovecraft drop in sales of physical media. Film funding was always a tail-chasing game of snakes and ladders, but now even the tiniest cracks in doors were sealed shut. My day-job as a producer came to an end as the two films entered their distribution cycle. I needed to pay the bills and I had been working as a lecturer at LJMU for several years. In other disciplines, research drives the pedagogy and vice-versa. Pockets of research funding are available within institutions and I saw a glint of an opportunity. In the summer of 2009, I made a series Revelations and Beginnings of comedy sketches using green screen/compositing technology. I was looking for a new project now that Violet City began life as a screenplay and a song, represented a departure from bitter-sweet comedies, some ten years before I came on board to realize it something that could be shot in a controlled as a film. The brainchild of Dave Jackson, a tunesmith environment rather than expensive locations, with a from the same early ’80s Liverpool post-punk scalable crew. scene as Frankie Goes To Hollywood, Echo & The LJMU were able to facilitate this at their former Bunnymen and The Teardrop Explodes, it was written screen-school based at Edge Lane, Liverpool. My as a treatment inspired by Violet, the colour of the home faculty was due to move into a new £37million protagonist’s eyes and the name lent to a city loosely building in 2013, so we had three years to nail it down morphed into a nightmarish, fantasy version of early and as much light, heat and dedicated space as we 20th Century Liverpool. wanted. I secured £12,000 worth of green screen, Written as a novel in the late noughties, Dave’s cameras, grip, hardware, software and pocket change day job as a screenwriting lecturer brought him into to feed a cast and crew. contact with myself, an independent film producer Concurrent to this, I read Dave Jackson’s novel, moonlighting as an academic, looking for a project to which he had written in order to complete his PhD push the boundaries of technology achievable on a thesis. Dave adapted the novel back into a 180 page shoestring budget. screenplay and this was the start of Violet City the I came from a very different place to Dave; as movie as well as the first inkling of our great narrative producer of two bitter-sweet comedy feature films, dilemma in the making this film – how to distil a novel the first of which ‘Don’t Worry About Me’ was directed and then a 3 hour screenplay with ensemble cast into a by noted Liverpudlian actor David Morrissey (State tight, independent and sellable product. 28 Capítulo IV – Cinema – Tecnologia fellow screenwriter/academic Jeff Young, himself cast as the arch tyrant Lord Splaine. I had enough to go by to start casting the film. This process is a volatile and tricky aspect of preproduction that can determine completely by itself whether or not the film will sink or swim. The narrative is reimagined by the actors as much as the writer and director, but it can also be irreversibly damaged. The film wasn’t a vehicle for recognised talent, but we wanted to build the cast around the two prominent young leads ‘Make your first film in a haunted house.’ of Flynn and Zeb. We needed an instant screen presence, actors who could hit their marks, take I can’t recall when I first heard this quote, allegedly direction and offer something to the characters. These from B-Movie filmmaker Roger Corman, or where to roles required experience and flair but I also wanted attribute it, but it certainly sounds right from the man them to be convincingly youthful, real age around 20 who ‘Made a Hundred Movies and Never Lost a Dime,’ for a playing age of 18. according to the title of his autobiography. Myself and Jeff headed down to London to meet a Corman was and still is a genre specialist, slaking couple of his protégés, Jack Roth (son of Tim Roth) and that thirst for pulp horror and science fiction that George Maguire. Both of them were a little bit edgy, in has been growing since the Second World War. His a good way, and had the challenging experience of a influences upon filmmakers such as Spielberg and long theatre run under their belts, having starred in the Coppola are avidly documented, but his films are stage version of QUADROPHENIA that Jeff put on with produced for less than the catering budget of those Pete Townsend. They had a pre-existing dynamic as made by his two famous devotees. friends that could work as on screen chemistry between I took my first lesson from Corman with this Zeb and Flynn. Neither had grabbed prominent unattributed bit of wisdom. Not literally, but figuratively screen roles yet, which was our major bargaining the idea of using a contained production base meant point because we didn’t have money for fees, barely that I could punch above my weight. Perversely, by enough for their expenses/per diems. They both had shooting in my ‘haunted house’, a green screen studio, the necessary charisma to work in these roles, which this meant the canvas of settings could be anywhere I was very exciting. It looked like we’d found our leads wanted, so Violet City seemed tantalizingly achievable. without much effort at all. This was going far too well. The odd thing that has since occurred to me is that Dave had completed a new draft of the script. We no-one else had tried it, at least not on a miniscule locked heads and he got into a rewrite, culling and budget of £12,000. Robert Rodriguez had a low budget conflating characters, whittling down parts of the in Hollywood terms when making ‘Sin City’ (2005, narrative that were important in his novel, but over- budgeted at $40million), but ours was almost comically egged the screenplay. It still ran at over three hours. low. Films like ‘Iron Sky’ (2012, budgeted at $10million) We spent two weeks casting the other characters. blazed a trail in terms of crowdfunding indy genre films, Even though it was unpaid and we’d specified but we didn’t want to spend two years raising finance Liverpool-only, actors came from far and wide (mainly when we only had the free, empty studio space for London) to read for us. I couldn’t believe how such a not much more than that period. Iron Sky was a rare small project was attracting talent on both sides of the success, but I’d seen countless good (and bad) projects camera in spades. Far from being forced into a corner evaporate in the tail-chasing process of film-fundraising. by the lack of funds, I had more choices than I could Gifting ourselves the green light to make a genre have ever imagined. A mix of students and alumni film seemed liberating at the time and still does, given along with help from my colleagues from productions even the prism of hard work, huge obstacles and past had assembled on the preproduction.