Ric Forster

LOL has been selected to be screened at FACT in Liverpool.

“On Thursday 13th November there will be a Best of the years Liverpool Film Night Screening.
There will be a programme of films celebrating some of the best short films of the year, and some industry directors and producers speaking about their work giving tips and advice on the industry itself.

FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology)
88 Wood Street
Liverpool, L1 4DQ
t: +44 (0) 151 707 4441
f: +44 (0) 151 707 4445
www.fact.co.uk”

Step one: take loads of photos of the cast on set in myspace poses.

Step two: Paper.

Step three: Ink.

With LOL being released as an online drama series, I wanted each webisode to have a title sequence. Thankfully, during production, I had John and Jeremy take as many photos of the cast as possible. The original plan was just to use these stills as character Facebook/Myspace pages – but the shots came in handy when putting together the title sequence.

I did the original design as a Photoshop file, doing deliberately-crappy cutouts from the Facebook shots and pasting them all into a big document. I found a great font called ‘green pillow’ which spells out the character names, as well as some ink splat brushes from deviantart (see below).

This PSD was then imported into After Effects, I moved the layers around a bit in 3d, to give the sequence some depth, and got the camera to move along in time with the theme tune.

Having used stills of the characters instead of live action, the whole thing felt pretty static so I decided I wanted real life video ink splats. Looking around the net, I couldn’t find any footage of ink splats for free so decided to shoot some of my own.

Covering the floor with white paper, I setup a camera on sticks tilted down and dripped a few drops of plain black pen ink. (Note to self: next time wear gloves. It’s permanent.)
Brought the footage into After Effects, used it to mask matt colours and job done.

Final Result:

Good audio on a film is, famously, somewhat difficult to achieve. It’s something that on set I just can’t pay close attention to. That job falls on the ears of my sound recordist. Because of the insane challenging shooting schedule there were some angles we only had one shot at. Having one boom mic, two characters standing on the opposite side of a classroom and not enough time is never a good situation.

The result was that when bringing the film into the edit, a massive amount of time had to be spent sorting out the audio. Pictures are a piece of cake, comparatively. I had the bulk of the visuals edited within a week of the shoot, but the audio took another month.

You can always try to pull better audio from other takes, but it doesn’t always sync up. My only option was to do some ADR, which apparently stands for Automatic Dialogue Replacement. I have a massive problem with this description, as there’s nothing automatic about it. It’s a really tricky process that is a nightmare to get right. I had to bring in Nicola, Bryony, Toni, Dan, Nico, Dane and Chris to re-record lines. Yeah, that’s virtually the entire cast.

The scene with Keely and Dawber standing in the hallway at the party? Dubbed.
Keely and Helen having a massive row? Dubbed.
All the scenes with Keely and Jaz in the classroom? Dubbed.

The results vary in quality, but hopefully nothing will stick out too much. It’s something they screw up on TV all the time. Often the new audio is recorded in a voice over booth and tends to sound artificially clear. Having access to all the sets after the shoot allowed me to re-record the audio in exactly the same situation as it was originally and I think it’s worked out alright. In one scene, the Jaz/Helen phone call, we were actually able to change and improve the script, as the original was pretty awful. With a bit of luck, viewers won’t notice…

There’s a scene in the film where Keely and Jaz are sat at the bus stop and Jaz whips out her mobile phone. Keely’s reluctant, but Jaz takes a shot of the pair of them making pouty faces. She then sends the picture as an MMS to Dawber.

It’s 8.30am Sunday morning. We’re ahead of schedule, but still got to squeeze in an extra scene at the bus stop that we missed yesterday. Need to shoot a close up of Jaz’s mobile phone, sending the picture she’s just taken to Dawber. Easy, right? Turns out, it’s really fiddly to compose an MMS on that handset and the owner of the phone doesn’t know how to send a picture message. Time is ticking. What do we do? We shoot the phone with the plain photo on the screen, the plan being to add the caption in post.

Here comes After Effects to the rescue. Straightforward enough to overlay a fake phone screen onto a handset, though two things made it difficult. One, Bryony’s thumb moves over the screen, so it has to be masked out, frame by frame. Two, muggins here decided to shoot the entire film handheld. Sure, it might look nice, but it’s a bloody nightmare for VFX work.

Solution? Motion tracking! I setup two motion trackers on opposite corners of the screen the tracked the movement of the phone, pixel by pixel. That way, when the new display is overlaid, it moves perfectly in time with the footage, and creates the illusion of reality. Took me a couple of hours to create the effect and render it in HD – but I think the end result is pretty seamless. See before and after video below:

An absolutely exhausting but fantastic couple of days. Really pleased with how the shoot went. We got pretty much everything needed, never falling far behind schedule. Cast and crew were awesome. Workshops ahead of the shoot paid off as we already had a good idea of how to play the key scenes.

I was a little bit anxious prior to the shoot – it had been a while since I’d directed drama. There was a day doing 2nd unit on Starship Intrepid back in May but I’d had very little chance to prep for that. Shoots at uni were quite small crews, so this was my first experience of directing with so many bodies on set. That said, the extra hands made everything go much more smoothly – great having Kingstone and Terri 1st AD’ing Saturday/Sunday.

I’d spent evenings in the last few weeks hanging back at work waiting until the Hollyoaks shoots were over and walking through the sets, visualising and storyboarding the scenes. Time well spent. There were a couple of setups that I had to re-work due to lighting issues but for the most part we were able to stick to the camera plans, giving me more time to work through the scene with the cast.

The shoot days were 8am – 7pm. Pretty easy going, but myself, Kaitlyn, Andy and Jeremy stayed until 11 every night dressing and re-dressing the sets. The set I’d chosen to use as Dawber’s bedroom got re-dressed by the design department a day before the shoot – so we had to change what was now a girls bedroom into a guys, and back again. This involved photographing every inch of the set to make sure we could put it back exactly as it was. We made Dawber’s bedroom as messy as possible by adding heaps of posters, skater gear and smoking paraphernalia. The pizza slices you see on Dawber’s bed are remnants from the Domino’s we ordered the night before. Waste not, want not.

As we’d fallen half an hour behind schedule on day 1, we had to lose a scene where Helen dropped Keely off outside the school gates. With no chance of adding an extra move to day 2, the scene was re-written into a phone call between Jaz, Helen and Keely – and shot around planned locations. The scene was written in the early hours of Sunday morning and finished on the drive to set. Not best practice, but the scene setup an important sequence in the film so was better to have a watered-down version than none at all.

Tasks still on my to do list are to return all the props, take the sound gear back to the hire company in Manchester and get the footage digitised. Won’t be able to relax until I’ve got the footage into Final Cut…

Casting…

Difficult? Yes.

Necessary? Yes.

Unfortunately, it’s kind of impossible to make a drama without going through the process.

From a logistical point of view, it’s tricky to organise. You’ve got to book a venue, contact potentially hundreds of actors and liaise with them to create an auditions schedule. For LOL, I placed adverts on CastNet and Casting Call Pro and organised two auditions, one in Liverpool and another in London. Although we’re shooting in Liverpool and it makes sense to cast locally, the majority of actors seem to be based in London. As the majority of the roles were for quite young characters, I also setup an audition with a local youth theatre drama group.

The other tricky aspect of casting is actually working with the actors. I was lucky enough to get quite a big response to the casting notices and saw close to a hundred actors for the 7 or 8 roles. That’s a lot of rejection. When you’ve got actors giving up their time and money to travel and perform for you there’s an obligation to make sure they get something out of it too.

I made the decision quite early on to audition for all the roles in pairs. So everyone reading for Jaz would act opposite another actor reading for Keely. We’d then swap roles. It really helped the process as there’s nothing worse than an actor trying to act against someone who is just feeding them lines.

It also gave me the opportunity to have the actors improvise. For every scene they read, I asked them to put down the script and perform an improvised version. The results were phenomenal. I was able to see what they were capable of and really get a feel for which actors worked in the roles. I also discovered that large parts of my script were rubbish.

I spent the next week looking over the auditions footage trying to work out who worked with who. There’s an unpleasant Simon Cowell nature to it, as you’ve got to be brutal, and absolutely sure that your choices are the right ones. With my decision made, I contacted everyone who auditioned and let them know whether they’d got the role or not. Not a particularly pleasant task.

There were some really strong actors who were genuinely great, but just not right for the roles. Though I suspect it’s something that actors are often told when turned down for a film, I do intend on offering them any roles that come up on future productions. It was great having found some fresh talent.