The Beast - a good scene, a failed short movie (2000)

When I first started making movies, I was inexperienced, so I didn't realise how difficult making short movies would be. So I would write these epic, intricate, sweeping, complex stories. Then I would shoot the first few frames and I would find that I couldn't actually shoot what I had envisioned. I had to improvise. Stay sharp, keep moving.

One of the short movies I made as a student was called The Beast. It was about a deformed man who could control the essence inside water. So he could control water and through water, could control anything that used water. I even at one point had him cause a tsunami filled with razor blades. Imaginative, yes. Practical, no. I had one shot where I was going to drench my two flatmates and throw a bucket of razor blades at them. They weren't too keen and I was pretty sure it wouldn't show up properly on camera - even when I swapped the razor blades for pieces of silver-painted bits of cardboard and promised to throw the water in front of them, instead of over them. This looked even worse than my original intentions would have.

The one really nice thing about this movie was a scene that wasn't all that important in the script. It was a scene where the title character smoked a joint in his hut and went a little nuts, excited by his new-found powers. The first thing that went right was the lighting. I wanted to use natural light and I found a dirty laundry at my mate's flat, behind their house. It was cramped and dimly lit on a hot Summer day, it was perfect. I took the scene from the script and wrote a shooting script to describe the visual storytelling frame by frame, moving the camera with the plot.

The cramped nature of the location stunted the camera moves, and this restriction was a catalyst for my creativity. I prepared the "joint" for the actor and his delight fed the scene. There wasn't much for the actor to do. It was one beat in many frames. The only weakness of the scene was the wig I gave him to wear, because I wanted the Beast to have long, shaggy hair.

I ended up deleting this scene accidentally, so it's gone forever. But I watched it on a television screen after we finished editing the film together. Other students complimented me on the lighting and the professional look of the scene. I hope to find a similar flash of inspiration/competency in filmmaking again some day.

The Poltergeist Movie: Part Two (Principal Photography)

On day one of the shoot, our SFX guy had done some research and had found out that cooked pumpkin-mush mixed with red food colouring can give the effect of blood and guts. We mixed the red food colouring with some blue, to darken it. I cooked a pumpkin, and on set we separated the mash - this was a little tricky. I had boiled the pumpkin myself and it was still a bit hard.

We ended up with some gross looking stuff that was going to be a projectile shot out from the drain pipe of the sink. We couldn't take the sink apart to perform this effect, so we relied on tricky camera angles. There were other sequences we needed to shoot that day as well. And we had run out of actors. I asked my flatmate to fill the void, mainly because I felt that anyone can act in a pinch. Not because I thought he was particularly dramatic or photogenic - neither of which he was.

I soon discovered just how difficult it is to try and force a square peg into an acting opening. He couldn't remember his one short line. He couldn't take direction. He couldn't follow simple suggestions. Even when wound up, he refused to use his emotion for the performance, when the camera was on. He was the worst actor I've ever worked with, and I wasn't even directing, so mine was a fairly objective opinion.

However, we ended up with some semi-usable footage. To fill the space of the inciting incident, the catalyst responsible for bringing forth the poltergeist (not that having one was mandatory) - we decided to use a seance. Our SFX guy built a Ouija board. It actually looked pretty good.

When we met again at the second set to shoot the first few scenes leading up to the seance, I had brought with me some extra equipment. A skateboard for a tracking shot. And a floodlight, for dramatic lighting.

We shot the sequence where one of the characters wakes up, gets out of bed and interacts with the flatmates, just to set the calm of the scene opening. At the end of a day's shooting we had some pretty half-decent footage. However, when I checked the light I realised that, having set it up on the floor, the heat of the light had burned a hole in the carpet. I apologised to the location's inhabitants and we quickly escaped. Had I to work with those lights again, I would purchase some rigging to stand the light off the floor.

The Poltergeist Movie: Part One (script development)

Somewhere in the middle of 2010, I put an advert on the New Zealand Art and Creative Website called The Big Idea - my advert described an opportunity to make a short movie without a budget - my ad explicitly stated that I had a mini digital video camera (not professional standard, but not shoddy - Canon MVX100i) and that I valued keenness over experience - and that due to there being no budget, no one was getting paid. There were ten or so responses to the advert. When I held a meeting to discuss the project, about nine people showed up.

I had never run a meeting before, so I was making it up as I went along. I stated as much and when asked whether there was a script and what the script would be about, my response was that no, I specifically had decided not to write a script for the project. All of my big ideas for movies were committed to major projects - novels and such. I was interested in overseeing the script process, but I wanted to get ideas for what to shoot from the team. This was to be a somewhat democratic process.

Four people showed up to the second meeting - this was my crew.

At first, most people hung back from the conversation, unsure if any contribution might be bullied down and ignored. But eventually, after a few beers, people began to open up. I was pushing the attitude that the subject and premise of the movie really didn't matter. It would all come down to the script and the implementation. It never matters what the movie is about, or what your story's starting point is. This seemed to take the pressure off coming up with ideas and people started contributing.

The biggest push was for some kind of suspense movie with - for example an alien invasion. Keeping in mind that we had no budget, we had a few goes at trying to figure out how we might shoot something like that, without it looking lame. We agreed the best way to do any movie of that kind would be by showing as little of the "creature" as possible as in Ridley Scott's Alien.

Eventually it was decided that there was no way to make a realistic alien on a zero budget, so I had the idea of making the creature a poltergeist, instead of an alien. And we began to turn over ideas about how we could shoot a poltergeist and what might happen in the film. After the meeting I secluded myself for a few weeks, writing an eight-page script - a classmate of mine who was at the meeting, and myself were taking it in turns to write the script for the shorts we were going to make. It was my turn, and every couple of days, I emailed a copy of the script in progress to everybody who was involved in this project.

I took notes and suggestions on board and the girl who was keen to direct the movie found us some actors, while one of the guys did some SFX research so we could have some cool things happen in the story. - As it wasn't going to be a dialogue movie and short films have to engage the audience in some way, in a short time. Usually there isn't much opportunity for a complex plot.

1986-1999

The concept behind The Thing Under the Bed (1986) was that there was a monster under the bed and he wanted to consume the living. I was four. I was also the writer, director and director of photography for this, my first short movie. My sister was the star, as the monster's victim. I also played the monster. This was the beginning of a tradition of my sister appearing in my movies, which would continue until she left the movie business in 2001. There was no script for my first short.

My attitude to filmmaking was simply a fascination and incorruptible, unswerving, immovable desire to tell stories. I picked up the camera - to which the depth of my knowledge was simply pick it up and point it at the thing and press the button. I told people what to do, which I liked. Later I would get cumulatively frustrated by people not doing what they're told. I eventually decided that if people were paid, they would be obligated to do what I say - therefore I planned the ways that were available to me, to raise the eleven thousand dollars to make my first professional grade short movie.

I would get a job, finish my novel and hope to sell it, and leverage my old web design paid gigs into a computer game programming job via learning Python from books. Somehow I would earn and save that money and I would make my movie.

In high school (my second attempt at sixth form/NCEA 2) when I was making my first student short movie - the epic horror parody entitled The Giant Satanic Potato and the Killer Apes from Hell (1999)- it has changed titles many times. These days I just refer to it as Demo Reel 1. There was a scene where a white trash stalker/rapist creeps outside the house of a young blonde teen. He is supposed to masturbate while watching her through the window. With a spark of inspiration, I filled a water bottle with milk, so that the actor could cum on the wall at the moment of climax. Unfortunately, it was a white wall, so the effect was not as it could have been.