Film

www.andrewhall.org

Radcliffe Camera this winter

/ Andrew Hall

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Since it has been a few months since our last update here, I thought I would use the opportunity to add a personal post, and take stock of all the changes and new projects that 2016 has brought. The most significant step in the growth of Radcliffe Camera Pictures has been my move to London, and I’m looking forward to the opportunities the city has to offer – including the opportunity to reconnect with old teammates such as Ashley Hughes (Tantamount to Treason, Red Ribbon, James), who (proving that it is indeed a small world) now lives not far from my new place.

On the subject of previous colleagues, it was nice to hear of the successes of my former Revue colleagues Barney Fishwick and Will Hislop this year, in their reincarnation as The Giants. Their shows in Edinburgh and London went down very well, and I look forward to catching up with them soon. I also recently heard that Luke Howarth (director of Othello) is involved in new-writing theatre project In the Pink at Hoxton’s The Courtyard this winter under the direction of Emma Brand (Plenty), which is incredibly exciting news.

In terms of film projects on the cards, many will have seen The Night Manager (and if you haven’t, you should), which has inspired a return to ideas for Tantamount to Treason. The relaunch of this project has been in the pipeline for a long time – it is something which we keep coming back to as a group, but which is tough to take the plunge on. If we do move forward on a web-series or longer film in the spring, it will take all the lessons learned from previous productions (including the original short film) to put together a great project. We are starting to feel ready to return to the drafting board to move the new script forward. Certainly the world of Tantamount needs to grow in size, mostly internally: there are characters to be fleshed out and new relationships to be highlighted. The key challenge will be in avoiding clichés, which arise most often when writers tack on extra material as nothing more than an expansion of the plot. We’re very keen to be pressing ahead on this front soon as part of our expansion into action dramas. In other genres, we are looking at two potential novel adaptations for the end of 2017, and possible travel-based filmmaking over the summer and into the autumn.

We are also excited to be announcing a new series of Super 8 film projects for the spring: final meetings are being held this week, and more details will be published very soon.

Watch this space.

New Year celebrations

/ Andrew Hall

Jerusalem6

At the end of another year of theatre and film projects, New Year’s Eve seems a good time to step back at tally up the work done by the team throughout 2015.

Plenty
The first theatre project of the year, and the team’s last in Oxford’s 168-seat O’Reilly Theatre, was David Hare’s mesmerising Plenty, a tale of war and mental illness, female strength and the fight to repair broken homes. Directed by Luke Howarth – one of our guest writers in January – and with a stellar cast, the show was an all-round success and a bright start to 2015.

James
Featuring a tight schedule, a super-low budget and a cast all making their debut acting appearances, James was a triumph of filmmaking determination under the direction of Lily Taylor and starring Jake Palmer in the title role of a pre-heroic James Bond. Described in our posts as a project with ‘a fun attitude yet a serious agenda’, the film is accompanied by an original score from Tom Kinsella, and enjoyed a well-attended premiere screening at Keble College once the summer’s exams were over.

The Norman Conquests
In early summer, attention turned to a project hoping to transfer from Oxford’s 800-seat Playhouse to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe under the watchful eye of veteran director Griff Rees: an ambitious rotating production of Alan Ayckbourn’s Norman Conquests trilogy. I was glad to be able to provide advice on the transition – although sadly unable to produce for them up in Edinburgh. Seeing their marketing and production teams around Edinburgh was, however, a real treat.

The Oxford Revue’s Issues
Taking the Fringe’s thriving comedy sector by storm, The Oxford Revue’s show Issues provided an amazing opportunity to produce a big show up in Edinburgh. Investing large amounts of funding to secure accommodation, the impressive 180+ seat Assembly Studio Two venue, and all the associated expenses of maintaining a twelve-person comedy team up in the city for the summer, all paid dividends with sell-out audiences, excellent reviews, and wonderful successes too for the Revue’s other projects. After that success, the stage is set for another fantastic trip next year; look out for Revue president Jack Chisnall’s plans for the summer in a guest post soon.

Citric Acid
We recently heard technician-turned-playwright Mina Odile write about the challenges of ‘new-writing comedy’, but it was an exciting pleasure to put on Citric Acid at the BT Studio, selling out several nights and delivering cutting, intriguing and oftentimes immersive satire to audiences each night. Exploring the absurdism of postgraduate life in the trendier areas of London, a theme which must have resonated with a large number of student audience members, the show gave welcome variety to the theatre portfolios of the Hexagon/Commensal teammates involved, and was a successful launch of the new Koma Kino theatre company under director Josh Dolphin.

Guest posts
And in the past few weeks, we’ve already heard from four of our fantastic guest writers – Tom Kinsella, composer to James, central figures in the Commensal and Hexagon theatre teams Mina Odile and Alex Grew, and theatre photographer Ollie Robinson. Four more guests are still to come next month, including figures from theatre and film projects across the past year, and into the next. Keep an eye out for their posts in our Comment section.

2016
Looking forward, there are big projects on the horizon accompanying the move to London in a couple of weeks’ time. A dozen very short, no-budget films are proposed for the Radcliffe Camera Pictures portfolio over the first half of 2016, ranging in theme and style from period costume dramas to art-centric social experiments, Shakespeare adaptations to Woolf classics. On the writing side of things, progress begins with former Revue colleagues on two comedy screenplays for television, while the newly redrafted Tantamount to Treason web-series becomes the focus of a search for investment and a production team able to realise its potential. On the stage, initial enquiries continue on a major adaptation project – currently under wraps – in collaboration with Citric Acid playwright Alex Newton, hopefully set for London later this year.

As we look forward to this exciting news, all on the Commensal, Hexagon, Koma Kino and Radcliffe Camera teams wish you a very happy New Year!

Radcliffe Camera Pictures established

/ Andrew Hall

Radcam board

The production group behind James, Radcliffe Camera Pictures, becomes officially established today as papers are filed with Companies House to complete its registration. Although the theatre teams Commensal, Hexagon and Koma Kino – under whose umbrellas a half dozen recent plays operated – are both registered societies, this film-centred organisation becomes the first in our Creative Venture portfolio to be fully registered as a company.

From a commercial point of view, company registration brings a number of benefits, including easier access to insurance facilities, eligibility for a wider range of funding sources and grant opportunities, and a legal personality capable of protecting its staff and intellectual property. It also gives the chance for a fresh start from an organisational perspective, and producer Andrew Hall intends to be much clearer about divisions and sections within this new business, creating space for greater accountability, efficiency and results. An example is the company’s writing programme, which remains in character a working group of flexible membership, but can now set a clear agenda under the company umbrella, while RadCam pursues its own productions and development on alternative media projects without infringing on its writing staff.

Working groups are key to the new company structure and ethos, and although the overall brand is committed to a focus on film for the present, this structure also allows plenty of scope for continued support of theatre ventures, especially as the newly-created Koma Kino (Citric Acid) means the team retain a foothold in the Oxford theatre scene despite a central move to London. Within RadCam, groups are dedicated to new writing, television projects, film production and community ideas; each group has a rotating chairperson and a flexible staff, with funding applications made on behalf of each group by the central company. Since so much of the team’s current work can be undertaken remotely (rewriting Tantamount to Treason, Koma Kino plays in Oxford and new Revue projects) this system also allows for easy recruitment of new talent and regular rearrangement of personnel depending on shifting projects.

With four writing projects soon to be announced, a web-series, a short film and a major theatre project all on the company’s books for spring 2016, everyone at Radcliffe Camera Pictures is excited for the New Year.

Tantamount presses ahead

/ Andrew Hall

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Building on the world established in the original, Seattle True Independent Film Festival-selected short Tantamount To Treason has been a background project for Andrew Hall and his production team since the film’s debut in 2012. The original ten-page screenplay spawned an expansive concept for a web series of three 15-minute episodes, spanning continents and history as it explored the web of lies and difficult truths of the three main characters. Involvement and discussions with the cast, Richard Lott, Dom Nolan and Chris Winter, and DP-editor Ashley Hughes, have been ongoing while each pursues their own endeavours around the world in recent years.

Taking that screenplay, drafted shortly after the completion of the student short, the team are pleased to be working now with a reworked, redeveloped and largely rewritten plotline covering three longer episodes, proposals to re-shoot the original film – now treated as a pilot into the series – and a much wider array of characters. With the involvement of Radcliffe Camera Pictures for initial development in the New Year, original cast members Richard Lott and Dom Nolan are meeting writer Andrew Hall later this month for the first table reading of the screenplay, an essential part of the writing process in refining dialogue and the tone of each scene. Joining the team by video link from Australia is actor Chris Winter, a complexity appropriate to his character in the series: a shadowy foreign intelligence director.

It has yet to be confirmed whether the crew will remain similar to the original production, with discussions slated for January on whether Andrew would return to direct the project, the possible appointment of a London co-producer, and an expansion on the cinematography team to enable the production to shoot with multiple cameras. This latter development would offer a major boost to the scripting, which is set in a world littered with the visual language of Bourne director Paul Greengrass, and the style of Jon Cassar’s work on 24. Watch this space.

Introducing guest posts

/ Andrew Hall

plenty team

Ahead of some new announcements for our production company Radcliffe Camera Pictures, we have decided to move towards the New Year with a change to the regular news pieces on the website. Alongside updates on all of our current projects, we’re excited to have seven new guest posts from colleagues in theatre and film on issues relevant to the industry today, as well as the experiences and challenges they have encountered on recent productions. We have already heard from Tom Kinsella, composer for James, on the challenges of reinventing and adapting the incredible James Bond source material to create a fresh film soundtrack, and this series plans to focus on different aspects of the creative process too. Featuring seasoned theatre photographer Ollie Robinson, the writers of new stage comedy Citric Acid and crew members from film and theatre sets of recent years, we hope you’ll find these posts an interesting take on creative life. Among the first in the series will be Mina Odile, co-writer of Citric Acid and technical director/lighting designer on Endgame, Othello, Plenty, Jerusalem and ’Tis Pity, in a little over two weeks.

In the meantime, take a look at the rest of our Comment pieces here.

RadCam takes on Tantamount saga

/ Andrew Hall

Four years since student short film Tantamount to Treason began the filmmaking careers of Ashley Hughes (ARTHAUS) and Andrew Hall, inspiring a mentality that visual and narrative success was possible even without a budget or experienced cast, Radcliffe Camera Pictures (James) takes on the development of a potential web-series born from the Tantamount world. Charting the twisted paths of the three central characters through London, Moscow and New York, the three-part drama is currently undergoing a rewrite before the team is assembled to approach interested financial partners. The initial short was followed by collaborations on Dare I Say, Beauty and Acceptance, Red Ribbon | Blue Suit and James from the producer-DP duo, and all parties from the original Tantamount project are being contacted for their ideas on its future.

Take a look at the original trailer and short film, and watch this space for more.

James screens in Oxford

/ Andrew Hall

Quiet anticipation mixed with laughter and sunshine as the cast and crew of James met with invited friends in Keble College’s Newman Quad before the first screening of the short film last week, with debut screen performances for the entire cast. The 15 minute film was well-received, and the beautiful weather and setting made for a nice celebration to the end of the six-month process of film production alongside the team’s final examinations at Oxford.

You can find out more about the making of James here.

Scoring James

/ Andrew Hall

by JAMES composer, Tom Kinsella

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The James Bond Theme is probably the most famous piece of film music of all time. So, when Lily and Andrew asked me if I would write an original soundtrack for ‘James’ – by drawing on the rich musical language of the Bond legacy – I was absolutely terrified. The James Bond of Hollywood fame has an unforgettable sonority in our collective consciousness, but how would a young James Bond sound? As a corollary, the true challenge of this piece was in creating a soundscape that contained all the musical seeds of the James Bond series, but also remained truthful to Lily’s own vision of Bond, who appears youthful, inchoate, and at times, vulnerable (none of which are adjectives one would normally use to describe the womanizing 007).

To achieve this, I borrowed a range of tropes from John Barry (who, for those that don’t know, composed the music for eleven of the James Bond films between 1963–1987). And then, I manipulated them. Some of these tropes were obvious and irresistible – for example, utilizing a surf rock style guitar ­– and some were more technical; most of the harmony in the film is built around variations of the ‘James Bond Chord’, which, for all those music theory fanatics out there, consists of a minor triad with an added major 7th/9th.

For the opening sequence, I incorporated these features (amongst others), but veiled their presence by writing in a pop music idiom. Why? The Bond we observe in this film is a young, somewhat ordinary student who works in the library, goes to the pub and isn’t great at flirting – he’s definitely more Katy Perry than he is Prokofiev. By way of contrast, omens that point towards the future of James’ character, in addition to moments like the fight scene, gave me a chance to explore the darker, more visceral side of Bond’s music, and pay homage to more recent works, like Thomas Newman’s soundtrack for ‘Skyfall’.

Overall, my aim for the film was for its music to synthesize and flit between the old and the new – contemporary Bond, and his younger self. In a broader sense, I guess my attraction to Lily’s James is that he encompasses something we can all somehow relate to; he is a nascent character, transitioning between his teenage years and adulthood, yearning to find himself, through a prism of insecurity – yet all the while possessing a glimmer of his future self. I’ve tried my best for my composition to emulate this; to be honest, I’m still terrified. But after all, what would a Bond film be without a bit of tension, fear and a large dose of excitement?

Final stages on James

/ Andrew Hall

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Postproduction on James enters its final phase this week, following a very productive meeting with the project’s composer, Tom Kinsella, on Saturday. The directorial team have already set out their timetable for completion of the audio to the film – including several hundred sound effects, a fresh dialogue track and the original score – and are spending the next few days finding reference material for a soundscape to complement the allusions made to John Barry’s original Bond masterpiece.

Elsewhere on the production, final editorial notes on key pickup shots and the overall colour grade of the film await discussion with the team’s London-based editor Ashley Hughes. Two sets of posters – a teaser for the colleagues of the Keble College-based novice cast and a professional design for general release – go to print in just over a fortnight, as the group fits the final stages of the film around university examinations.

The first screening – and an accompanying party – is set for Wednesday 17th June.

Picture lock on James

/ Andrew Hall

James screenshot

After a second extended editing session with Ashley Hughes of ARTHAUS, the team are delighted to have reached picture lock on their edit of James, the forthcoming Oxford-based short tracing the early steps of one of English fiction’s greatest heroes. With director Lily Taylor close to confirming a composer for the project’s original score, and work beginning on the audio mix in the coming weeks, excitement is building amongst the members the dozen-strong team. Starring eight completely novice actors – including both leads – and with no budget to speak of, James is a triumph for advocates of the innovation needed for success in low-budget independent filmmaking.

A meeting to set a final screening date is scheduled for later this week – check back here for more news soon.