Progress...

I said at one point that if I didn't manage to keep up the production diaries for Jenny Ringo and the Cabaret from Hell it would most likely be because I've been busy working on the edit. I'm pleased to say that this has definitely been the case over the last couple of weeks.


As mentioned before I did have to change editors and at the time I worried that this might delay things even more, but luckily my old friend and frequent collaborator Ross Boyask stepped in to save the day and we've been working on the edit pretty solidly ever since. So far it's coming along really well and we're about a third of the way through. I'm not sure how realistic my end of April deadline is but it feels good to finally be doing something with it and to see it come together.


Also, Jenny Ringo and the Monkey's Paw will be screening as part of the Edge of the City Film Festival on Saturday the 28th of April. The full programme is here.

Friday the 13th...

When I saw Jenny Krueger of Memoirs of a Scream Queen was hosting a Friday the 13th blogfest...

...I thought 'Cool, I can write about how Friday the 13th Part III is my favourite film in the series even though it's not very good.'

I was going to talk about how the first time I saw the film it gave me nightmares because I was far far too young to be watching such things. Then I was going to talk about how the second time I saw it I was watching through the whole series with friends over the course of a few evenings (we only made it to Part 4) and that when watched shortly after seeing Parts 1 and 2, the third one doesn't really hold up. And then I would write about seeing Part 3 as it was meant to be seen, in 3D, and finally realising that it was actually a work of genius (well, not quite, but it remains the best use of 3D I've seen...ever).

So I planned it all out in my head and chuckled to myself as I imagined what an amazing blogging triumph this new post would be. And then I absent-mindedly did a search for Friday the 13th references in my blog just in case I had covered any of this before. 

It turned out I had. Right here.

Exactly the thing I was going to write had already been written, by me, a couple of years ago. I may have been drinking at the time.

Tangent alert - I would put this momentary memory loss down to getting old, but this is not the first time I've completely erased something I've written from memory. In my third year at university as part of a course on early journalism I decided to write about the coverage of Jack the Ripper in the Pall Mall Gazette. Then by chance I came across an essay I had written two years earlier on the same subject. Back then it was definitely down to drinking.

The thing is, I don't have much else to say about Friday the 13th.

I suppose I could talk about how I first became aware of the films through a C64 game my friend owned (much like my first experience of Nightmare on Elm Street). I don't really remember much about the game other than it mostly seemed to involve wandering around until Jason killed you, much like the plot of the films. Occasionally when you died you would be presented with the image of a head with a machete through it so we would spend hours playing the game trying to figure out how to make that happen. Now we are living in the future and I can find this image with a google search.

The internet has ruined everything.

But look! If you have an ten minutes free you can watch someone play through the whole game!

Which I have just done. I'm never getting those ten minutes back.

I suppose I could also talk about my friend Jason. It's not as tenuous as it sounds - the second time I met him my friend Jason was dressed up as Jason Voorhees for a Halloween party. He hadn't made much of an effort - he was just wearing a cheap hockey mask and telling everyone his name was Jason, as if that completed the costume much more than a boiler suit ever could have done.

Like my viewings of Friday the 13th Part III, I met Jason exactly 3 times (see how it all fits together?). The first time was on my very first night at university. I'd arrived a bit later than everyone else and when I went to register they'd run out of complimentary tickets to the freshers' party.

'It's okay' they said 'You'll get in anyway.'

In the afternoon I made friends with the people in my halls of residence (including future best man, monster-maker and writer of Jenny Ringo and the Cabaret from Hell, Geraint D'Arcy) and shared my predicament with them. They all had tickets to the party.

'It's okay' they said 'we'll get you in'.

I didn't get in.

So I went to the student bar instead and made friends with a chap called Jason who had also arrived too late to get a ticket to the party.

The second time we met was the aforementioned Halloween party.

The third time was on the very last night I was at university, in the post-grad bar. 'Remember me?' I said, 'We met on the first night we were here! And now here we are again, only now it's our last night!! How cool is that!?!?'

He said he did remember me, but then we didn't really have much to say to each other after that. We may have hugged. It was a bit awkward. We were both very drunk.

So that wasn't really very relevant to Friday the 13th at all. How about the time my wife Andrea and I discovered what would really happen to us in a real life slasher situation?

We were staying with our friend Julia in LA (check out her blog here) and she took us to Universal Studios sometime around Halloween. In the Texas Chainsaw Massacre maze I abandoned Andrea to Leatherface and ran to the end without her. That was quite bad.

But in the Friday the 13th maze, stalked by several frighteningly authentic Jasons, my cowardice reached new heights. I hid behind my wife. I may also have pushed her towards him a bit too.

Friday the 13th-type situation, I am actually the last person you want on your team. I would be the annoying character that you really hope dies soon and in the most horrible way possible. I would be like the irritating prankster guy in Friday 13th Part III. Only more irritating.

See how it all comes back to Friday 13th Part III in the end?

So what have we learnt from all this? That I'm an alcoholic coward with occasional memory loss and that I spent too much of my youth trying to get a game to show me a picture of a man with a machete in his head.

Next time I decide to write about something I've already written about I think I'll just repost the original.

Actually, there is one more thing! Friday the 13th directly inspired a sequence in the film I'm currently working on, Jenny Ringo and the Cabaret from Hell. I don't want to give a way too much right now, but here is photographic evidence...

Check out the Jenny Ringo website for more info.

And if you enjoyed this nonsense, it might be worth checking out what other bloggers have written about Friday the 13th by clicking the links at the bottom of this page.

I am still here...

...and I'm aware it's been like years since I posted anything. But that's okay! Because my amazing and incredibly intelligent wife has been holding the fort with this rather brilliant post over on her blog.

I haven't had time for blogging, I've been busy doing important stuff like writing! And organising MovieBar!! And playing Mass Effect 3!!!

To be fair I was holding back the diaries in anticipation of some awesome production photos. On this shoot we were lucky enough to have a professional photographer on set most days so in theory there should be awesome production photos. But being a professional, our photographer is too busy with paid work to get the photos finished so I may have to wait a while yet. This seems to be the story of my life when it comes to filmmaking.

In other post-production news I've had to change editors as the editor I was using is too busy. See what I mean?

So, one day I promise there will be awesome photos. And some day after that there will be an actual film. For now I will continue the production diaries without awesome photos and I'll update you on what little news there is about the post-production. 

For now that news is limited to this -

Brother Pete finished the first animated sequence for the film. It is the most amazing animated sequence ever.

If you want to see some other awesome animated sequences, check out Pete's YouTube channel or you could check out his excellent work on Jenny Ringo and the Monkey's Paw, which you can watch right now by going to our website and signing up to our mailing list.

Listen to me ramble...

I was on the Filmsploitation podcast last week! It's Episode 15, you can get it on iTunes here. I talked about The Sentinel a lot and I probably rambled about some other film-related stuff too. I think I managed to plug Jenny Ringo a couple of times, mostly thanks to reminders from Phil.

I will continue my production diaries soon, I promise, it's just I've actually had to do some writing this week. Proper writing like what I used to do when I started this blog! I've been wearing the writing hat and everything!!!

Dead Hooker in a Trunk...

When I was reading about Women in Horror Month for a post I wrote a couple of weeks ago I realised that despite supporting the sentiment, I'd never actually seen a horror film directed by a woman...until I remembered Near Dark, Ravenous, Pet Sematary, The Being, Freddy's Dead, The Howling 6 and American Psycho. So I'll amend my previous statement to say I had yet to see any of the films by the recent wave of indie women horror directors as listed here. 

I went for Dead Hooker in a Trunk based on the fact that it has a UK DVD release making it the easiest for me to get hold of. And now I'm a little bit in love with it.

I should start this with a warning. Dead Hooker in a Trunk is one of those films that needs you to meet it halfway. Clearly filmed on no budget at all, it's often not pretty to look at and is a bit rough around the edges. You won't hear any complaints from me as the same can definitely be said about the no-budget feature I wrote but when the film started I did have that sinking 'this might be a bit of hard work' feeling. It didn't last.

The film follows a group of friends on a mission to figure out how a dead hooker ended up in their trunk and losing various body parts along the way. It's kind of Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia meets Bad Taste.

About halfway through there's a scene in which one of the characters has her arm ripped off by a passing truck and her friend marches over to the driver, punches him in the head and retrieves the severed arm all in one shot. It was at this point I realised I was really enjoying myself and I began to understand why the film has already built itself a formidable cult following. As well as being completely unlike anything else you will ever see it's also a lot of fun, and that's the key. It feels like it was fun to make, the characters are fun to hang out with and it never takes itself too seriously (except for a really long murder scene towards the end which feels a bit out of place).

There is a bit of a problem with the writing, in that I felt all the of the characters could walk away from the situation at any time with no repercussions. Sure, there was a mystery to be solved and killer on the loose, but was it really up to them to solve it? Would anything have happened to them if they hadn't? At one point the characters actually say something to the effect of 'let's go home and forget about it for a while' which is narrative suicide - if the characters are in no hurry to move the story along then why should I care what happens? At the same time this is balanced with a kind of Easy Rider  almost-arthouse 'let's just hang out with these guys and see what happens' attitude which does a great job at covering up the holes in the plot. 

And then the film ends on a rather touching, uplifting note that made me forget its flaws and rediscover a long-forgotten love for humanity. This is a film about friendship and the things we are prepared to do for the people we like. It is the loudest, bloodiest, craziest feelgood film I've ever seen, and for that it should be applauded.

Also, if this one is anything to go by, Jen and Sylvia Soska's next film is going to be something really special...

Jenny Ringo and the Cabaret from Hell - Production Day 2...

Here, finally, is my production diary for Day 2 on Jenny Ringo and the Cabaret from Hell.

Yes, it may take me until this time next year to finish blogging about the production of the film at this rate, but there has been important stuff to do like watching through all the footage and working on the script for Jenny Ringo 3...

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Day 2 should have been easy. We were filming in our flat so we didn't have to go anywhere and all the equipment was already there. The scenes were all pretty straightforward dialogue scenes and most of them took place in the lounge so once we'd set up the lights that should have been it for most of the day. I hadn't covered these scenes in the rehearsals because this was Jenny and Gavin in their natural habitat and I knew Rosie and Lukas would get the performances spot on first time (which they did).

It should have been simple.

It didn't quite work out that way for a couple of reasons.

Reason 1) Long dialogue scenes.

By long I mean one page, a page and a half at most. In film terms this is long. Actually that's not true in all cases, but in the films I want to make one page is a long scene. Whether people liked Jenny Ringo and the Monkey's Paw or not most people have commented on the fact that it moves along at a good pace and doesn't feel 25 minutes long. In fact the only scenes that seem to drag are those without dialogue, which are on the whole shorter than the dialogue scenes.

I am making a point of this because I watch a lot of short films and a lot of them have overlong scenes. Some are mostly just one really overlong scene. And most of the time they really don't need to be that long.

So if a scene does happen to be over a page long and I've cut out everything I can then I'll look for ways to break it up. The same principle applies to filming the scenes.

The longest scene we shot on Day 2 involved Jenny and Gavin sitting on a sofa. It was written in the script that at an appropriate moment Gavin stands up. What isn't written is what Jenny does, but obviously she stands up too as otherwise it looks weird. This is all good as it gives an otherwise static scene a bit of movement. However, it doubles the shot list. In this case there were 3 basic shots we needed to make the scene work - a 2shot with both characters in the frame and a close up of each of them. But because they changed positions halfway through the scene we can't film the whole thing in one go. So we have to do three more shots for the new position. Each new shot involves tweaking the lighting, working out the camera position and sometimes changing the positions of the actors. Then you have to consider all the various things that can go wrong with a take. And then at the end of the scene they change positions again.

This all takes quite a long time, much longer than the hour we had allowed for filming each scene.

I recently watched Troll 2, which is famous for being the worst film ever made...

(I have actually seen worse. A lot worse. And that's probably not a good thing)

In Troll 2 all the major dialogue scenes seem to have been shot on Steadicam, so the camera just moves around to focus on whoever is talking. There are a surprising number of single-shot scenes in Troll 2 and I can understand why. It must have been way quicker. It doesn't look great and doesn't allow you to do much with the lighting other that made sure it's all really well lit so everything stays in focus the whole time, but it definitely must have been quicker.

Yes, I am taking hints from Troll 2 and should probably be banned from filmmaking forever now.

Reason 2) The tidying spell

So in this film Jenny uses magic to tidy up her flat. This is more exciting than it sounds, I promise - there are high stakes and unexpected consequences! The real issue is that 'Jenny casts a tidying spell' looks fine in the script but isn't so easy to pull off in reality. In my head it looked like Mickey Mouse and the dancing brooms (or Jay Baruchel and the dancing brooms). In real life...we hadn't really planned how to do it. For the last film we did effects tests for all this stuff, like this...



This time for some reason I decided we'd just figure out the tidying on the day. So we decided to do it by locking off the camera then taking still frames of a messy table while removing items one at a time. I was standing behind the camera telling the crew what to remove next, calling out things like 'bowl!' or 'ashtray!' in what soon started to feel like some kind of educational naming game. My initial plan was to do the same for different areas of the room, but given we were already behind I decided to just do the table which will hopefully be enough to show what is happening. So it was a bit time consuming but not all that tricky in the end, unlike the scene we were to shoot on Tuesday which was a lot more complicated.

There were two scenes left to shoot in our lounge but we were losing the light from outside the windows and we had another scene to shoot upstairs where Pete and Charlotte had been turning our bedroom into one of the dressing rooms in the Cabaret from Hell.

So I decided to move the two lounge scenes to another day. They weren't long scenes, and it wasn't a massive problem, but it meant that on Day 2 we were officially behind schedule, and that worried me a bit. In fact, from Day 2 onwards I would be constantly checking the time and stressing about being behind schedule. I'd lost some of the confidence I found on the first day and suddenly it started to feel like the whole thing might pose more of a challenge than I first thought. Friday seemed like a long way off...

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No idea what all this is about? Here's the trailer for the first film...



Sign up to our mailing list at www.jennyringo.com to see film and get awesome updates on how we're doing with the sequel!

Women in Horror Month: Why Jenny Ringo is not a feminist...

Women in Horror Month is an online event that happens every February in which a variety of bloggers, filmmakers and creative types get together to promote women working in the horror industry. Despite neither being a woman nor technically ‘working’ in the horror film industry I thought I’d try to write something for Women in Horror Month this year anyway, because of Jenny Ringo.

On the off chance this is the first time you’ve come across this blog, Jenny Ringo is a witch who lives with her slacker flatmate Gavin and can be seen getting into all kinds of supernatural hijinks in the film Jenny Ringo and the Monkey’s Paw…





…and the forthcoming Jenny Ringo and the Cabaret from Hell which I shot the week before last (sign up to our mailing list at www.jennyringo.com to see the first film in full and to follow our progress on the second one!)

Jenny Ringo is a woman,  so that totally gives me the right to promote my short films even more than I am doing already by talking about her in the context of Women in Horror Month! But what to write about? Do I write about how she’s a strong female character in the vein of Sarah Connor or Lara Croft? Do I write about how my films are empowering for women because Jenny kicks supernatural ass? Do I write about how Jenny Ringo deals with gender issues in a radical and ultra-feminist way?

No.

Because none of those things are true.

I wrote Jenny Ringo’s first cinematic adventure when I was at university. It was a feature in which Jenny was a photographer working for a small town newspaper (like the one where I’d done work experience as a kid) who uncovered a conspiracy involving angels and magic and cool stuff like that. And I thought it was the best thing I had ever written. I was so enthusiastic about it that I handed in my outline six months early in the hope of getting some advance notes from my tutor. My tutor tore it to shreds. It came back covered in red ink with really furious notes like ‘You need to get a better understanding of a woman’s agenda if you’re going to write female characters!’

I was devastated and scrapped the whole idea. I still wrote a Jenny Ringo feature in the end, but rather than the supernatural conspiracy adventure I’d spent three years planning I turned it into a comedy. I came up with the story about a week before I was supposed to start writing it. My tutor still hated it, but luckily for me there was an external examiner assessing the scripts too and he loved it (the start of a love-it-or-hate-it trend which seems to have continued with the short films). I will come back to this later.

The real reason I am not about to declare that Jenny Ringo is totally empowering for women is that I am not Zack Snyder. Yes, I am about to alienate the women reading this even more by defending Sucker Punch.

Zack Snyder’s big mistake with Sucker Punch wasn’t making a film that many regard as being horribly misogynist. As Mark Kermode said when he reviewed the film (as seen here) getting angry about the sexual politics in Sucker Punch is doing it a service it does not deserve.  Basically, to care about the sexual politics in the film you have to be involved in the film itself, and Sucker Punch has so many other problems stopping you getting involved that if you’ve cut through all that and got to the dodgy gender politics then you’re missing a whole bunch of much bigger issues with the story. I am aware that I said ‘basically’ and then explained it in a much more complicated way than Dr. K did.

The problem is, people still got angry about it. But what’s interesting is that the people who seemed most pissed off by all this were men.  I’ll get to this later.

The real issue with the representation of women in Sucker Punch is to do with the fact that the film presents a group of female characters that seem to have walked straight out of a 70s exploitation film but then tries to pass them off as somehow empowering examples of women being awesome. To be fair to Zack Snyder, he never stated that this was his direct intention. What he actually said was things like this…

'I really don’t look at it like, ‘Oh, I’m going to make a female empowerment film.’ I just thought that the girls are awesome, and they can do whatever they want. I can only make it from my perspective, and if the goal of the film was to make a female empowerment film, then that’s absolutely debatable whether or not a man is the right choice for that. But the goal of the film is to tell an artistic story that is not bound by reality or anything like that, and if it happens to be at the end that girls feel like hey, I feel like I’m free to be strong in my life, then I don’t know.'

Which isn’t that different from saying ‘Oh, I'm going to make a female empowerment film.’

There is one huge problem with this whole debate. The target audience for Sucker Punch was not disillusioned women, it was teenage boys.

I don’t know any women who went to see Sucker Punch through choice. Those I do know who saw it did so because their boyfriend/husband convinced them it would be good because Zack Snyder did an okay job with Watchmen and made one of the few remakes that doesn't suck with Dawn of the Dead. I know some feminist bloggers went to see it, but would they have bothered if the gender politics issue hadn’t come up in such a public way? And here’s why I'm making a point of this…

In terms of dubious gender politics Sucker Punch is no worse than 90% of Hollywood’s mainstream output.

If you want to get angry about the represenation of women in popular culture, Sucker Punch is not the place to start. Which is why it perplexes me that so many men seemed to be angrily accusing it of misogyny when it was released. Have you seen films before? Any actual films? They’re all like that!!!

Then I realise that the men who complain about the misogyny in Sucker Punch are mostly just trying to get laid. It’s a statement that says, ‘Listen, I totally understand women’s issues, and do not approve women fighting robots in their underwear, despite the fact that most of my DVD collection looks like that.’

The point of all this is that I’m not about to try to get you to watch Jenny Ringo and the Monkey's Paw on the basis that it is a female empowerment film, because I am fully aware that it isn’t. I didn’t create Jenny Ringo because I was pissed off at the lack of strong female characters in popular culture. I created Jenny Ringo because I wanted to be John Constantine...

I didn’t want female empowerment in my life back then, I wanted northern empowerment. Constantine was from Liverpool, just an hours drive from Stoke-on-Trent which is where I’m from. He was super-cool and could do magic and despite being a bit of a fuck-up always managed to talk his way out of trouble at the end of the day. I couldn’t do magic, was not at all cool and struggled with the very basics of human interaction most of the time. So I decided to create a John Constantine-esque character to make myself feel better about not being cool and not being good at magic. But to disguise the fact that I was a) essentially stealing a DC character and b) using that character to deal with my real life issues I decided to switch genders. I took the name from a character I used in an old short story, a female version of Johnny Ringo from the Clanton gang in Gunfight at the O.K. Corral.

And that was how Jenny Ringo started.

After the first story Jenny stopped being a rip-off of John Constantine, stopped using magic and essentially became an angry version of me. I’d get annoyed about something in real life and then I’d put it into a Jenny Ringo story. After I wrote one about Jenny getting dumped by a guy (after I’d been dumped by a girl) which featured no magic or supernatural hijinks at all I realised I was basically just writing a diary so I stopped.

Until I started the final project for my MA in Scriptwriting and went back to that first story, which is where we came in.

The Jenny I write now has definitely evolved from the Jenny I wrote then. I can’t claim to understand a 'woman’s agenda' anymore now than I did then, but I know for sure that a few of the women I’ve known over the years have found their way into her character. There’s definitely a bit of my wife in there, and Rosie who plays her in the films has brought a lot of her personality to the character too. But if there was a Jenny Ringo pie-chart I’d say the overwhelming percentage of what makes up the character comes from me, and that I probably do still have a very male agenda even if I don’t really know what that means.

The best example of this is the script for Jenny Ringo and the Cabaret from Hell which I did not write, although I did in the end twist the story into one which directly relates to how I’m feeling about life right now. So even when she’s written by someone else, Jenny Ringo is still me at the end of the day.

All this is a very long-winded way of saying that despite the fact that the majority of my output is about a female character in a horror film I don’t have anything to contribute to Women in Horror Month.

Except this.

The thing I find most frustrating about any discussion of gender politics in film is that people are very quick to point the finger at films like Sucker Punch and very rarely celebrate the work of women filmmakers who are making films right now. A couple of years ago, for example, I had a couple of hours to kill before a meeting in the evening and went to see Nicole Holefcenor’s Please Give, which I really enjoyed. And in the cinema at the time were me and one other guy. A film directed by a woman that is about women and probably has a good understanding of a woman’s agenda (I wouldn’t know) gets a major cinema release and at a prime evening timeslot is watched by two men.

This is why Women in Horror Month is important because, as a quick look at their blog will demonstrate, there are lots of women involved in making horror films. And as a virtue of making the Jenny Ringo films I’m married to one of them.

My wife Andrea produced both films, and by produced I mean she went above and beyond what that role would usually entail. If the organisation of these projects had been left to me they would not have happened. Or, like my student films, they would have happened but only at the last minute and they would have turned out badly. I would not have been able to make either of these films without her onboard, so if you really want to support Women in Horror I suggest you stop reading this and follow Andrea's blog and read what an actual woman (and an actual feminist) has to say about making horror films.

And also sign up to our mailing list at www.jennyringo.com because that will make me happy.