JakeTheMovie.com

Leighton Cardno on the hit TV show 'Go Girls'

Fri, 30 Apr 2010 14:11:00 +1200

Congratulations to JAKE's Leighton Cardno who appeared in TV2's Go Girls last night! Look out for his recurring character 'Leo' throughout the rest of season two!

Go Girls plays every Thursday at 8.30pm.

Making JAKE, Part 4: The Birth of Hybrid

Thu, 08 Apr 2010 10:32:00 +1200

While I started work on a second go at a first bash of JAKE, concurrently, other events were brewing.

Every year, between April and June, the V 48Hours competition rolls around. I got involved with some other South Seas students when I first came to New Zealand in 2004, and through some streak of blind luck, our entry, BURNS AND McCLOUD: STREET SENSE, the story of a cop and a toaster who is also a cop, came in 2nd place over all.

We went on from that success to do ... well, not much of anything, really. A couple fake commercials, and that was about it. And year after year, a roughly similar story would unfurl. How was it that it was so easy to mobilize people to spend money to make a film that they didn't even have control over all the elements of for V48Hours, yet so difficult to organize people outside of that scenario?

Thankfully, there were a few people who listened to my incessant complaining about this scenario and urged me to work towards something. The first was my flatmate, Heath King, who took part first in 2006 and slowly became obsessed with gear for controlling camera motion. Heath is - unlike me - an insanely practical person who can build almost anything. And so we started mumbling about jib arms, dollies, cranes, steadicams.

And then Alastair Tye Samson, who I went to South Seas with in 2004 and had spent much of his subsequent time in Wellington, returned to Auckland. And having invested a lot of his time into a team in Wellington (Hydra Motion Pictures - who had also had success in the V48Hours competition with their short film 16 BULLETS), he was also looking for film making collaborators up here. It was this combination, the Hydra and the Squirrel, that suggested to Al the name Hybrid Motion Pictures.

(This combination is immortalized, in both an endearing and grotesque fashion, in our ID animation, by Lucas Brooking, which can be seen here.)

All this was around the time things were gearing up for the 2008 V48Hours, and so a critical mass was reached for a new team. But we decided, from the start, to have a different approach. First of all, it wasn't just about 48Hours. It was about making films with friends because it's what we love to do. Second of all, it was about treating filmmaking like rock bands treat band practice.

That may seem like a bizarre analogy, but bear with me. A band, by and large, doesn't sit around for a year, then get together one weekend and record an album without practicing. A band practice where nothing happens other than running through a couple songs and jamming on some ideas that don't amount to much isn't intrinsically considered a failure. The sheer act of playing together is reward in and of itself, and experimenting with new ideas is a way of breeding creativity that can manifest itself in different and important ways.

So: Hybrid Sundays were born. Pick up a camera, choose something to experiment with, and go. The first one was to experiment with Heath's brand new jib arm. Whip up a narrative involving a corpse and a gun, and good to go! Following weekends had similarly slight (and bloody) storylines, none of which will win any awards.

Which was not even remotely the point. The point was: we were making short film. Without waiting around for somebody to give us permission or money. And that, in and of itself, is good.

Making JAKE, Part 3: Finding The Foundations

Thu, 25 Mar 2010 15:49:00 +1300

There's a book by Anne Lamott, one of the best books on writing I've ever read, called BIRD BY BIRD. One of her key tips? "Shitty First Drafts". Don't worry about it being great - just bang it out. Is it shitty? That's fine. At least you've got something to work with.

This was great advice when I wrote my first screenplay, and second, and third. When you're starting out - hell, even now- there's nothing like the sheer giddy feeling of completion of 80-110 correctly formatted pages that could be a movie. I know that finishing the first draft of JAKE was one of the most fulfilling, satisfying moments of the entire process.

But I am getting very far ahead of myself. The problem with this method, for my brain, is that the result is quite messy, and re-organizing it structurally is pretty difficult for me. I don't find changing narrative structure difficult when I'm working with material in an editing suite, moving footage from one place to another to restructure things, but when I'm editing a 100-page script, making changes to reset and move the structure is relatively hard for me.

A disciplined, organized writer would systematically approach the structural issues, dissect them, and proceed accordingly. At least, I suppose that is what they would do. As I am not one, I did what I know how to do - put the problems in the back of my brain and think about them when I wasn't thinking of anything else, or bore friends with discussions about them.

As mentioned last time, the problem I was having was this: how do you make a movie about a person who is so unlikable that they have been recast in their own life and make them the protagonist without alienating the audience?

Like any problem, there are usually a couple fundamental underlying assumptions, and this one has a couple. And questioning those assumptions is a good way to find solutions to seemingly intractable problems. The first assumption is that alienating the audience is a bad thing. Now, I definitely don't always feel that way - some of my favorite movies are antagonistic towards the audience, from HOLY MOUNTAIN to CACHE, from CLEAN SHAVEN to LAST YEAR IN MARIENBAD. But this wasn't what I wanted to do here - I wanted to follow the emotional journey of somebody who'd been recast.

And then I found, accidentally, the other assumption. I don't remember how, but one day I realized what I'd been assuming - that somebody would have to be unlikable to be recast.

What if he wasn't THAT unlikable?

What if it wasn't that everyone was happy to have him replaced, but rather just didn't care much? Or didn't notice?

And in my brain, things started to unlock, and I started to have a dim idea of where, finally, this concept was going, and how it was going to get there.

First Jake Teaser Trailer Online!

Sun, 21 Mar 2010 00:33:00 +1300

We're very pleased to announce that our first full teaser trailer is now online! If you haven't already, check it out above - you can even watch it in high definition by clicking on the "HD On" button in the upper right hand corner.

Making JAKE, Part 2: Scriptwriting (Take 1)

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 11:00:00 +1300

This is the second in a series of short articles about the process of writing and directing JAKE, by Doug Dillaman.

I don't keep a diary, but I have a document on my laptop that was last modified in September 2007, which is when I must have given up on my first attempt at writing JAKE. It's not a very impressive document - about a page and a half, giving varying details on the first 11 scenes. I must have revised it a couple times, because I have a "Scene 3.5" nestled in there.

My writing process is not particularly systematic. It involves a lot of vague notes, long walks, and slowly plotting out things in my head until I can see the first third of the movie and the end. Once I have that, I'm normally ready to start writing. Historically, I've literally started writing the script at that point, just starting at page 1 without an outline and working my way forward, watching the movie in my head, almost literally transcribing it. Inevitably, I find that there's scenes that I'm missing, and so they work in, and then the characters or elements I've introduced there start changing the story in an organic way as I go. I'll write til I'm not sure what's supposed to happen next, walk away, then get back to it. Sometimes in a matter of an hour, sometimes days or weeks.

As I recall, this time I thought I'd try something different, and map the story out scene by scene before writing the script. I say "different" as if it's novel, even though outlining is something every writer is supposed to do before they write. But it was novel.

One of the interesting discoveries I made doing this is that you can see a lot more of the story in one gulp than you can see when you're writing a script. A quick look at the page and you don't see 45 seconds, you see 5 to 10 minutes. And the more I looked at the page, the less I liked it.

The problem was this: how do you make a character that is undesirable enough that somebody would want to recast that character with a different actor, without making that character so unlikeable that you don't want to spend time with him?

Now, I'm definitely not somebody who thinks that every movie has to have a conventionally likable protagonist. But there has to be some reason that you want to spend 90-150 minutes in a dark room with them. And I knew I didn't want to spend even five minutes with "Jacob McWorthington", as he was named then.

And so I put JAKE aside for a few months, not sure what to do with this confusing mess of an idea I'd created.

Jake's lead actress Anoushka Klaus on Shortland Street tonight

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 15:01:00 +1300

We're proud to announce that Jake's lead actress, Anoushka Klaus, is making her Shortland Street debut on TV2 tonight, playing a recurring role as nurse Frankie Hull. Tune in at 7pm!

Making JAKE, Part 1: The Idea.

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 12:26:00 +1300

This is the first in a series of short articles about the process of writing and directing JAKE, by Doug Dillaman.

Everything starts somewhere, and JAKE, the sixth feature film script I've written and the first one that I've directed, came from the combination of two ideas which I had near simultaneously.

The first: Sometime in 2007 - I think it was June - I was not having a particularly good day, and was in a bad mood, and as I laid in bed that night, exhausted, I thought about the elements of my life, and as I considered them, I realized that all the raw material that was there - the people I knew, the family that believed in me, the job I had, and so on - was a good foundation. And that perhaps the problem, my unhappiness, was not with the elements of my life but what I was doing with them, and that perhaps somebody else, if given the opportunity, would do a much better job.

The second: Maybe that night, or the night before, or the night after, again, lying in bed, I thought about Jake Gyllenhaal. Why? I have no idea. I had seen ZODIAC recently, and he was on the cover of terrible magazines, the kind whose covers are plastered in enlargements on the outside of every dairy in New Zealand, because he'd recently started dating Reese Witherspoon. And I wondered what his life would have been like if he went by Jacob instead. Would he get big movie roles? Would he date movie stars? Or would the very fact of choosing a less tough-sounding name change the very way we perceive him - not only that, actually, but the way he perceived himself? It seemed likely.

This business of how we choose to name our selves - why I go by Doug instead of Douglas, why some of my friends go by Dave or David, Robert or Bob, and so on - has something to do with how we perceive ourselves. And that choice then bubbles out into the world.

And so, those two seeds cross-pollinated, and I imagined Jacob and Jake, and how they would take the materials of a life, and what each of them would do with it.

And thus began the 18-month gestation period for the first draft of JAKE.

FAQ #1: "When can I see Jake?"

Sun, 10 Jan 2010 11:10:00 +1300

The short answer: sometime in 2010, we hope!

The long answer: we are currently submitting Jake to film festivals around the world. The application process for film festivals is expensive, especially factoring in shipping from New Zealand, so we're being selective in what festivals we apply to at this point, but if there's a festival that you think we should be applying to for whatever reason, let us know in the comments and we'll take a look!

As we hear back from festivals, we will also be talking to distributors. This is uncharted ground for us and we don't know exactly what's going to happen, to the point where it would be foolish to guess. And in 2010, the distribution landscape is ever-shifting - internet distribution is becoming more and more mainstream, and the typical "play festivals/get limited theatrical release/go to video" or "get into festivals/don't get theatrical release/go directly to video" paths are no longer the only two options for indies.

But one way or another, we are committed to making sure that as many people see Jake as possible, in the best quality possible, as soon as is reasonably possible.

When we know more, you'll hear about it right here!

What is Jake?

Fri, 01 Jan 2010 00:01:00 +1300

Jake is an independent feature film produced in Auckland, New Zealand by the DIY movie-making collective Hybrid Motion Pictures. We're the first theatrical feature film in New Zealand to shoot entirely on the RED camera.

We have finished editing Jake; while we put the final touches on the colour grade and sound mix at Images and Sound and our composer Paul Velat finishes the music, we're sending the movie to festivals around the world.

We're very proud of the final product, and look forward to being able to show it to all of you.

Welcome to JakeTheMovie.com

Fri, 01 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +1300

Welcome to the new Jake website! We'll still be updating our Facebook page but this will be the main hub for news and information about the movie. We've released some brand-new behind the scenes stills, and our very first still images from the film itself as well as our first teaser trailer are coming soon. We'll also be publishing blog entries about the experience of making Jake. So welcome!