Filmumentaries

Kevin Pike.
Legendary Special Effects Guru.

Well as I hinted yesterday, I’ve been trying to line up an interview with special effects veteran Kevin Pike who started his career on Jaws. Well tonight after a couple of emails to and fro, my phone rang and it was Mr Pike himself.  I was rather taken aback to receive a call from a genuine special effects hero whilst I was serving up dinner for my kids.

If you don’t know who Kevin is, just check out his credits list on IMDB!

After chatting for 15 minutes or so, he said he’d happily contribute to my project despite having a very busy schedule.  I must say that I am very excited about this. I might even ask him about his legendary involvement in Back to the Future. You never know, Going Back, A Filmumentary might be a reality one day!

Jim Beller, Jaws expert and all round nice guy recently watched my first cut of Inside Jaws. He loved it. Phew! He also made some great suggestions and pointed me in the right direction to rectify some of the scenes that were a bit lacking.

One of his ideas was to talk to some people who had previously been interviewed for the fabulous Jaws: Memories from Martha’s Vineyard, a book that Jim himself was heavily involved in.  So, armed with some contact details I got in touch with members of the crew as well as extras to get a handle on their unique experiences shooting JAWS!  Telephone interviews are often criticised for their low quality, but for me it’s all about content, in whatever form it comes.

Tonight I called and interviewed my first victim. All I’ll say is that she was a very willing participant indeed with great stories for me to include in the commentary track. I love hearing these tales from the unsung heroes, even if they only played a small part in the films’ creation. I really think you’ll enjoy her enthusiasm and insights.  It’s so great that people are still happy to talk about the film after all this time. I got a real buzz chatting. It’s always so difficult not to laugh along with the interviewee. But as I need the interviewees voice for commentary, I have to stay quiet!

With any luck, I’ll soon be speaking to a veteran of film making. He was also involved in a little film set in 1985. Or was it 1955? More on that later.

I have been away from home working in Australia and Malaysia for the last week and a half. Whilst Melbourne always keeps me busy with it’s amazing array of cool bars, friendly people and other wallet emptying attributes, Kuala Lumpur has offered up three days off. So during the scorching heat I decided to dip my toe into Inside Jaws again. My colleague and friend Ben was on hand to help with some additional motion graphics whilst I beavered away at editing.  I’ve actually got through rather a lot of work and it feels like the end may finally be in sight. In the distance mind you. But the point is, I can actually see it now.

I was also boosted by feedback from my Jaws expert buddy Jim, who has now watched my first cut and has returned to me with some great notes.  Further motivation has been drawn from contact with a large publication in the U.S. They want to run an article about me and my filmumentaries to coincide with the release of Inside Jaws.  Well, suffice to say that it has helped push me along some more.

Real work has begun in Malaysia now but my evenings are free and staying into edit is probably better for my health and my wallet. On second thoughts, maybe I’ll edit half of the time…

Well the downtime over the winter wasn’t as productive as I’d hoped with regards to my little projects.  What with multiple HDD failures etc.  Real life obviously takes precedence. But the good news is, for those of you waiting to see Inside Jaws, I am back on the road next week for my thirteenth F1 season.  This means a lot of time sat on planes, in hotels and on coaches.  More time to tinker with my soon to be released filmumentary.

Just last night, Jaws expert Jim Beller who kickstarted this project, had a look over the first hour of so of my rough cut. We then had a lengthy Skype chat, going through notes that we had both made.  Jim is my Jaws brain and is great at saying, ‘Wait, I have a piece of material you could use there”. So I came away from our chat with lots to do. All great suggestions from Jim and a couple of good ideas from me just because I was able to sound Jim out about them first.

If my new Lacie drive arrives in time, thanks to some kind donations, I will be taking it to Australia with me and spending some strange hours in my hotel room editing away.  This year I have to make some savings as recent circumstances at home have meant our income has effectively been cut in half. For now anyway. So hopefully Inside Jaws will keep me away from expensive bars, clubs and restaurants and on the way to getting the project finished before summer.

Thanks for your continued support.

To keep within the low budget during the production of Raiding the Lost Ark, I purchased a £100, 500GB Western Digital hard disk.  Whilst it was only USB , it worked with my Macbook (not pro) and the upscaled 720p footage rather well. It was quick enough, portable and travelled the world with me through to the films release in February 2012.

I had enough room to begin Inside Jaws on the same drive, so after making a backup on a Lacie Big Disk Extreme (1TB) along with all my previously filmumentary work, I got to editing!

All was fine until about a month ago when I dropped the Western Digital drive on the kitchen floor.  I immediately plugged it back in and all seemed fine until a couple of days later when the beachball of doom appeared whilst I was editing in FCP.  Immediately I knew that I’d lost a few days work.

The annoying thing is that I don’t keep a log, so I’m not sure what all that work was. Little things occur to me here and there as I am editing. There was no way of retracing my steps.  After some moaning about HDDs on Twitter, I started editing from the big Lacie Extreme backup drive.  A few hours in, during a render of the final project, I was getting paranoid now, the power supply blew and the drive sounded broken! I was right to be paranoid. The god of hard disks had struck again.

I quickly ordered a new power supply from eBay. These projects are all about keeping up momentum and motivation. It seemed the cheapest way to potentially resurrect the project.  After a week or so the power supply came back to life and so the editing recommenced. Only a matter of hours in the drive sounded like it was copying files whilst I was doing nothing. In fact it sounded like that busy sound you get when empting the trash. Finder promptly crashed and the HDD wouldn’t mount.

I had made a second (just in case) back up on and older and apparently less robust drive enclosure. The only problem was there were some media files missing from this previous backup.  So I’ve spent today re-importing media from DVDs, CD and online, desperately trying to match it so that it can be reconnected in the FCP timeline.

I am back up to speed but it’s another day “wasted”.  Thanks to a kind donation, I’ve ordered a new Lacie Rugid and I’ve copied all the project and media files to my iMac system disk. When will this faffing with drives end?!

Well, it’s almost a year since I started this blog and released Raiding the Lost Ark, so to mark the occasion, I checked out my domain stats for the first time.

To be honest, I am blown away.

Thanks to all of you for your faithful support and encouragement. Doing these projects takes a lot of time and effort outside of my work and real life, so it’s really great to see that so many of you visit this site. Even if you ignore what I’ve written and go straight to the videos, thats fine by me!

In this past 12 months I’ve been invited to write for Empire Online. I’ve been interviewed on radio and numerous podcasts. Part of Inside Jaws was shown in Sydney, Australia thanks to the wonderful PopcornTaxi. Ain’t is Cool News ran a story  and Movies.com showed an exclusive clip of my forthcoming project.

Furthermore (and most importantly to my bank balance), I’ve also finally managed to convert the skills I’ve learned on making these filmumentaries to get a one day job editing a Force India F1 car launch, which I enjoyed immensely.

The next big news is that  Inside Jaws is almost complete. Just a few more weeks so go (I hope).

So what ever you are doing, keep at it, you never know what might happen!

Today, I starting adding credits to the end of Inside Jaws.

It soon became apparent that I should have been doing this since I began the project. I thought I had compiled a list somewhere (on my phone maybe). But no.  So today, I made it my aim to trawl through my emails, facebook messages and tweets, as far as they would allow to find the names of the individuals who have helped me along the way.

If you have helped me and feel you deserve a credit. Please do get in touch. Its been a while since I began this project and without my notes, its easy to let one of two slip through the net. 

As you know, or should know by now, goodness me I’ve been banging on about it for long enough… I do not make any money on these filmumentaries. That was never my intention and never will be.  ”What about the site donation button?” I hear you ask. Ok, I have accepted a few donations over the years totalling enough to run this blog domain for just under one year, but never any more than that. I also turn down every single request to buy copies of my filmumentaries. In fact I go further and report anyone trying to sell them on ebay.

What I am here to say, or more to the point, ask of you, is  that I’d be very grateful if you consider donating to one of my chosen charities. Particularly if you have enjoyed my work and feel compelled to show your love.

Yesterday, I added a donation button to a charity that I think does really great work for those with autism.  ”Ambitious about Autism works to improve the services available for children and young people with autism and increase awareness and understanding of the condition”. Now who can argue with that?

So, again, if you have a sudden need to be grateful for the work I do (remember its for fans like you), then please do think about a donation.

Thank you for your time.