Very sorry for the long delay! Now you get three months of newsletters in one!

March 2009

Another full month where every weekend was spent filming!

Oops wait – back track

I totally forgot to tell you in the February Newsletter about all the fight rehearsing we were doing! You can’t really just turn up on set and expect all these fights to just happen by themselves. Especially if you want them to look good and for no one to get hurt. We had to work at it!

We had a number of training sessions during February for working out and rehearsing some of our key fights at the climax of the film. After losing our main fight directors, RC Annie, we had certain members of the fight team take on different sequences with Lewis Penfold taking over as the main fight director. Lewis, who was also playing the role of Gorganog, worked intensively with Christopher Dane, perfecting the duel that happens between Gorganog and Arathorn during the climax of the film. Other fights involving the main characters and background were also worked on in rehearsal sessions before and during the shoot. Despite these sessions, I’m sure I’m not the only one who found the fight filming days fun but very tiring. I feel like I should have been getting myself a lot fitter before we shot. It’s surprising how much energy you need to spend a day or two continuously fighting. Once we have more time to work with the behind the scenes footage we will be able to put together some new featurettes for the website including one about fights on film.

The last long haul

March included the last of our large shoots involving lots of people, rangers, orcs, elves, children and fights

Epping Forest

We started the month back in Epping forest reshooting the infamous scene 30 plus the forest fight from the end of the film. Half of scene 30 was actually shot back in November 08 but we had sound trouble and also lost the light that day. Unfortunately by the time we were able to re schedule, the leaves had grown back and the place looked quite different. There was one section of the scene that we thought we could get away with but then couldn’t find part of Gilraen’s costume so had to choose a new one and reshoot the entire scene which was a pain. Typically we then rediscovered the costume after that weekend!

The forest fight was our other task for this weekend. On the Saturday we had our Elves, fight team and some main characters. We also had a number of our Viking reenactors come down to play ranger and orcs. They did a great job as always. On the Sunday for Arathorn’s fight it rained really bad at one point but we had to just keep shooting due to time. It made it look dramatic but matching it all up in the edit will be fun.

Twin elves...right?

As we are asking actors to work for free we always have to work around their other commitments. On the rare occasions when our filming schedules cannot accommodate this, we have had to use a double instead. This happened this month when one of our elven twins, Matt Kennard, couldn’t make it for the forest fight. We decided to dress up one of our Vikings, Olaf, who did a great job. Hopefully no one will notice, apart from you guys of course, who keep reading all of these spoilers :)

Shaknar’s first appearance

Our main antagonist in the film had his very first appearance this weekend. Shaknar and the other main orc Gorganog both have foam latex masks that perfectly fit the actors they were made for. Foam latex is expensive, time consuming and requires a proper oven for escetially cooking the masks so we were never planning to be able to have them. However, Jon Peck from Norton Armouries said that he could help and kindly made the foam latex masks for these two characters. It’s amazing the difference it makes. Due to various frustrating problems like time (as always), losing the light, full P2 cards and no empty ones plus no charged batteries this first appearance probably lasts approximately 5 seconds max in the final edit! The remainder of his last scene, which I will say no more about or it will ruin the ending of the film, was actually shot a couple of weeks later next to West Stow and not in Epping at all.

West Stow

Well we were never supposed to be back at West Stow but with the problems of the November shoot it was clear that we were going to have to go back at some point. Luckily the guys at West Stow are so supportive of us that they were happy for us to return. This time we decided it was better to do two weekends rather than one full week. Since July when the portacabins we had made so much use of were taken away there is no where really for us to do make up, wardrobe or to store props etc. This was something that really caused us problems in November and we were keen to avoid this again. We contacted a company called Over the Moon Tents and they very generously donated us a large army marquee for the week which they kindly came and assembled for us. This made such a difference! We set up our unit base there including makeup, wardrobe and catering. Richard Unger our Stills Photographer rigged us up a load of lights, loaned to us from a friend of mine from the theatre world, so that we could work before sun up. The only thing we were lacking was heating. It was extremely cold doing makeup and wardrobe in the early hours! Like all BoH shoots it was hard work trying to get so much shot in such a short amount of time and we often had two units working at the same time. The first weekend was spent doing a couple of the key fights, like the duel between Arathorn and Gorganog, and then on the second weekend we did all the linking scenes plus and main clash and individual fights.

Happy Birthday Dagmaer!

One of our loyal background artists and basically a character in his own right, Dagmaer, had his birthday during the second weekend. Like many of the Vikings of Middle England Dags has been part of this project since the July 08 shoot and has played both a featured ranger and a "bearded" orc, he’s even the storyteller in one of the scenes. The project wouldn’t be the film it is without the loyalty of these guys, who come all the way down from Leicester for the shoots and training sessions, and I hope they have enjoyed being a part of it as much as we have enjoyed their company on this journey!

Twitter

As if I don’t have enough to do. The official website and these newsletters are hard enough to keep up to date. The myspace page, facebook group and fan site but I’ve now added BoH to the next big craze, Twitter. http://twitter.com/bornofhope

April

Post Production Begins!

Although we do still have some filming left to do, we started post production this month. The enormous task of capturing, logging and labelling all of the footage begun. This is not an easy task at the best of times but, shamefully, BoH was often a mess when it came to logging shots during filming. The clapper board was often used to help synchronize sound but the board was not always marked up. Even when it was we have found in the edit that scene numbers have not always matched up due to script changes. We never had a script supervisor to help record everything that was being filmed and we often had multiple cameras rolling at the same time. We also used different cameras during the shoot, mixing HDV and HD. Unfortunately I don’t really have a good knowledge of the technology of cameras (I’ve been learning) and without a Director of Photography there was no one to make sure that everyone was filming in the same way. In the edit we have discovered about four different formats were used and cameras were not always colour balanced to look the same, sometimes we were able to use a 35mm adapter and other times it wasn’t available. There is a lot to do in Post to get it all looking the same. Ah well, you live and learn and when you don’t have money you have to do your best with the resources you have.

Elf Fantasy Fair.

So this month was when Chris Dane, Danny George and myself took a road trip to Elf Fantasy Fair. I’ve never really done a road trip before and it was quite exciting jumping in the car and just driving all the way to the Netherlands. We headed off at around 6am on the Friday morning, spent an hour and a half on the ferry, where there was a film crew shooting a commercial, spent 10 mins exploring the ship, bought a £5 sandwich, got back in the car and headed off again. Chris had chosen to do all of the driving as he preferred it and had the biggest car. We’re thinking of doing a road trip to Ring*con but might share the driving that time as it’s a longer trip. The drive was quick easy and pleasant, I had brought along my Tomtom which was a real help. Our most challenging moment was when we all started to get hungry and kept missing the turnings for services. Actually our main problem was finding the castle. We had called Alex who was our main contact while there. Alex had contacted me the year before interested in coming to a shoot and helping out. She had then met us at Ring*Con 2008 and then attended some of the shoots and helped as a boom operator. Alex lives only about 30 mins from EFF so we were going to be staying at her house. So the plan was for Rebecca also known as Eowyn in the Fellowship (a group of 10 LOTRs fans who meet up in full costume at events like this) to meet us in the car park and to guide us to our pitch which we had got positioned right next to theirs. So we thought we were there, parked the car, called Alex and waited. About 10 mins went by and we started to wonder, we looked around more and then called Alex again. We were in the wrong car park! Back in the car and on our way again. Found the castle and the car park but no Rebecca. Called Alex again (pity we didn’t have Rebecca’s number really). She had walked to the car park twice already from the pitch which was the other end of the grounds which cover a square mile. Finally at about 7pm we meet up with Rebecca, nabbed a lift in a little EFF pick up buggy, loaded on our stuff and perched ourselves in the back and headed to the pitch. We only had a small space as there was just the three of us sitting at a table talking to people really. Thankfully the fellowship guys had kindly lent us a little gazebo, table and bench which was great otherwise we would just be three people standing on a patch of grass. Dinner was with the fellowship, all cooked over an open fire. Nice! I personally love open fires and outdoor cooking, even though the UK weather limits the opportunities. We managed to enjoy it on the Saturday too which was lovely. So on Saturday we got to see the place come to life. Apparently there were about 20,000 people there, most of which were dressed up! It’s a really nice event. There are live bands, loads of stalls selling LARP equipment, new age stuff, re-enactment stuff, costumes and of course loads of food. There are areas for the Live Action Roleplayers to have their battles, there are lots of horses and dogs around the place. We met some friends of the Fellowship guys and their very cute puppies! I’m kind of glad we only saw them once otherwise I think I would have been very tempted to have one! I did get to hold one at least. Many people camp there in old style camps, a mix of different time periods plus fantasy. There are performers entertaining people, people giving presentations and talks (like us) plus special VIP guests giving talks and autograph sessions. It’s a hive of activity and I’m very glad we went. Our presentations went well both days with a decent turn out of people. We had spent the last week panicking and making a new trailer as we had had no time to put new footage together to show people. However the photo slideshows and the new trailer went down really well and everyone seemed to love them.

I did actually take a small video camera with me and filmed a kind of video diary of the trip so once that is edited together I will put it on the website for you all.

May

The Hunt for Gollum

You’ve probably all seen it by now and if you haven’t, where have you been?! The Hunt for Gollum, a fan made film which tells the story of Aragorn’s quest to find Gollum only to learn that he’s already let slip about Bilbo and the Shire, had it’s world premiere release this month and has had a fantastic reaction from the fans. It was viewed almost one million times in the first week and has generated some great reviews and international press. I am very proud of this film and what the team, which included many BoH people, managed to achieve. The simple idea for a little 10 minute film, that sparked out of Chris Bouchard’s involvement with Born of Hope over two years ago, became a sweeping 40 minutes (I know how that can happen!) and wonderfully showcased the talents of it’s cast and crew. When Chris first mentioned his idea to do a film about Aragorn and asked to borrow some of our costumes I was happy to help. I supplied some of our test shoot costumes and materials, my camera jib and lent them my United Cutlery Aragorn ranger sword (which unfortunately got broken during the first shoot so was replaced in later shoots by a cheaper version). I even went out with the team to shoot in Snowdonia Wales in 2007, helping as a driver/runner/wardrobe assistant etc. As the film expanded and photography extended they ended up filming in parallel with us but luckily we were never shooting on exactly the same days so the costume cross over was thankfully never a problem. The favours worked both ways in the end as we used the H4G costumes in BoH, Chris Bouchard helped out as a camera operator on a few of our shoots and some of their team are now working with us in post production.

With the arrival of The Hunt for Gollum and the two films running so closely, many people have often confused the two or thought they were made by the same team. In reality these are two very different films both in story, scale and the way they were produced. For example, due to the small cast and crew needed for Gollum, they were able to do more guerrilla filmmaking, keeping their budget extremely low. BoH is so much bigger in terms of the number of people involved, filming days, props, costumes, wigs and prosthetics needed that our budget is about 8 times that of Gollum.

Your response to The Hunt for Gollum has been so amazing and I just hope that we can hit the bar they have set for us… maybe even jump it! You can tell me at the end of the year if we did :)

Post Production in full swing

They say that a film is made three times. First in the scripting, then in the shooting and then again in the editing. This is certainly true for Born of Hope. The script had changed many times and even during filming it is often the case that when you start to lift the words off the page they don’t always work as well as you think. Dialogue can change to make it more natural and to fit the characters the actors have brought to life. Then sometimes in the edit, scenes that you thought worked really well, just seem out of place in the grander story, or problems during filming mean that footage cannot be used. One thing we found when we started to put the rough cut together was that it became clear that if we stuck true to the original script, there were some possible plot holes that would mean we had a lot more to shoot if we were to make a cohesive story. The film tries to cover about 5 or 6 years and we need to keep the story flowing at a good pace to maintain the interest of the audience. As the edit comes together some scenes are dropped, some extended and some events unfold in a different way to the original script. Apart from a few scenes left to shoot the rough edit is now complete and we are into the finer detail tweaking now. The film is currently around 75 minutes in length.

VFX

Top quality CGI is expensive and time consuming, and time and money is something we are limited by, which is one of the reasons I was originally planning to avoid it. I have always been very adamant that this was not a CGI film and that there would be very little used. However, things can change. Born of Hope is about characters and story but we have some extremely talented professionals coming on board to start visual effects and we hope to be able to show you the breathtaking Middle-earth we all know and love.

In fact if VFX or other post production jobs are your thing then you can send in your details and maybe get involved. See below.

New Recruits

If you loved The Hunt for Gollum and were worried that you had missed out on being part of a film like this then fear no more. Born of Hope is currently recruiting and now is your opportunity to get involved in one of the biggest and most spectacular internationally made internet films ever! It’s larger, longer and more epic than Hunt for Gollum. A large cast bring an entire people to life. A host of new characters never before seen on screen! This 75min film has been in the making for almost 6 years and was what sparked the Hunt for Gollum.

Born of Hope has attracted people from around the world to join the team, even gaining support and interest from some of the original New Line Trilogy cast and crew members including Richard Taylor and the Oscar winning team at Weta Workshop, New Zealand.

"Amazing stuff. It's incredible to see what craftsmanship, sensitivity and attention to detail is being brought to bear on this ambitious project. Everything so far looks amazing and I can't wait to see the finished film"
Richard Taylor - Director/Effects Supervisor, Weta Workshop.

Find out more at www.bornofhope.com/Recruitment.html

Have your say

Now that we are mostly in post production with only a few scenes left to shoot, I will probably have less interesting stories to tell or cool photos to show in the newsletters leading up to the film’s release. I am also reluctant to show you too many spoilers from now on because we want to keep some things a mystery. I was therefore thinking that, considering these newsletters are for you guys, maybe I should ask you what you want to see and know. We already have the Q&A section on the website but these are often things like, “when is the film released” or “will we see Elrond in the film?”, the new section of the newsletter could focus on a particular person, character or job. For example one month we could delve into the makeup and prosthetics side of the production, with interviews with key crew members. Another month we could talk to the actors and learn more about their experiences working on the project. We might even be able to sort out some video interviews as well, you never know.

So please let me know who, what, where or when or whatever you would like to know and we will pick some of the popular questions or proposals for the next newsletter. Simply reply to this newsletter email and I’ll do what I can.

Well that’s all for now. Hopefully June’s Newsletter will be out at the end of the month. Gosh that’s not long!