#OnEdge20 is a series of posts commemorating 20 years since I rolled cameras on my first short film.

There’s an old filmmaking saying, which goes, “You make three movies.”

It’s very true. The movie you write is the first, and even that is subject to rewrites and last minute revisions (yesterday’s blog entry showed how the opening sequence of On Edge was modified to allow for the film’s completion when we were up against time constraints).

Secondly, there’s the movie you shoot. And this can seem quite alien to you as you look at it on the little monitor screen of the video-assist, or from beside the camera as you direct Charley Boorman to “Gurgle a bit more, make it sound like you’re really choking on the blood.”

NB: He really was choking on the blood.

Then there’s Doug Bradley, sneaking up behind you to whisper, “Tick… tock… tick… tock,” into your ear as a constant reminder that time (and your sanity) is escaping you. Ahh, such sweet suffering memories.

On Edge in Covent Garden, July 1998: Christopher Fowler, Doug Bradley — and some long-haired young idiot — discuss dental hygiene.

And finally, there’s the movie you edit. Looking through the archives for this series of blog posts, I was reminded how things have changed in movie production — and how little they have really changed. The technology is different, but the creative process from script to screen remains the same.

Here are some pictures that show (don’t tell)…

Yes, those really are floppy discs.

I mean, look above at how many DAT (digital audio tapes) were required to create the sound for the film. The impact of a short horror film like On Edge relies very much on its sound. Because I couldn’t do the ‘big reveal’ until the last available moment, the whirring of drills and the snagging of flesh was super important in creating a sense of unease in the viewer about what was happening to poor Peter Thurlow’s gob. You might be able to spy the soundtrack masters in there too. ‘Cycles of Abuse’ was a song by my metal band Self Destructive Nature, co-written with guitar legend Paulo Turin (Gangland, Paul DiAnno’s Battlezone) which rocks out over the opening/closing fetish club framing device. ’Sweets From On Edge’ was incidental music composed by Dooj (The Jazz Butcher), and I have such happy memories of working with him on that in his flat, and referencing the scores to several John Carpenter films and Don Coscarelli’s Phantasm, all of which became strong influences on the finished score. Sadly, Dooj passed away recently. He was a brilliantly inventive musician with a lovely, energetic personality to match his vivid pink hair.

These pictures also illustrate the different formats used, from the raw 35mm film footage (the rushes, or dailies) to the TK Master (a telecine’d digi-beta tape copy of all the film footage, used in editing, which was prepared at The Moving Picture Company), to the locked edit (again on digi tape) then the assembled 35mm with its associated sound mix. The optical effects (the vision blurs, whiteouts and dissolves, titles etc.) were created at Capital FX, and these were incorporated into the film edit by Vaughn Mullady at Tru Cuts.

The film we ended up with was a glorious 35mm cinemascope film print, with the sound running alongside it on an audio track. When the film was picked up by Columbia TriStar to screen in London cinemas with the feature film ‘I Still Know What You Did Last Summer’; there was a slight catch. We could screen at as many cinemas screens as we liked — but we had to pay for the prints. The prints were around £750 each, so we could afford a grand total of… two. With the master print out on tour at film festivals, our 2 new prints were screened at Odeon Leicester Square and The Warner Bros. West End (now the Vue). 8,000 paying cinemagoers saw our film, which also played a ton of festivals and bagged some prestigious awards.

Youtube was just about to take off (!), but in the early days, bandwidth restrictions meant that a maximum of 10 minutes footage was upload able to Youtube. So the first online screenings of the film (something we take for granted now) saw the film split into 2 parts as it was 15mins long!

I lost count the number of VHS screening tapes we had copied, including costly NTSC versions for the USA and other territories where PAL was not standard. Nowadays, you can pop your film onto Vimeo and have it selected (or rejected) by film festivals without the need to send costly tapes (the weight of which made shipping expensive too). Which brings us, rather neatly, to the present.

Twenty years later.

Would I have done anything differently, knowing what I know now? Yes, lots. But that’s not the point, really. Making On Edge taught me so much, and I am forever grateful to everyone who worked on the film, and/or supported it in any way.

Maybe someday (with the time & funds necessary to do such a thing) there could be a 4K-ultra HD remaster of the film, created from all the original elements?

For now, I hope these blog posts have provided an insight into a creative journey that I embarked on twenty years ago, and one that I still cherish to this day.

Thanks for reading. And for watching.

Oh, and don’t forget to floss.

Dr Matthews – what’s the worst that could happen?

Watch On Edge
on Amazon VOD
and DVD

Check out the On Edge
screening history & list of awards
here

#OnEdge20 is a series of posts commemorating 20 years since I rolled cameras on my first short film.

DAY 3

Yesterday, we looked at the evolution of the screenplay for On Edge, arguably the most crucial part of any film production.

Today, we’ll look at another vital element you can’t do without. And what is that, I hear you ask?

Why, a Batman Forever diary & organiser of course!

It doesn’t have to be a Batman branded one (although i can highly recommend it is, i mean, the one i used came with really cool stickers and everything) but I can’t underline enough the importance of having something portable that you can scribble in, with enough space for each day of the week to include the important milestones. This was 1998 of course, and we had computers back then but not smartphones. Imagine that. But even now, when I work on a project I use an honest-to-goodness paper diary to keep track of everything. It’s just simpler that way (for me anyway, your milage of course may vary).

Pre-production means a LOT of meetings. For On Edge, there were meetings to be had with the Heads of Department (camera, sound, art, assistant director, special effects, and of course with the cast!). One of my fondest memories about making On Edge is taking the train and a bus to Pinewood Studios to meet with Bob Keen at his Image Animation workshop to discuss the design of Charley Boorman’s prosthetics, and the ‘uber drill’ used by Doctor Matthews to create his latest dental masterpiece. Bob’s workshop was an Aladdin’s cave filled with such treasures as original Cenobite models from Hellraiser and the xenomorph eggs from Aliens. We decided it would be fun to incorporate actual dental implements into the make-up and the drill, and Bob sourced a vintage portable dentistry kit from an antique’s dealer in order to achieve this. I was like the cat who go the cream during these meetings, let me tell you. And later, on set, I got to tick off a bucket list moment — shouting, “More blood please Bob!” before a take. Sigh — it’s the little things that make life so fulfilling.

Bob Keen applies prosthetics to Charley Boorman

Going through the diary all these years later revealed what an intense period of activity it was, juggling a day job (at that time I ran a market stall in Camden, and another in Charing Cross to pay the bills and to get me through university) and the many decisions necessary to prep the film for production. Producer Joseph and co-producer Juliet made sure everything ran smoothly (and some of the crew said the catering was even better than on some feature films they’d worked on!) even when we were down to the wire casting the role of the receptionist. Beth Murray (I had seen her brilliant turn in the music promo for Placebo’s Pure Morning) bagged the part, and she was perfect. With Doug Bradley and Charley Boorman on board as dentist and patient, we were ready to go.

The shoot itself passed by in a bit of a blur. We shot for three days at a dental clinic in Covent Garden, and this is where an astonishing coincidence happened. It turned out that the location we had chosen for the shoot was Christopher Fowler’s dentist’s! There was some poetry to that — but all lyricism went out of the window with the actual shoot.

The dentist was away on vacation during the shoot (smart man) leaving his (heavily pregnant) head nurse in charge of the building. The nurse herself warned us that she was given to violent mood swings and tearful outbursts due to her impending due date! Unknown to the film crew, a decorating team had also been booked to spruce up the clinic during our film shoot. Many people still think a film shoot is two actors, a camera and three hangers-on, but we had a crew of over 40 people working on On Edge, two enormous equipment trucks, a massive generator and a metric tonne of equipment to hoist up and down the stairs — a stairwell which was bloody well being painted while we were supposed to be making a movie. The nurse decided that 6pm was our absolute cut-off time for filming each day. When we factored in all the delays, due to being extra careful not to scuff the freshly painted walls and so on, we needed a later finish that that by day 3. And on that day, I ashamedly admit i began to lose my fragile grip on my sanity, rocking back and forth in my director’s chair and gurgling like a madman about ‘the coming apocalypse’. 

But it was all right. With the support of my amazing cast and crew, we simplified the opening sequence, so we could achieve it in the time remaining to us. I believe that a cash bribe.. um, I mean ‘bonus’… was made to the nurse-in-charge, and we even invited her to look down the camera lens at what we were doing, all to buy ourselves some more time.

Time is the fire in which we burn.

So if you’re making a movie, get yourself a good diary.

Eagle-eyed readers will see that author Christopher Fowler was invited on set (time constraints changed his call time from 2pm to 4pm) and yes, he makes a cameo appearance in the film!

The fish symbolises a visit to the London Aquarium. Always book a day off the day after you wrap. Thank me later.

The shoot ends and the edit officially begins!

Tune into the blog tomorrow for more #OnEdge20

Watch On Edge
on Amazon VOD
and DVD

Check out the On Edge
screening history & list of awards
here