4. SUPER MASSIVE VS THE FACEBOOK – POST HEAVY

I’m pretty pleased with the way the latest episode of SMR turned out and there’s quite a lot in it that’s quite interesting so I thought it’d make a good case study looking at the way post-production can bring a project to life. It’s fair to say that the post in SMR is labour intensive, mind-numbingly, insanely post heavy. Each of these episodes is turning into a mini visual FX-laced short film now and we’re looking to push the production value up much higher in the coming months. I say this a lot but the most important thing for a filmmaker is to develop their own personality and voice for how they tell stories. We’re still developing ours for SMR and it’s intimately shaped around the things that Swanny (the raver) and I love. We’re careful not to censor ourselves and if we find the jokes funny then we have to trust that other people will find them funny too. I have no idea why comedy is so belittled by people. Getting anything made is tough, making people laugh as well is doubly so. You’d really laugh if you saw some of the vitriol that’s levelled at me on YouTube. I genuinely find it hilarious. I can imagine if you didn’t know what you were letting yourself in for then SMR might be a bit of a shock to the system, but that’s okay. What’s entertaining is that people have two switches, ‘crap’ or ‘amazing’. Just because you don’t like something doesn’t make it crap, or does it? I’m not sure I know anymore. Still, some people commend the production values but don’t get the gags and that’s absolutely fine. What is good though is that we appear to be rather like marmite: people either like us or they absolutely hate us and that makes me very happy. If you’re eliciting a strong reaction, positive or negative I think you’re doing really well. I know people who hate Black Swan but that certainly doesn’t make it a bad movie.

It’s very easy for filmmakers to fall into a natural rhythm in what they’re doing because that’s the way they’re accustomed to seeing things done. It’s something I’m very good at, but all it is is pastiche. It’s good to dig around in those dark corners where you wouldn’t normally go and the skill lies in making that decision work, making it the right decision. Now, I’m not saying you should always go off-piste, because sometimes that’s absolutely the wrong thing to do. I think it’s more about picking the right material, the material that sets off a tickle in an idea that won’t go away. When I was putting together Monument it was never originally intended to feature dance but the more I thought about it, that fantasy, lyrical approach felt like it was going to really enhance the story. So that’s what I did, and it paid me back. There have been so many knife crime, council estate, gritty films that I knew instinctively that I wanted to tell that story in a different way. I don’t know anything about council estates so it would have been wrong for me to go down that route anyway. We’re constantly asking ourselves on SMR if what we’re doing is right, and more often than not we end up plumping for the difficult choice because we know the reason we instinctively reject it is because ultimately it’s the right choice. You have to learn to trust that instinct.

With SMR we’ve quickly realised that you can only deal with about 60secs of him shouting at you before it becomes too much so we’ve been developing the other strings to his bow, the narrative eps, the action, the artist interactions and the plain bonkers stuff too. What I love about the project is that it seems utterly frivolous and throw-away when you watch it but I hope that repeated viewings give you a sense of the detail and the layers in what we’re doing. For instance, the episode about X-Factor contains an animation with a huge number of visual gags, most of which you won’t even see, but they do repay a second viewing. Broken down our comedy comes from slapstick (in the shape of the raver’s physical performance), from verbal acuity (i.e. what comes out of his mouth), from animation, from sound design (a massive and devastating stage of the post process), parody, toilet humour, visual FX, bathos (a combination of the very high with the very low), satire, word gags and very very very precise timing. That probably sounds like a lot, it really is, and we pack all that into a three minute episode. The Facebook episode is the first episode we’ve done where we’ve really worked hard to integrate every single facet of what we do to the highest level we could. And it was an awful lot of work. It was partly a combination of me wanting to prove something to myself, and also needing to have one ep we could send people that would perfectly sum up what we’re about.

So how do we do it? Well it all starts with ‘I want to do this…’ at which point one of us writes a script. And that’s it. We don’t really spend a huge amount of time working on scripts as the best development happens when we’re shooting, just testing gags, rewriting, and generally improving things as we go along. It normally takes about two hours to shoot and then the fun begins. We never write any of the animations into the script. I just find these in post. It’s all about seeing what kind of time I need to fill, dreaming up a gag and then working out how on earth I’m going to do it. The animations are usually where we put the satire and it takes a really really really long time to work out the neatest, sharpest, most efficient joke we can come up with. Not easy. With this episode I wanted to develop an animation style that would be quick to do and easy to repeat every episode and I feel I may have found it now. The editing is a pretty laboured process and involves a huge amount of work getting the timing right. I really feel the pressure on the edit in these vids more than anything else I do. Forget the obvious sections like the sound effects bit, it’s stuff like how much time to leave between the ‘Warning’ message and the ‘rock to the maxxx’ section. You kind of just have to feel it.

Sound design. Oh man. Sound design. Layer upon layer of sound effects. A feature film will actually involve way more than I’ve got in my mine, it’s just that once you’ve killed yourself doing all the visual FX and then have to reengage your brain for all the finessing and detail of the sound design it’s amazing how much it takes out of you. That level of detail is a huge part of the reason films feel so involving. And yet we’re barely aware of it. This is something that becomes painfully obvious when you start shooting drama. We all get caught up in how beautiful DSLRs look, and you’ll notice most of what we get to see is pretty pictures set to music. The music does so much of the work. Foley, sound effects and other audio tricks do the rest. And when it’s wrong you really notice. No offence to music and image filmmakers but there’s a whole bunch more to learn when it comes to creating atmospheres with sound. There’s two types of sounds needed in SMR, those that directly represent what’s going on, i.e. a light sabre sound, and those that having nothing at all to do with what you’re seeing, i.e. the cow mooing sound when he pulls down his red pants. The former are pretty easy to sort out, the latter are nothing short of a total nightmare.

It’s strange that, though audio and video are both edited in the same fashion and both sit in the timeline together, the way you work with them is so completely different. With video you can scrub through and very quickly make a judgement on whether it’s worth having. With audio you have to listen in real time and there are no particularly obvious clues as to what you might be looking for. Video clips pop up handy thumbnails for quickly searching in the browser, but audio files have no such thing. Their names might also tell you very little about what they are, for example with song titles. All this means that searching for sound effects, or looking for music takes forever. I know I need a sound effect, but I’ve no idea what it’ll be and where I’ll find it, and it ends up being just hit and miss. Often I’ll play a sound backwards or slow it down, or speed it up. It’s incredibly slow, tedious work. You may notice that in SMR we change direction incredibly frequently, lurching from the epic to the pathetic to the mysterious to the comfortable in quick succession. The Facebook episode has probably 12 different scenes and it’s only three minutes long. These all require their own distinct atmosphere, created instantly and the music plays a big part in this (as does the grade). I have to cut everything, retime it, pace it so that it fits what we shot to perfection. The Justin Timberlake parody is a good example, the music is sped up by about 120%.

The visual FX are obviously a big part of what we do and I’ve been gradually ramping up what we do with them because, well because I like doing it. They also help set us apart from a lot of other content out there and give us a greater perceived production value. This is the first episode I’ve done proper CG, incorporating X-wings into the alleyway shot. This was a huge learning curve but I see huge potential in what we might be able to do with CG in the future if I can learn to do it a bit faster and one of our Hong Kong episodes has a huge amount of CG in it so it’s been a useful experience to try it out with the Facebook episode. That 10sec shot involved matchmoving, 3D camera tracking, CG animation, a lot of smoke puffs, explosions, flares and of course the lasers. The effect is good because you can’t really see the x-wings too well but believe me, they’re really not composited very well in terms of colour correction, motion blur, depth of field, that kind of thing. Awful in fact. Much to learn. I lean heavily on Video Copilot’s Action Essentials pack for all the explosions and gun effects. Very useful. I’m not going to reveal how I did the Justin Timberlake effects but it did involve cutting SMR out of the scene frame by frame… time consuming.

The animations are fun but time-consuming. The Emma Watson required digging around for bits of photographs to use as references and then compiling a scene that fit what we were doing. She was everywhere last year as the face of the Burberry campaign and the gag was about the way she’s been objectified by dirty old men imagining Hermione coming of age. It was also a little poke about how she might have become somewhat self-important. Flashing the horse flips the whole sexual situation on its head, it’s completely idiotic but it’s also a little comment on the difficulty child stars have in making the transition to adult performers of note, and how they often end up somewhat messed up, making bad career choices. That’s a lot to fit into a single piece of animation, but it’s the Family Guy way. If you watch that show some of the little side gags where a character makes a throwaway remark that sparks its own gag sequence are absolute genius. They’ll also have taken a really long time to get right, capturing a huge amount in a very short space of time. The other major animation, the Facebook gag, is also meant to be fairly satirical. I actually really liked the Social Network but SMR himself did not. What we wanted to do was take a pin to the somewhat self-important nature of the film. Putting 3D glasses on the characters already makes them look stupid, and giving them sexy sounding dialogue made fun of Mark Zuckerberg’s initial Facemash website where he rated girls. Rendering the film’s dialogue to a sexy exchange only involving the names of the two most celebrated talents of the film – David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin, is completely calculated. The big lips are just there to reinforce the sex theme. The text that comes up directly references one of the posters for the film and also mocks the fact the film was trumped by a tiny British movie at the Oscars. Oscar himself is sporting 3D glasses and big lips, belittling that institution’s own self-importance. Again, there’s lots and lots going on there. Maybe we’re being too clever but these are the bits I write and I put a huge amount of thought into them. While you might think it’s trivial stuff, for me it’s not.

It took a full seven days to edit and do all the sound design, visual FX and grading on the episode. That’s manageable. We want to be doing four episodes a month but we need funding to do that. Not every episode will be as intense as this, actually probably only one in four but I’m glad I went all out on this one as it does exactly what I wanted, it shows what we can do when we really knuckle down to it.

Just because it makes me feel all warm and clever, here’s where all those different types of comedy were meant to appear:

Satire: the warning message, the two animations

Slapstick: always the dancing, the lemons against his groin

Verbal acuity: every time he speaks!

Animation: the animations obviously, but also the ‘bikini’ shot

Sound design: All the way through but particularly the Police Academy section

Parody: the Facebook animation, the Justin Timberlake section

Toilet humour: Kerry Katona, SMR in the toilet

Visual FX: Jar Jar and the X-Wings

Word gags: ‘offsetting’, ‘egnim’,the Facebook poster etc.

Bathos: Warning message (when the word ‘minge’ appears), the Britney section just after the blood when he hits the door

Finally, to those who feel they’ve lost my more sensitive side to daft, balls out kinetic comedy, there is work of a completely different sort on the horizon and while I love doing SMR I will still be pushing hard towards deeply involving character driven drama with no special effects at all. SMR keeps me working and keeps me refining technique, ideas and just keeps me having fun. Like I keep saying, you have to practise. If you have any questions about anything you’ve seen in the episode feel free to fire away. Anything at all.