The Making of Let Him Go

The story for 'Let Him Go' came from a one page script written by Nigel Goodwin that I think he wrote for entry into some one minute script contest or the like.  It was bare bones, the characters didn't really have a chance to reveal themselves in a one minute script but the idea was most certainly there.  It was one of those ideas that is so simple that you smack yourself in the forehead and say, 'Why didn't I think of that?'  Simply put, someone wants to turn off a life support machine and someone else wants it kept on.  The opportunities for dramatic conflict here more or less write themselves.

When I think of a loved one slowly dying in hospital, the death of my Grandfather immediately springs to mind.  My sister held a vigil at his bedside for the last few weeks of his life.  She couldn't understand why her mother (his daughter) didn't visit very often and why she seemed unemotional about the whole affair.  Thus the script became an opportunity to explore what might have happened had my sister and mother been faced with the unbearable option of turning off his life support.

The structure of the script was simple.  There are five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.  I wanted to show all five of these stages compressed into this one scene so that our lead could portray each of those five stages.

Immediately I had Kym Veldman in mind to play Adele, the daughter of the dying man.  She had very few lines in Troll2357 but still managed to impress me, particularly with her facial expressions which (I must admit) I had no part in directing.  I just told her to stare at him, figured we would probably have to work on that stare to get it right, but I was totally wrong.  Her stare exceeded my expectations for how appropriate it was to the emotion of the scene.

Kym Veldman as Adele

What I didn't know at that point was that Kym had lost her father when she was younger.  This led to her taking 'Let Him Go' quite personally and drawing on her own emotional experience to drive her performance.  As a result, when we were filming, I gave very little direction to Kym and instead tried to build the rest of the film around her performance.

Nigel Goodwin jumped aboard as producer and took on the role of the doctor in the film.  He recommended Kathryn Rigby for the role of Adele's mother, and what a find that was.  The only part we hadn't filled as we closed in on filming was actually the priest.  We were getting quite close to filming by the time I messaged Noel Ross and asked him if he fancied a playing a priest.  Noel is a fantastically versatile actor whom you can comfortably slot into a lot of different roles so I wasn't really worried if he would be right for it.

Noel Ross as the Priest

So, with our cast all in place, Nigel suggested the location of the Lee Valley Millennium Centre.  He was doing some drama course there so I attended one night just so we could try and find a classroom that might double for the hospital room.  Once found I called a contact he had and negotiated a very reasonable rate to film there (I won't say how reasonable for fear of getting anyone in trouble but it was very reasonable).

Matt and I flew down there one afternoon for a recce but unfortunately I had no idea that our contact didn't work after a certain time.  Our recce thus consisted of looking through the window in the door with the camera and little else.  I figured that would be okay... I was wrong.

I had a particular lighting scheme in mind when I started, one that used the daylight from the windows as a fill light.  I figured I would have to screen off certain portions of the window, little realising that these weren't just windows, they were enormous windows.

THURSDAY 11TH MAY 2017 - the first day of filming.
So, when it finally came to setting up in that room, I noticed immediately how much smaller the room was than I imagined/remembered.  The only other time I had been in the room I took some shots on a wide angle lens which I think tricked me into thinking the room was much larger than it was.  Alas that made all my storyboards pretty much useless so I had to improvise, come up with alternatives to each shot as we went.

Initially I thought it might be best to concentrate on one performance at a time, starting with Kym.  Later I would realise that was a mistake, that it removed the immediacy of the scene and made it more difficult for the actors to feel where they were in the scene - particularly those not being concentrated on.  In a way it was quite fortuitous that just about everything else screwed up that day.

The other big problem I had, as earlier stated, was the amount of daylight coming through those two enormous windows.  The blackscreens we had didn't cover the whole height of the windows.  There was a spotlight meant to represent the sun for certain shots where Kym and Kathryn's character stand in the foreground.  The idea was that, for two shots, the sun would hit their face (meant to represent an emotional awakening).  Instead I tried to use that light to overpower the daylight on the walls, so I turned it up... thereby turning that into the keylight and screwing up the whole scheme.

It was only when I watched the footage back later that I realised how bad the result was.  Shots where they came too close to the light were overexposed and, at a distance, the lighting looked more suitable to a comedy.  I told Kym we would have to start again... she had a fit with her leg up, understandably.

TUESDAY 16TH MAY 2017 - the proper recce.
Nigel Goodwin, Matt Hughes and I took the lighting equipment, the camera, the blackscreens and black bedsheets to the location.  We covered the windows and set up the lights, shot some footage that looked more or less how I wanted it.  This is how you do a recce, not by zooming through the window of a door.  This was a valuable and important lesson though, ensuring I will never again film without first doing a proper recce.

THURSDAY 18TH MAY 2017 - the last day of filming.

 
So by now we'd done a proper recce, I'd dropped the whole 'sunlight motif' moving the sunlight to the background, and I was storyboarded to the hilt.  This time we would alternate between the characters.  Breaking the scene into smaller pieces and considering each portion individually, nailing each part of the scene for all characters before moving on.

Kym had requested footage from the first day and I think that gave her the chance to reassess her performance because I thought she was good on the first day, but on the second day she entirely blew me away.  At least she would have done if I had time to be blown away and wasn't just saying, 'Right next shot.'  So my apologies to Kym for not showering her with praise which she most certainly deserved.

Kathryn Rigby also finally had her chance to show what she could do, and she didn't disappoint.  It was obvious when she started that Kathryn does a lot a theatre, she nearly blew my ears when she started reading her lines.  All I said to her was, 'Don't project, just pretend.'  She got it.  I was pleasantly surprised with how quickly she adapted.

Kathryn Rigby as Adele's Mum

On the first day Noel Ross had sported fake teeth and his performance was hilarious.  I think I was a little carried away with the humour and it took Nigel to pull me aside and say, 'Maybe that's inappropriate to the scene.'  He was right.  I asked Noel to remove the humour from his performance and play it straight.  I realise that may not be much fun but he was still brilliantly convincing, even on shots where he was just in the background.

Nigel's doctor was an interesting case.  It was the first time an actor had ever applied for their dialogue to be removed, but I would suppose the dual role of actor and producer had some influence there.  Nigel's role was eventually reduced to a single line of dialogue and a couple of facial reactions but he was a good sport about that.  Like me I think Nigel rightly prioritises the dramatic impact of the film he is working on over any other consideration.

Nigel Goodwin as the Doctor

Incredibly we managed to achieve all 50 shots in that scene on that single day.  We worked quickly but without haste.  Rushing the film would have had a detrimental effect on the performances and could have probably dripped down into the editing, lifting the pace of the cutting also.  Instead, at least in those more emotional shots, we filmed each shot within two takes.  That was largely down to my removing almost all of the moving shots I originally intended and relying largely on static shots.  Static shots are invariably easier to film than moving ones.

POST-PRODUCTION
This would have been easily edited within a couple of weeks.  We're it not for my later discovery that approximately 30 out of the 50 shots required digital manipulation.  The two main reasons for this were that the words 'TUTORIAL ROOM'  were clearly visible on the door behind them, and there was also a huge dirty mark on the wall behind Kym's head.  Those two items would have been simpler to remove were it not the entire film is shot in shallow focus making it near impossible to motion track the shots.  In fact there are two effects shot where the tracking had to be done by eye (I won't tell you which in case you look for it).

Thus what should have taken two weeks took six.

Once again I approached the brilliant Lois Paton about the music, actually I think she had a script ahead of time this time.  Again I approached the film as though it were to have no music at all which enabled me to give Lois free reign to compose.  She did not disappoint, once again providing a first draft that exceeded my expectations.  By the fourth draft we once again nailed it.

If you have watched the film once you may not have noticed the music so much because of how apt it is to the scene.  I would encourage everybody to watch this film once just to appreciate the amazing score.

The result was an emotionally dense drama that effectively represents the five stages of grief.  While much credit must be given to the actors for their commitment to the material for much of that emotion, one shouldn't overlook the effect of how it was shot and cut nor how the music accentuates that emotion.

I'm a strong believer in the idea that, if you surround yourself with brilliant people, they will help make your work appear brilliant.  Troll2357 was the first step in demonstrating that idea, and Let Him Go is the second.  I'm hoping to reunite this winning team (and grow it a little) for the third step.

The Making of Troll2357

One could say that the whole concept for Troll2357 originated in November of 2014.  A writing tutor set us the task of writing a story based on the title 'The Wizard's Daughter' or a number of other titles.  I decided I preferred the title 'The Wizard's Daughter' so I mulled that one over.

At the time I was reading true disturbing stories about young people, girls mainly but certainly not exclusive to that gender, killing themselves due to comments made by absolute strangers...  To anyone who grew up prior to the age of the Internet this is a bizarre concept to accept.  That some person whom you don't even know, doesn't know you and likely never will, can undermine your feelings to the point where you decide it is no longer worth living.  Whatismore, on the rare occasion that these 'trolls' are tracked down and confronted by those tormented, they don't care and act like the whole thing is a joke.

This got my blood boiling and I couldn't get it out of my head, so if I was writing a story that week it had to be on that subject.  I started to imagine what I might do if a relative of mine killed themselves in reaction to trollific comments.  I imagined tracking down that troll, kidnapping him, tying him to a chair and cutting out his eyeballs to feed them to him (okay it was damned severe but I was wrapped in anger and hatred at the time).

The result was the short story 'Troll2357'.  I would publish this in my sci-fi fantasy anthology Fantastic Fiction: Volume One.  Incidentally, that is available as an ebook here: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/566647

(the latest version of Kindle: https://www.amazon.co.uk/kindle-dbs/fd/kcp)

Alas it is far more difficult to connect with people these days with merely writing, unless you have a name they recognise or are writing something that can be easily recognised by genre cliches.  We knew the concept of the story was too important to just leave it as a story that few people may ever read.

The first step was to find an actor who would be convincing as the troll (we already had the Wizard and had a Cheryl in mind).  For almost six months we searched, posting and reposting the casting call.  Actors would contact us through Facebook, we would send them a couple of pages of script, they would do a reading, usually filmed by a friend on a smartphone, and then send it back to us.  It wasn't that the acting was bad for anyone who applied really, its just that there was nothing that made me sit up in my seat.

That was until this video:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4fFkoDCE00

It was the first audition video that made me sit up in my seat.  I was impressed by Nigel Goodwin's range of emotion.  He managed to show me facial expressions that I hadn't even imagined and yet seemed so right for the scene.  So we cast Nigel on the spot and decided the time had finally come to move forward with the film.

It was the uncle of Matt Hughes who kindly allowed us to film in his enormous basement (we actually only used one room of his basement, there are three).  In the prose story the location is depicted as a bunker that the Wizard patiently dug under his house while his elaborate plan was in motion.  For obvious budgetary reasons that idea had to be dropped in favour of a pre-made basement.

The main body of filming took place in that basement in Bootle over five days.  Those five days were broken up into three days one week and two days another.  Having this divide in the schedule proved invaluable.  It allowed us the time to truly assess the footage we had and come up with changes which ultimately strengthened the overall film.

Translating prose to film is not always easy.  With prose one has extra elements that can't be called on when trying to tell the same story on film, for instance interior monologues.  In the original story there was no need to ever leave the basement, the whole story is set there with other important information taking the form of character thoughts.  But in the film I realised quite early on that we needed an epilogue, a chance to show how these events have affected the troll and to add the twist.

In the initial script there is simply an epilogue (very much like epilogues that were often used at the end of an X-Files episode) showing the troll returning to the Internet after a couple of years and writing a blog about his experiences.  I literally lifted the interior monologue from the story and placed it as voiceover for a scene of the troll typing.

It was only after we finished filming in the basement that I realised that wouldn't do.  The quality of the footage shot in the basement was such that I feared just slapping some silly unthought out epilogue in and thus spoiling the whole film by the end.

I started to think what the reaction of the police might be to this story.  This, of course, got me thinking about their attitude and reaction to Internet crime in general.  How Internet crime is often not considered a crime worth pursuing the person committing it.  If I left the house right now, walked up to a black man and made some aggressive racist slur, that would be considered a 'hate crime'.  Particularly if there were witnesses, I wouldn't blame that black man for taking the issue to the police. 

But perform what is essentially the same action on the Internet and suddenly that's okay... because it's the Internet.  Oh granted the police talk big about the Internet, and are occasionally embarrassed into pursuing certain perpetators or a particular publicised aspect of Internet crime, but with only 95,000 prison places they know that if they were to prosecute everybody who might flaunt the law online they could conceivably fill UK prisons 10 times over (frankly, I'm being conservative with that estimate).

So this led me to the idea that the troll goes to the police to confess.  Initially we filmed a scene with one police officer interviewing him, with a scene at the start explaining why she was interviewing him on her own.  Later I realised that there was no reason for her to interview him on her own so I made it two police officers, two different police officers at that.

One I made young, to represent the younger demographic, those people who perhaps barely remember a time before the Internet.  This officer would take the troll's story seriously which would be at odds with the second officer.

The second officer I made a lot older, someone who probably clearly remembers a time before the Internet and perhaps is not too technically savvy so may well be lost with some of the story, particularly the reference to Youtube comments.  This was inspired by my reading the prose story to my mother and her not really getting it, perhaps because of too many modern references.

To this day I'm not even sure how we wound up with the excellent combination of Noel Ross and Kym Veldman.  Perhaps they will remember better than I.

In the end we shot the scene in the living room of our sound consultant.  It had white walls and a believable enough door but was extremely tight to film in.  With just about the whole film shot in telephoto lenses, and just the odd 50mm shot, we didn't have a lot of space to play with.  This is a common problem with telephoto lenses in UK dwellings, the rooms just aren't big enough to give you a great range of shot sizes while using a telephoto lens.

Actually, just remembered, the parts of the interview scene that Nigel is in playing the troll were actually filmed separately from the police interviewing him.  The fact that I, the director and editor, forgot that shows how effective that deception was.  We filmed Nigel's shots for that scene in a room of his home with my cinema screen acting as the white wall behind him (well... a green wall with the lighting of course).

Of course that creates a problem with the sound and we have the fantastic work of our sound editor Martin Gratton to thank for solving that.  He succeeded in matching the acoustic qualities of the two different halves of that scene.  We are indebted to him for that.

The final edit of this film actually consisted of over a thousand individual video and audio files, I kid you not.  There were a good number of composite shots and other effects which one hopes the viewer doesn't notice.  In fact I didn't even credit myself for the effects because I didn't want to draw attention to them.  If an effect is obvious then it's a failed effect frankly, as most modern effects are I'm afraid.  They're so blatant and unashamed about showing off what can be achieved, however that may influence the final digestion of the film by an audience.

The final layer, the icing on the cake, was the music.  I hadn't really thought about the music at any stage while making the film, in fact I wasn't even sure that it needed music.  In truth the film could have existed quite well without it, there is enough going on dramatically to keep the audience interested.

I listened to a lot of tracks by a lot of different up-and-coming composers before I discovered the work of Lois Paton.  She kindly volunteered her services when I asked.  I think she was expecting me to send her a temp track, but I hate that practice.  When you hand someone a piece of music and say, 'Make it like that,' what you're effectively doing is handing the composer a pair of creative boxing gloves.  That is why Hollywood films all tend to sound the same, which makes the music entirely unmemorable.

Because I didn't approach the music with any set ideas this allowed me to effectively say to Lois, 'Knock yourself out.'  Given total free reign to compose the music according to her own ideas she came back with the most amazing first music draft you can imagine.  Three drafts later, responding to my feedback each time, she delivered a score that fits so well you barely notice it, which is entirely despite the fact that it is not exactly quiet music.

Hollywood tends to hide its music these days, make everything underscore, almost as though they don't want people to notice the music which is fair enough - it is non-diegetic sound after all.  But people won't notice the music so much if the story you're showing them is engaging enough, that's the real trick.  If you're worried that the music is going to take people out of the experience all I can suggest is that you work a bit longer on the script, because that will only happen with a boring script.

Anyway, I think that's it.  I may have forgotten to mention some things but basically that was the production in a nutshell.  The film was selected for the Cardiff Mini Film Festival and is entered in a number other larger film festivals that we're going to be waiting what is still a few months before knowing if it will be selected.

As always my thanks and love go out to all who volunteered for this film and helped us bring this story to the screen.