Corfizz

Monday, 30 August 2010

Talking cheese

Is this cheese half-fat?
It said it was.
The cheese can talk?!

It is quite normal, in English, to refer to something as 'saying' something when in fact there is merely something printed on it. Hence:

The letter said that Barnaby was in Cuba
The book sang Chomsky's praises
The newspaper railed against tie salesmen
The report said the girls had achieved more
The instructions said not to overload the input receptacle

These are perfectly acceptable sentences: they don't just belong in fantasy worlds that consist of talking letters, singing books, ranting newspapers and pieces of paper that give helpful advice. All of these examples, however, refer to things that are intended to contain printed material. Other things, like cheese, are more dubious: "?The cheese said it was half-fat". English speakers are more likely to say "It said it was half-fat [on the cheese]". The 'confusion' in my original dialogue arises from analysing "it" as the cheese rather than the impersonal "it" of the construction "It said [on the thing] that..."

In German, you cannot use the verb 'to say' (sagen) to refer to that which is printed on something; instead you say that something "stands" somewhere, e.g. Im Bericht steht, die Mädchen hätten mehr geleistet (The report says the girls achieved more).

Sunday, 18 July 2010

From Poverty to Africa: Retrospection Part 1 - Story

What is From Poverty to Africa? It's a film. It's a failure. It's one enormous patch-up job. It's the residue of an abandoned enterprise. It's a giant mechanised scorpion. With wings.

Although From Poverty to Africa is not my project (the unquestionable auteur is Matthew Tisot), I was involved in almost every stage of the process from pre- through to post-production, and so I am well-placed to reflect on how things went, so that other amateur film-makers can learn from our mistakes (and our successes, if you can call them that). Around 30 people contributed something directly to this film, and those people might also find some of this interesting. This is a critical analysis. A reflection. A review. A how-not-to guide. It has eight parts:

Warning - there will be spoilers in every part of this retrospection.

"The French Film"

From Poverty to Africa was originally intended to be in French, and was conceived as a learning tool for English students of French that would attempt to highlight cultural differences between the UK and France and teach a little bit of French history at the same time. The film's original title was Un Homme, Une Femme, Leur Chameau et L'Angleterre (A Man, A Woman, Their Camel and England). Later, Matthew decided to expand the film's potential audience by abandoning this goal and putting the film in English. The script, however, was already complete and parts of it had already been translated into French; thus, when we came to edit it, we were limited in what we could change.

This unusual and inadvisable situation - which I doubt that any other amateur film-makers could possibly fall into - accounts for much of the oddness of the film's plot. The honeymoon in the UK was supposed to be the major part of the film; neither aliens nor Africa were envisaged, and the full implications of Claire's autocratic control of her daughter's life were never going to be explored, even though this could have been an interesting aspect of the story. In the original script, the main villain (who was a man) was after the camel because he was, apparently, in love with it, and only manipulated the couple's honeymoon because he was "simultaneously involved in a nefarious side scheme to advertise, or subtly cause you to advertise, as many French brands and companies as possible", which was, of course, merely a contrivance so that the film referenced genuine French products, such as Bien Manger spinach (changed to Rien Manger) and Président brie (changed to Premier Ministre brie). The silliness of all this need not have mattered in the context of the film's original purpose, but in widening its appeal, something needed to be done.

Matthew added the alien storyline for this reason, though I always felt that it over-complicated the plot, and indeed this remains one of my main criticisms of the film's story in its final state: it is simply too complicated. The camel has two histories - one involving espionage during France's May 1958 crisis, and one involving an alien hypermarket. Interwoven with the absurd events of the honeymoon are some arcane excerpts from the alien instruction manual as well as a small story arc that occurs in Africa in the future. Add the idea of the 'Ultimate Gaullist Weapon' to the mix and you end up with something extremely convoluted. Since it was only really the ending of the script that we could change, the vast majority of the plot is left to Jeanne to explain, at length, in one of the final scenes (scene 52). Not only does this violate the "show, not tell" maxim, not only does it threaten to cause the hypothetical audience intense boredom, but it was also rather stressful for the actress playing Jeanne (Amber Prosser), since she had to remember some massive lines.

So, the product placements that Jeanne made during the trip, and all of the strange things that happened - they all had explanations contrived for them, contrived to fit in with the new alien storyline, and this is the reason why things are so complex. As it is, however, I think that most people will be watching the film with absolutely no idea what's going on, thinking that all of these weird events are just there for comic effect, only to discover in Jeanne's fifteen-minute exposition that actually, yes, everything does fit together and it's not all just random.

The title "From Poverty to Africa" suggests that the thrust of the plot should be the impoverished life that Thomas had in Marseille prior to meeting Questa and the journey that leads them to a new lifestyle in Africa. But because the original thrust of the script was just to put the characters in contrived situations in a variety of locations in the UK, Thomas' past is not given much attention at all, and the decision to go to Africa is introduced quite suddenly near the end, with an unexpected and somewhat moralistic-sounding argument to go with it. The specifics of the Dubois' project in the Congo are not considered, though it seems to be an eco-village that uses appropriate technology to provide local people with a sustainable livelihood.

At the end of the original script, Thomas has a heart attack in response to how utterly weird he finds Jeanne's scheme (he "dies of a freak-out", as I always pejoratively referred to it). The ending went through a number of revisions, including one where Thomas turned out to be of alien heritage. I was always pushing for at least one of the main characters to die, since I'm not fond of happy endings (a happy ending is just an unfinished story), but I'm pleased with the final result nonetheless. Having both Thomas and Questa surviving allowed us to add the scenes in Africa, and there is the alien's final message at the very end of the film to prevent it from finishing on such an otherwise bright and cheery note.

We never stopped adding things to the script: in fact, the last addition was only a week before I burnt the first DVD. We were intending to add a lot more to the story to try to improve it yet further and address absolutely all of the film's extant problems. This was going to involve a new character with dissociative identity disorder called Darryl Dycho, who would, like Thomas, have grown up in the slums and then ended up in Africa. I was wary of complicating the plot even further and so I'm glad, on the whole, that these plans were eventually scrapped.

As it is, From Poverty to Africa's plot contains a number of interesting ideas: the idea of a mother-in-law so interfering and prudish that she prevents any intimacy between the newly-weds on their honeymoon, for example. But these ideas are not explored as well as they could be, since they are diluted by everything else that's going on. Better to do one thing well than to do lots of things not very well, isn't it? The film also makes a point of tackling a large number of real-world issues - poverty, crime, addictions, xenophobia and exploitation - but despite the film's title it fails to do justice to any one of them, and consistently 'tells' rather than 'shows' (with a few exceptions, which I will look at shortly).

Narrative Techniques

The film consists of a number of different types of scene:

The scenes in Africa, i.e. 'present day'.
Scenes of the past that occur in the story that Thomas and Questa are telling.
Ditto, but where Thomas and Questa's actual story in the present day is heard as a narration. These parts are signalled visually by the vignette effect, or by being in black and white in the case of the events that happened before Thomas and Questa met.
Scenes in the past that can't be part of Thomas and Questa's story because they couldn't possibly have seen them, such as most of the scenes involving the ninjas.
Flashbacks of the past within the past, e.g. when Jeanne refers to her product placements in her exposition. These are signalled visually by a subtle sepia effect.
Visual material that illustrates events from the remote past, i.e. the spaceship crashing in the Atlas mountains and the various images of de Gaulle and the camel.
Excerpts from the alien instruction manual.
The maps. These are stop motion sequences that Matthew made.

Thus, the extremely complicated plot is mirrored by an equally convoluted narrative structure, with various degrees of 'flashback', some which are just visual flashbacks and some which are both visual and auditory. Now, I don't think it is necessarily problematic to use different types of flashback, and I think we went to commendable lengths to use these techniques to their full creative effect. In the 'Race to the Finish' sequence, many of these different types of scene are interwoven and juxtaposed in quick succession, but I don't think it necessarily confuses the hypothetical audience: rather, I think it contributes to the sense that all of these various plot elements are finally converging in epic style, and to a certain extent it gives a helpful 'summary' of all of the different things that are going on in the story. Nevertheless, I think it is unwise to set up a story as being 'narrated' and then to include things in it that the narrators couldn't possibly have experienced. In a way, it deceives the audience.

The idea of adding the scenes in Africa and making the film literally a story that Thomas and Questa are telling came about largely as a solution to various audio-related problems which I'll discuss in part four. Basically, the audio in some of the scenes was practically unusable. So we re-wrote each of these scenes as though it were being narrated from the future, and put this audio over the top of the original scene. The vignette effect was really only chosen to try and cover up the flickering of the fibres of the microphone's wind shield at the edges of the shot. The alien instruction manual sequences were introduced in an attempt to soften the blow of the introduction of the alien aspect of the story, since originally the aliens would have only been mentioned for the first time in scene 52, right near the end.

(Further to this goal, we added the newsletter called 'Ovnis en Algérie, Aujourd'hui' [which is such a cool name by the way (it means 'UFOs in Algeria Today', but in French it rhymes)] as well as the line about Thomas' pancreas transplant in the hotel room, and the short article about the UFO incident in the newspaper that Jeanne is reading on the train ['UFO in the Atlas mountains: 51 years later'], as well as the space sequence that occurs at the very beginning of the film.)

Scene 39 (in the restaurant) and scene 52 (the really long one on Rodborough Common) use the interesting technique whereby something in the past story corresponds to something that happens in the present time, whereupon the time-line shifts. For example, when Questa exclaims "Arrived on Earth?!", we use this as an anchor to shift into the future timeline where Thomas is telling the story, and is actually saying "We were shocked by the idea that the camel had somehow arrived on Earth". I think this is quite a nice idea, but whether it helps or hinders the hypothetical audience's understanding, I don't know.

Non-Verbal Communication

Scene 11, called 'The Lost Train Station', has no lines. It consists of a series of short shots of various famous locations in Paris: the Arche de la Défense, Arc de Triomphe, Eiffel Tower, Tour Montparnasse and Sacré Coeur. Thomas and Questa are looking at a map and are quite clearly lost. Finally Questa hurls the map on the ground in frustration and the pair sit outside the Sacré Coeur with a sign that says 'Where is the Gare du Nord?' in French. Jeanne appears and hands them a new map. The camel glows. Thomas shrugs. The narrative is thus conveyed entirely without speech. Needless to say, this is highly effective: concise, interesting, funny, uncomplicated. Indeed, if there were dialogue in these scenes, it would probably have been difficult to get good sound quality in such locations.

A similar scene is the one code-named Z50, which takes place during the 'Race to the Finish' sequence. Here, Monique is telling the story to Gaitán using yams as props. Thomas and Questa come into the room looking despondent because their son is very ill. Monique puts her arms round them, gives them some comforting words (which we do not hear) and takes her leave. The lack of sound, of course, is supposed to reflect the sombre situation. As with scene 11, it's amazing how concisely you can convey something without the use of dialogue.

Along with other non-verbal acting such as Jeanne's multitudinous ways of peering around her newspaper on the train, the exquisite gesticulations of Thomas' parents as they loot the house, the way that the ninjas gorge themselves on their doughnuts and the expression that Jeanne gives to her phone when Questa cuts her off, these scenes are in many ways better, and often more memorable, than the far more numerous scenes that have a large amount of dialogue.

The Tripods

In scene 15, on the cliffs after the ferry has sunk, there is a tripod right behind Charlotte. Funnily enough, this tripod was never meant to be on shot. Somehow, nobody noticed until it was too late. Now, what can you do about this? You cannot simply 'rub out' a tripod. Technically you can clone neighbouring parts of the background, but this is difficult enough to do properly with a still image in Photoshop, let alone 25 still images a second. Ideally you need to re-film the scene, but of course nobody would want to go all the way back to that location and do this.

So naturally we turned tripods into a veritable sub-plot. I even managed to make an effective tie-in with the musical score, as I'll discuss in part five. The reason for the short 'ventriloquist' scene involving Honky is merely to prepare the audience for the fact that a tripod will shortly be on shot, so that they aren't alarmed.

Ironically, perhaps, it turns out that the tripods do make a contribution to the film's narrative cohesion. At each product placement and at each 'Key Location', another tripod emerges at Rodborough Common. Although it will be initially incomprehensible to the audience, its repeated occurrence sets up a theme, suggesting that there is in fact a dastardly plot going on here. When the final tripod emerges in 'Race to the Finish' and when they all light up and summon the hypermarket, finally there is a sense that all of that weirdness has indeed built up to something - it has built up to this moment. Quite the denouement.

Of course this doesn't subtract from the fact that it's still totally ludicrous having a tripod popping up on a common every time there's a product placement in the vicinity of a wooden camel ornament.

Pacing and Such

From Poverty to Africa might just as easily have been a stage play. After all, most of the scenes consist of Thomas and Questa standing still against a backdrop of the next location, and then Jeanne enters stage left or right to say something weird. There is hardly any movement in the film at all. Thomas and Questa run a short distance when they escape from the Tent Modern, then they stand still outside a shop for ages. They walk a short distance to their hotel, then lie still in bed for the next scene. They stand still on the London Underground platform, arguing and looking gormless, before running three paces to get off the shot and on the train. They stand still at Land's End; they walk about five paces over to the heel-stone at Stonehenge. This is why the ninjas running along the road is so heartening: finally, some movement! And the same when Jeanne runs along the shore of Loch Ness, clutching her hat. And this is why 'Race to the Finish', where the car is supposedly racing towards Rodborough Common, is far more exciting than it would be in any other film: it's like getting a vista of a sunlit tropical island after days of being stuck in a dark cave. But then, of course, comes the monstrosity that is scene 52 ('Betrayal and Showdown'), where Thomas, Questa and Jeanne stand in the same place for fifteen minutes talking about the plot. (I believe that the pulses of light that the camel emits every 15 seconds, however, do make some contribution in increasing the pace of this scene.)

The lack of action in this film is shocking. After the first few black and white scenes with the wheelbarrow and the mustard theft, it's effectively just standing still, having mundane conversations and being perplexed. We were intending to improve this state of affairs in the now-scrapped new scenes, by adding some more interesting camera-work, some more scenes involving movement and even a short chase sequence.

Advice

Here is some story-related advice for other amateur film-makers:

Write a fantastic script, edit it and improve it ruthlessly BEFORE starting production
Be clear about your target audience in advance
Do not be too ambitious - i.e. don't try and pack too many ideas into one story
Don't put in action just for action's sake, but think of your poor audience. However you do it, make your film interesting.
Not every scene has to have dialogue. Consider the creative opportunities (and technical benefits) presented by non-verbal communication.

In the next post, we'll look at the characters and the actors behind them.

From Poverty to Africa: Retrospection Part 2 - Characters

Thomas Dubois, played by Matthew Tisot

Thomas is quite clearly supposed to be the main character: it is his poverty that the title references, and he is the one who starts the story for the first time at the beginning of the film. Yet Thomas is consistently overshadowed by the other characters, including Questa, who almost certainly has more lines than him. This is partly because the other characters are just generally more comic, but also because of inconsistency in his character. He is supposed to have grown up in the inner-city slums, to have had numerous addictions and to have been involved in petty crime, yet if it weren't for the fact that this was specifically revealed to us at the start, we probably wouldn't notice. Though specific mention is made of his lack of formal education, he speaks very eloquently and comes up with very logical and intelligent arguments. All of this is ostensibly due to the civilising effect of Questa and her elocution lessons, but this certainly sounds like a contrivance. In the hotel room, Thomas talks about a few of the events from his past; after that, he essentially becomes furniture until the very end, making only a brief come-back to fend off an inflatable crocodile.

The inconsistent character is not helped by Matthew's inconsistent acting. While some of it is good, other bits are dull. Sometimes he displays genuine character, such as when he relates the tale of the chicken in the fast food shop, yet he never acts like this at any other point in the film and loses this character immediately afterwards when talking about his pancreas transplant. Compare also his delivery of "That's the second time this week - unbelievable!" at the start with the line immediately afterwards, "So, anyway, why don't you tell Señora Gaitán our story?" It seems as though we just didn't know what Thomas is supposed to be like. Another part of the problem, of course, is that he doesn't have much of interest to say; Questa and Jeanne steal all of the interesting lines, especially towards the end, where Thomas' only purpose is to be confused and ask the right question so that the exposition can move forward. Matthew spent a long time trying to get the "Wow, and speaking of the world..." line right, and the result is generally quite good, if a little slowly delivered (while he tries to remember how the next bit goes).

Memorable line: "The extent of your manipulations is unbelievable!"

Worst line: "Anyway, back to the piece of paper."

Questa Dubois, played by Charlotte Kay

Two somewhat contradictory questions about Questa come to mind: firstly, is she perfect? Secondly, is she stupid? She understands Thomas' problems, and accepts him as a person despite his criminal past; she puts a firm stop to his addictions and stops him from taking up drinking. She is absolved of any blame for Jeanne's situation and suggests that she would have helped her if she could have. Partly for these reasons, Questa seems to have no character flaws, although she does display some impatience, such as on the London Underground. At the same time, she fails to fight back against her mother's tyranny, just accepting whatever she says almost unquestioningly. She may be afraid of her mother, but she doesn't even seem to show any sign of resentment, or even unhappiness. She just seems to want to make the best of the situation. We may suspect Questa of being an idiot for a number of reasons: she fails to recognise her cousin Jeanne; she wonders why the English people all look "strangely similar" without considering that they might be the same person; she stupidly remarks to her mother on the phone, "I can't tell you if she's here or not; she's told me not to say anything", despite having a gun in her face; and, of course, she married Thomas. There were further examples of Questa saying stupid things which were cut in the final version. Despite all this, Questa shows signs of being intelligent: she has an impeccable grasp of French military history; she isn't satisfied with Thomas' shrugging-off of the camel's glowing; she was supposed to have taught Thomas what he knows; and she makes generally very cogent and analytical remarks about most things, particularly in her voice-overs.

Questa's character is more consistent than Thomas', but still seems to be lacking something. This was going to be addressed further in the new scenes that we had planned: Questa was afraid of being disinherited, for example, which was going to explain why she didn't dare anger her mother too much. As it is, we have to be thankful for Charlotte's acting, which consistently made the best of the inconsistency. She injected emotion precisely where needed, and, unlike Matthew, she continued to act even when she didn't have any lines, which certainly saved the wedding reception scene from being even duller than it already was.

Memorable line: "Everyone's life is important!"

Worst line: "In fact you could say that this is the story of their products."

Jeanne Lefèvre, played by Amber Prosser

From her first major appearance on the train, Jeanne/Amber immediately provides the film with some much-needed colour. In fact, Jeanne's success in the train scene is entirely down to Amber, whose impromptu newspaper-peering antics were not detailed in the script, yet were perfectly consistent with the deranged but nefariously cunning antagonist that she plays. Her acting was, however, somewhat variable - her performance in scenes 15 (on the cliffs), 18 (in the tent) and 39 (in the inn) being somewhat flatter than her outlandish enthusiasm in scenes 40 (outside the inn), 20 (at the shop in 'London') and 47 and 49 (on the common). Generally, the scenes that were filmed later are better, presumably because she had had more time to grow into the role and to learn the fiendishly difficult lines. Given the tight schedule and the sheer length of her lines, Amber's patience and overall performance is laudable.

Jeanne is one of the better-developed characters in the story and it is perhaps a shame that we don't really get too close to her; she is, for the most part, presented as the 'other' - the mysterious stalker, the shady villain, the one who's silently pulling all the strings, right up until her plan backfires, the aliens dispose of her and she's never heard of again. Jeanne is hence not the overarching antagonist, since it quickly becomes clear that the threat posed by the aliens is orders of magnitude more serious than any damage Jeanne could have done with her hypermarket. It would not be at all controversial to say that the villains and the interactions between them are far more interesting than the protagonists. Betrayal and back-stabbing are the order of the day: Jeanne gets the ninjas to betray Claire by setting the Ultimate Gaullist Weapon on her; Jeanne then disposes of the ninjas when they refuse to join her; Claire almost looks as though she has a strange-hold over Jeanne, before Jeanne asserts her cunning once again; and finally the aliens betray her.

Memorable line: Too many to choose from! How about, "Don't come any closer! I like my personal space."

Worst line: "Brilliant, brilliant, but I mean, as I say..."

Claire Montpellier-dit-Michel, played by Rosemary Reeves

When I first read the original version of the script, I found scene 9 (the wedding reception scene) extremely funny and also somewhat innovative for being a stereotypical 'villain's exposition' that actually appears at the start of the film instead of the end. Unfortunately, this scene turned out to be rather dull, which was at least partly because Rosemary had not been able to learn her lines (and was consequently reading from a script for the whole scene! Bet you didn't notice!) and because she delivered them very slowly. In other places, her acting was memorably good - "Silence! Or I'll kill you!" - and her non-verbal acting was usually appropriate for the unhinged, power-hungry, wicked interfering mother-in-law that she was playing.

Claire is a reasonably interesting and entertaining character overall. Unlike in early versions of the script, she re-appears near the end of the film, which helps for the cohesion of the film in general but does drag out the already over-long scene 52 (the long exposition on the common). Claire's final fate isn't mentioned - she fizzles out along with Questa's mobile phone battery - and this could leave the hypothetical audience wondering how Thomas and Questa managed to escape her grasp and do what they wanted, i.e. remain married and set up their project in the Congo. The scrapped new scenes would have explained that Claire died of a haemorrhage after getting into a fight with a union woman who was trying to get better working conditions at the Montpellier-dit-Michel lumber mills; Questa then inherited the fortune and used it to finance the eco-village in the Congo.

Memorable line: "Tell me now or I'll rip off both your arms and beat you... with their soggy ends."

Worst line: "What's this? It says it's a family tree..."

Claudia García Gaitán, played by Maddy Lawrence-Jones

Most of the film is a story that Thomas and Questa are recounting to Gaitán, and this would suggest that Gaitán is a significant character. However, her role is solely to listen: we needed to introduce the idea of the story being narrated (for reasons I mentioned in part one), and that means we needed someone to be narrated to. Gaitán is from some "organisation in Venezuela" whose purpose is never explained. Her appearance is official and perhaps even intimidating, but she appears to have a sense of fun and isn't afraid to fall fast asleep when the story gets boring. We recorded a number of shots of Gaitán in various stages of boredom and sleep, and Maddy's non-verbal acting here was quite superb. The idea of inserting these clips, however, is of somewhat questionable purpose; we were effectively saying, "Yes, we know this bit is boring". According to Gaitán, the story is "very... detailed", which is, of course, a polite way of saying that it's exceptionally dull. After all, there is no reason why Thomas and Questa would have to go into the excruciating detail that they did, and I also see no reason why Gaitán felt it necessary to put up with it. The overall impression I get from this is that Thomas and Questa are just exceedingly sad people.

Some people have said that Gaitán was hard to understand, which I imagine is more because of the Spanish accent than the volume. Those familiar with Spanish will find it quite authentic.

The scrapped new scenes were going to develop Gaitán into a major character. She was to be a reformed drug dealer who was responsible for the death of the fiancée of the scrapped character Darryl Dycho.

Memorable line: "Have you heard this estory of theirs? It's very... detailed..."

Worst line: "You are the product of the couple in Cévennes National Park."

Monique, played by Milly Paine

Monique is perhaps the most colourful character in the film: an ex-security guard who is now completely obsessed with yams and only speaks in rhyme. Who could fail to be enchanted by such a ridiculous personality? In fact, I would almost be tempted to say that there is more character and interest packed into Monique's relatively brief role than there is in Thomas and Questa put together. In this way, I think Monique is one of the film's great assets. Her history as a security guard neatly allowed us to remind the hypothetical audience of Thomas' past, and if there were more time, it would have been an interesting relationship to explore.

Milly plays the character very well, though I would suggest that she delivers the rhymes a little too quickly. This was probably due to the fact that she and Maddy were practically incapable of keeping a straight face and so she needed to get through the lines as quickly as possible before she burst out laughing.

Memorable line: "Wham! Have another yam!"

Worst line: "Thank you for your introduction Thomas; unfortunately I have some very serious news to offer" (not a bad line, really).

The Ninjas, played by James Strachan and Luke Warner

Is it justifiable for me to treat the ninjas as though they are one character? Well, I don't care. They don't even have individual names (though the scrapped new scenes were going to christen them Vivantpierre and Battantpierre). The ninjas, like Monique, add some much-needed originality and spice to the film. As soon as the camera pans down on them in scene 26, we can tell that this is going to be good. Incompetent, gluttonous, Gaullist ninjas. Have you ever heard such a ridiculous concept? James and Luke's acting (and particularly James') add barrels of extra pizzaz - although the 'raised finger' gesture was originally meant to be much more prominent. One unfortunate problem with the ninjas is that their masks make their voice quality worse. Luke's acting was quite flat and hesitant in places.

Memorable line: "In the name of de Gaulle!"

Worst line: "Ninja huddle!"

Emma Scott, played by Starbuck Friend

Emma is the Scottish woman who talks to T&Q on Loch Ness. Her lines are amusing, but unfortunately spoilt by the traffic noise. It would have helped if the microphone were closer to her. This was the real reason why I added subtitles in the final cut, but the fact that her lines are in Scots provides a convenient excuse for making them obligatory. Emma's only purpose from the plot's point of view is to distract T&Q while Jeanne steals the camel. Starbuck's acting was very good, including vibrant gesticulations.

Memorable line: "Tay bad it ate him next."

Worst line: ?

The Ventriloquist, played by John Tisot

Now, a bit of background (which I explained in part one). You know that tripod that's standing behind Charlotte on the cliffs in scene 15? It wasn't meant to be there. I'm not sure why they didn't notice, but they didn't, and there's nothing you can do about it short of re-filming the scene, which was not really practical or desirable. So naturally we decided to make tripods (or rather, tripodula!) a major element of the plot. As such, Matthew introduced the ventriloquist scene in order to prepare the hypothetical audience for the fact that a tripod will shortly be on the shot. This scene is funny, in my opinion, and Mr. Tisot (Matthew's father) delivered the lines very well.

The Alien, played by Justin Morgan

The alien's lines in the stop motion sequences are not, in my opinion, particularly funny, nor are they particularly understandable (though that wasn't the point). They serve their purpose, though. The processing that I applied to my voice is quite effective, I think: I didn't want it to be too extreme in case it made it inaudible, but I did make it go deeper or weirder at appropriate points (e.g. "the time for killing is upon us"). My voice acting is generally OK.

Memorable line: "You humans go on about such drivel" (another self-referential dig at how boring the script is)

Worst line: "People start acting like headless llamas"

The Panicked Passengers, played by Ben Pennington and Starbuck Friend

Classic. That is all.

The Parents, played by James Sidwell, Sarah Kilmister, Dan Omnes and Aphra Hurford

These don't have any lines - they appear at the beginning of the film as flashbacks of Thomas' and Questa's parents. I can't really think of any criticisms. James' acting was extremely good; Sarah's was also fantastic; excellent non-verbal communication in both cases. Dan and Aphra didn't have to do much, but they did it well enough.

James and Sarah also provided the voice-overs for the comedy on the television:

"I AM your father! And thanks to gender re-assignment surgery... etc."

Great stuff.

Speaking of gender, consider the proposition that From Poverty to Africa is a feminist film. Consider - it is Mrs. Dubois, not Mr. Dubois, who is wheeling the wheelbarrow and doing the heavy work; similarly, the young Claire is the one who wields the axe; the major antagonists, Claire and Jeanne, are strong, cunning and ruthless women; Gaitán is a senior official in her organisation; Monique is a former security guard; Questa exerts a good deal of authority over her husband and teaches him elocution and logic; and the male ninjas are highly incompetent. Now, we must certainly not fall into the trap of calling a film 'feminist' just because it happens to portray a lot of powerful women and stupid men; and indeed, there was no conscious intention behind these facts. The roles of Gaitán and Monique were specifically written as 'unisex' roles and Matthew just accepted whoever said yes first, regardless of gender. Though Thomas is still supposedly the main character, his fairly uninteresting role allows the large number of female characters to come to the fore and take over the helm - witness, for example, the back-seat that Thomas takes in scene 40, outside the inn, where Questa and Jeanne argue about the military history of the UK and France. But this, in my opinion, is not really noticeable unless someone points it out, and that's probably because it was unconscious. There is no feminist statement to be found here, and so the phenomenon is of no consequence, and certainly not a problematic one.

Advice

Character-related advice for other amateur film-makers:

Allow your actors a certain leeway in adapting the lines to suit their style: forcing them to stick rigidly to the script is likely to make it unnatural for them.
Similarly, provide scope for the actors to bring in their own particular flair, mannerisms or ideas - chances are, it'll turn out better than you imagined it.
NEVER compromise on line-learning. The advice above notwithstanding, if the actors struggle to do the scene without referring to a script, then they're not ready.
Accordingly, don't try to get filming done in an ambitiously short period of time. Give the actors plenty of time to learn the script and understand their role, and help them with this process as necessary.
Actors need to continue acting even when they don't have any lines.

If your actors aren't roughly as enthusiastic about each scene as you are, chances are you've got a boring script.

Always have a clear idea of what your characters' purpose, goals, opinions, history and general personality traits are while writing the script.

Think about how your characters are changed by their experiences throughout the film.

Next, we'll look at visual elements.

From Poverty to Africa: Retrospection Part 3 - Visuals

This post will deal with the technical and creative sides of the visual elements of the film; the next post will deal with audio elements.

Each scene in From Poverty to Africa was filmed with no more than three consumer-level miniDV camcorders. In the vast majority of scenes, these were mounted on stationary tripods, and each camera was given a different perspective (generally a wide shot and two close-ups). This allowed us to simply roll the cameras and do the scene and then worry about which shots to use in the post-production stage. Had we only used one camera, we would either have had to re-film the entire scene every time something went wrong, or we'd have needed to figure out in advance what shots we wanted and move the camera accordingly. This latter option could threaten the cohesion and flow of the scene, however, since the actors would have to wait for the camera to be moved every time a new shot was required, and any slight movements they made in the meantime would be more noticeable. This technique was employed in scene 15 (on the cliffs), however, and didn't impact it too greatly.

Using three cameras clearly allows the greatest flexibility, but it does use up three times the tape. Furthermore, you should ask yourself: is it better to get three cheap cameras, or one or two good quality ones? Based on our experiences, I would now be inclined to recommend going for two good quality HDV camcorders instead of three old-hat cheapy SD ones. The newer hard-disk-based cameras are also worth considering so that you don't have to worry about tapes. You'll have to have more hard disk space available on your computer for HD video, but that's actually extremely cheap nowadays.

A further issue we had is that we generally only ever had one camera operator available for each scene. One camera operator for three cameras. Great. That means every time the actors take their positions, someone needs to go around each camera checking that it's OK, and if one of the actors goes off shot in one of the cameras that you're not supervising - well, you can't tell. Somehow this was less of a problem than you might think, probably because most of the scenes are so sluggish that the actors stay in one position all the time.

As for the shots themselves, they were strikingly uninteresting and unimaginative. Wide shot, close-up, close-up. Totally static. Very little use of panning and zooming was made. One exception is the long zooming-in to Thomas on the streets of Marseille, which was quite effective. For most scenes, very little thought went into the creative impact of each shot. Most of the time we worked out which shots to have on the day of the shoot, and most of the time it was based on pragmatic rather than creative concerns.

Is Your Action Safe?

A slightly more arcane problem goes as follows. When you record video in a broadcast format (PAL or NTSC), a certain amount of it is cut off when the video is viewed on a television. The amount that's cut off varies somewhat by television. There is a region called the 'action safe' region, within which all action will definitely be visible on all televisions. There are two problems. Firstly, our consumer camcorders do not show the region outside of the action safe region on their LCD displays. Secondly, when you watch such a video on a computer, all of it is visible. Concretely speaking, that means that if the leg of a tripod is on the shot, but is outside of the action safe region, then a bit of it will be visible on some televisions and on any version of the video that is viewed on a computer. Take a look at the right-hand side of the wide shots in scene 40 (outside the George Inn in Frocester, pictured here) and you'll see a tripod leg. This wasn't visible in the camera's LCD display, which is why I didn't flag it up as an issue at the time of shooting. This issue becomes a MAJOR headache when it comes to the green screen shoots, but I'm dedicating a whole post to green screen issues!

There are three ways you can combat this problem (although it's too late for us of course). The best thing is to get a good quality camera that lets you see the entirety of the image being recorded. The second best thing is simply to take account of this phenomenon when shooting. The third idea is to crop out the 'invisible' region when exporting for web.

Lighting

Lighting was not an issue for us because we just ignored it. This didn't really impact on the final product that much, except when it comes to the green screen scenes, which I'll deal with separately. The worst scene for lighting was scene 18, however - the one in the 'Tent Modern'. This scene was filmed in a tent inside a village hall, and the tent itself was not lit. The scene ended up very dark, and I needed to adjust the gamma and apply colour correction to get it looking reasonably decent.

It may come as no surprise that a lot of the scenes in the film were filmed in the daylight but then post-processed to look as though they took place at night. The 'Day for Night' plug-in for Final Cut Pro was invaluable for this effect, although a very similar effect can be achieved by adding a dark blue tint and desaturating the image. The parameters of the Day for Night filter cannot easily be animated, however - i.e. you can't easily make it turn gradually from day to night or vice versa - but I achieved this effect nonetheless at the end of scene 39 (after the restaurant scene) by simply duplicating the clip, adding the filter to the upper clip and animating its opacity (and also decreasing the brightness). You didn't think we left the camera there overnight, did you? No, Matthew left it there for half an hour, and I sped it up to 15000% and added this effect.

It also gets dark at the end of the 'Race to the Finish' sequence. This was easier to do because the shot changes several times, so I simply used different parameters in each shot and didn't need to add keyframes.

At the beginning of scene 52 ('Betrayal and Showdown'), Thomas and Questa are sat in the car at Rodborough Common. In reality, daylight was streaming through the windows, so much so, in fact, that the windscreen was practically white. I removed the white with a luma key, stuck a picture of Rodborough Common on the video layer underneath and added the night-time filters to both layers. The effect is not perfect, but with more tweaking I could probably have improved it.

Cohesion

Scene 7, internally called "Love", is only 20 seconds long, yet, along with the "Kiss Conquers Camel" sequence at the end, it demonstrates an especially tight integration between visuals and music, as well as carefully-considered special effects and narrative techniques. It is worth examining these two scenes in more detail.

In scene 7, Thomas and Questa see each other for the first time in the woods and they fall in love instantly. Thomas drops his axe. Questa drops her logs. They run towards each other and embrace. The scene begins in black and white. All of the flashback scenes up until this point have also been in black and white, intended to symbolise not just the anteriority of the events but also the bleakness of Thomas' situation prior to his meeting Questa. As such, when he sees Questa for the first time in the woods, she alone is in colour, and the woods behind her are in black and white. As she runs towards him, the colour spreads out from her to fill the screen, and from thence on, the film is in colour. In this way, the special effects are clearly exploited to convey the idea of just how much Questa enriched Thomas' life. This scene, incidentally - exactly as I've described it - was part of the very first draft of the film that Matthew wrote, and, despite how clichéd and tacky the idea is, it is a masterful concept.

Remember, you cannot separate the foreground of a video from the background unless you film the foreground subjects on a plain colour background, i.e. a green or blue screen. This scene was not filmed using the green screen, yet I still managed to achieve the effect of isolating Charlotte in colour and putting the background around her in black and white. This was because most of the background consisted of leaves, which are, surprisingly enough, green. So I used the chroma key filter to key out the leaves. I then duplicated the clip and desaturated it (i.e. put it in black and white) beneath the foreground layer, which I cropped so that it framed Charlotte. I increased the edge thinning of the chroma keyer quite liberally, softened the edges, then applied a blur effect to the background to make her stand out even more. An interesting consequence of doing things this way was that when she drops the logs, they turn black and white (you'd have to watch it frame by frame to notice this really, though), which would convey the impression that Questa no longer cares about the logs. This would not have happened if we'd used a green screen (though you could still create the effect if you wanted to).

To make the colour spread out from around her, I duplicated the clip again with no keying or desaturation and placed it between the background desaturated layer and the foreground keyed layer. I applied an oval-shaped matte to this layer and simply animated its size. Similarly, when the shot switched to Thomas, I made the colour spread out towards him from Questa's direction.

I was able to compose music to fit this scene quite precisely. I used a 'call-and-response' structure, so that the piano represents Thomas and the flute that responds to it represents Questa. As the besotted pair get closer to each other, the piece gets faster and the piano and flute start to play together. The instruction at the top of the sheet music was "Allegro e molto formaggio", meaning "Lively and lots of cheese", since both the scene and the music are decidedly cheesy.

The 'Kiss Conquers Camel' sequence is the part where Questa pushes Thomas to the ground and kisses him, causing Claire's intimacy warning system to go crazy and explode and causing the camel to explode and send a last packet of information to the hypermarket, causing it to explode. The music is in fact a remix of the romantic theme that was used for scene 7 - it starts off in emulation of the romantic theme, then becomes more frantic when the shot switches to the scales, and there are chords to match the explosions. This sequence contains very little dialogue, but I think it is very effective at conveying what is going on, since each shot leads quite smoothly into the next, and the close connection between the camel and the hypermarket has been firmly established throughout the scene by the pulses of light that are exchanged every 15 seconds.

The alien hypermarket was created by DB Digital 3D, a 3D modelling company that I'd strongly recommend - it's very affordable and provides excellent, friendly service. The hypermarket is probably one of the best special effects in the film.

Software

For editing, I was using Final Cut Studio (version 1), which is a professional suite of applications by Apple. Final Cut Pro is the main component of this suite, and in my opinion it is a pleasure to use. It is well worth learning its armoury of keyboard shortcuts, as they can be extremely powerful. For example, it was often necessary for me to move clips along by exact amounts of time - to do this, you can simply click on the clip and then type +5, for example, to move it forward by five frames, or +2.6 to move it forward two seconds and six frames.

I did encounter one bug with Final Cut Pro (at least I assume it's a bug), which caused me to lose the master sequence in which all the scenes were put together; I got the curt error message "Not found" when I tried to open it. You see, each scene in the film is a sequence, and then there is a master sequence that contains all of these sequences in the right order. But some of the scenes contained other sequences themselves and it seems that it is inadvisable to nest too many sequences together. If your project file starts getting big, split it into multiple projects, and if you have too many nested sequences, export one of them as an uncompressed movie. I'm using version 5 of FCP and I'm not sure if you'd get the same issues in the newer versions.

While Final Cut Pro runs extremely smoothly on my aging iMac G5 2.0GHz with 1GB RAM (I know - pretty inadequate by today's standards), Motion and DVD Studio Pro are decidedly sluggish and quite prone to crashing. Motion is Apple's own motion graphics program. I tend to use it purely for its library of particle effects (e.g. the pulses of light that are exchanged between the camel and the hypermarket).

I used The GIMP and Inkscape for image manipulation and creation purposes, such as for the gamut of images that appear in scene 9 to illustrate the camel's history. These are free and open source software alternatives to the formidably expensive Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator applications. In my opinion they are perfectly good for the vast majority of purposes; they are actually quite easy to use and also very stable, even on the Mac, which they weren't designed for.

Advice

Technical film-related advice to others:

Get a decent camera. You're making a film. The last thing you want to scrimp on is the camera. I mean, seriously, what were we thinking?
Use multiple cameras if possible. Use a clapper-board or some improvisation of one for ease of audio-visual synchronisation (we didn't).
Think about what shots you want, and make them interesting!
Understand the action safe region!
For indoor shots, make sure to take lighting into account.
Record a pre-roll before each take - i.e. about 5 seconds of nothing before the action starts. This is because most cameras don't actually start recording (or don't start recording sound) for a little while after you press record.
Record a post-roll after each take - i.e. about 10 seconds of nothing after the action finishes. This helps to ensure that there is continuous timecode: if you review what has been shot, you should leave the tape in the post-roll region so that the camera doesn't reset the timecode.
If you're using tapes, make sure to number and label them when each one is full. This saves a lot of time later on because it'll be easy to locate the footage you want. You also need to make sure you input the tape's reel number before capturing it to your computer so that it can log everything correctly.

Next we'll look at audio.

From Poverty to Africa: Retrospection Part 4 - Audio

Amongst film-makers it is often said that audio is half of video, which is, of course, nonsensical. What they mean is that audio is just as important as video, and here I agree whole-heartedly. If the sound is bad, it doesn't matter how good the visuals are - it's ruined. Making the sound more convincing, adding better sound effects and an appropriate, good quality musical score all make a massive contribution to the film's overall impact. Do not compromise here. The sound is extremely important.

Which is yet another reason why From Poverty to Africa is something of a failure. Cheap, consumer-level camcorders with their built-in microphones are simply not good enough. We realised this quite early on. There was no doubt: we needed an external microphone, so we got a Røde VideoMic, a fairly inexpensive hypercardioid shotgun microphone that had good reviews. And indeed, it was very effective. Compare, for example, scene 18 (in the Tent Modern), which was filmed without the microphone, with scene 9 (the wedding reception) or any of the green screen scenes. Nevertheless, a whole raft of new issues came surging to prominence as a result of the use of this microphone.

Firstly, the Røde VideoMic, like practically any film accessory, is mounted on the camera's standard hot shoe mount. (If you've never heard the phrase 'hot shoe mount' before, do pause for a while to be amused at how ridiculous the name is.) But guess what? Our useless, cheapy consumer-grade miniDV camcorders were so useless, cheapy and consumer-grade that they did not have the hot shoe. Not even a cold shoe. Not even a tepid clog. Furthermore, only one of our three cameras had a microphone port. At first, we simply fixed the microphone to the camera using elastic bands, which worked, but was rather clunky. We also had an accessory for the microphone called a 'dead cat', which is a wind shield that you fit over the microphone. (Pause: you put the microphone on a hot shoe and then put a dead cat on it.) With the microphone fixed to the camera by means of elastic bands, the distance between the microphone and the lens was not great, and so the fibres of the dead cat were occasionally visible in the shot, flapping in the wind. Observe this phenomenon, for example, in scene 8 (at Notre Dame) - though I managed to counter it somewhat by adding the vignette effect. Eventually we got a new camera that had both a microphone port and a hot shoe. Unfortunately this doesn't solve the 'flapping dead cat' problem entirely, so it's worth watching out for that if you use this accessory yourself.

Furthermore, there were a few scenes in which the crew forgot to turn the microphone on. This may seem like a problem for which there is no solution (except re-taking), but remember that we did have multiple cameras in almost all scenes, so there was still the crappy sound from the other camera's internal microphone. In most cases, however, this sound was intolerably bad, and we had to resort to the dubbing and narration solutions. The latter is much easier and more effective. The idea is that Thomas and Questa are narrating the story in the future, so for any scene that did not have usable audio, we could simply record a 'narrated' version of it and make the clip's 'native' audio very quiet. For narrative reasons, however, some parts had to be dubbed.

Dubbing

Dubbing is not easy. Seriously, you do not want to get involved with dubbing. If the actor's lips are visible, you need to get the actor to record their lines such that they match their lips exactly. This takes a few tries, but does work. If you're dubbing a long scene, though, it'll take ages. Thankfully we only had a few isolated lines that demanded dubbing: those in scene 17 outside the Tent Modern (from "I wonder where we should start") and those in scene 39 in the restaurant (such as "Thanks for your advice and recommendation..."). A further problem is that dubbed audio will not sound as though it was recorded in the location where the video was recorded. This is less noticeable if the whole scene is dubbed, but if the scene consists of some dubbed and some non-dubbed sections, it is surprisingly noticeable and jarring. This is an excellent example of how audio is so unconsciously important. We don't generally notice that our voices sound different if we're in a car park compared to if we're in a living room or a big hall, but record yourself saying the same thing in two different locations and you'll notice a marked acoustic difference. And when you're dubbing, the actor is recording straight into the microphone; on location, the microphone is further away (unless it's on a boom, which it wasn't in our case). Making a recording sound like it was recorded on location instead of in a studio (or, in our case, in my bedroom) is very difficult, although tools do exist for this purpose.

Then there's the problem of ambient sound. In a restaurant, you can hear the sounds of other diners; in London, you can hear the traffic noise; and just generally, in any environment, there is some background noise. Even in an empty room with nothing going on, there is some kind of 'room tone'. If you dub some speech, then the parts of the scene in between the speaking will be completely silent, and this is actually very jarring and unnatural-sounding. You need appropriate ambient noise. The best thing is to make a point of recording a small amount of 'nothing' at every location, just in case you run into situations like this: this is called a 'wild track'. Thankfully, we had plenty of ambient sound even when we hadn't specifically recorded a wild track. (This was, in fact, one of the things that we had planned for in advance.)

A few scenes were intended to be dubbed all along - these were the scenes that took place in the car while it was moving. It was rightly deemed that it would be too unsafe to act in a scene while driving on the motorway. What we (they) did was to record the actors mouthing their lines (or more accurately, just mouthing anything) while the car was moving and then record the lines themselves separately. In other words, there was no attempt at lip-synching here. This makes scenes 31 ("This car smells quite fresh...") and 45 (the start of 'Race to the Finish') somewhat unconvincing.

Like I say, stay away from dubbing at all costs. If it turns out that your sound is bad, don't think, "Oh, we'll just dub it!" Seriously consider filming the scene again. Check the sound quality thoroughly during the shoot to prevent issues.

Noise Removal

If you use a camera's internal microphone (don't, though), you will always pick up the hum of the camera's electrical magic. Such a regular and consistent hum is an easy target for automated noise removal, such as can be achieved with Audacity. I used Soundtrack Pro, however, and achieved good results. The first advantage of having an external microphone is that it gets the microphone away from the camera and so lessens the hum noise. This is a rule: get the microphone away from the camera and as close to the talent as possible. For professionals, that means using a boom or clip-on microphones. Seriously consider these options. We didn't, but I definitely believe that it would have had a massive positive impact on the film's overall quality. Even if you can't go to this length, I cannot stress enough the importance of getting the microphone as close as possible to the actors. Look at the beginning of scene 42 (Loch Ness): you wonder why we subtitled it? The fact that Emma (played by Starbuck Friend) was speaking Scots was just a convenient excuse to make the subtitles obligatory, but the real problem is that you can barely hear her. Yes, there's a lot of traffic rocketing past the shores of Loch Ness; yes, it was windy; yes, there was someone playing the bagpipes not far off; but if the microphone were closer to her, it would have made a big difference.

Scene 40 (outside the George Inn in Frocester) is another scene spoilt by traffic noise. In this scene we were successfully using the Røde microphone and we placed it as close as possible to the actors. But we were still filming right next to a road, and despite the fact that Frocester is a tiny place in the 'nowhere' region of the English countryside, cars are still noisy when they pass through it. It is impossible to remove traffic noise in post-production. You can try, and you can let me know if you have any success, but as far as I'm concerned, it's impossible. Noise removal works best when the noise is a regular sound at a particular frequency, or when it's at a particularly low volume relative to the sound you want; in the former case you can use equaliser filters, high cuts and low cuts to make sounds at particular frequencies quieter, and in the latter case you can use a gate to cut off anything in a particular frequency that's below a certain amplitude threshold. This works wonders for electronic hums. But the noise of a car going past is at practically every frequency and is very loud. I'm sorry, but if a car goes right past you during a line, you need to re-take. If it happens too often, you need to go somewhere else, or get clip-on microphones. You don't want to resort to dubbing, after all.

Soundtrack Pro was also useful for certain effects, such as the 'megaphone' effect on the ferry and the 'loudspeaker' effect on Claire's voice when she's on the telephone, both achieved with low pass and bandpass filters, as well as a compressor and reverberation. The stock sound effects that come with the program were also invaluable, and added a lot of value to the sinking ferry and the exploding hypermarket (for example).

Advice

Technical audio-related advice:

Before filming, consider all the sources of potential noise. If possible, purge them. If the environment is too noisy, think again.
Use an external microphone.
Get the microphone as close to the talent as possible. If possible, use a boom or clip-on microphone.
Don't forget to turn the microphone on!
Point the microphone in such a position so as to maximise the pick-up. Our microphone was hypercardioid, which means it picks up mostly from a region right in front of it and a smaller region right behind it (i.e. not so much from the sides).
Record a wild track at each location - i.e. a small amount of ambient sound. It can be surprisingly useful even in non-dubbing situations.

Next we'll consider the music.

From Poverty to Africa: Retrospection Part 5 - Music and Meta-Diegesis

Having an original musical score added a great deal to the feeling of cohesion in this film, in my opinion, as it allows certain plot elements to have musical 'anchors', which helps the audience to make unconscious links between them. The music gives the production its own distinctive sound, so that some melodies may be just as memorable as the characters' lines. It also means that you can make the music fit the action precisely. We were lucky enough to be able to get together a talented group of musicians who played most of the tracks that I composed, and we recorded them in a studio called Rural Studios - a very affordable and highly recommended recording studio in a delightfully peaceful and beautiful location. Just so that you know what I'm talking about, I'll list the pieces of music here, in the order in which they appear in the film. Those that we didn't record at the studio were made with software instruments instead.

Opening Theme - oboe, clarinet, cello - played during the opening credits
Theme of Romance - violin, flute, keyboard, cello, recorders - played when Thomas and Questa meet for the first time in the woods
Main Theme - trumpet, saxophone, cello, oboe, flute - played during the wedding reception
Conspiratorial Camel - made with software instruments - played when Questa explains the camel's history and again during Jeanne's long exposition at the end
Alien Instruction Manual - made with software instruments - played during the alien's voice-over scenes
The Journey Continues - keyboard, recorder, flute, cello, oboe, alto voice - played during the stop motion sequences and at the start of the ending credits
Lost In Paris - keyboard, flute - played when the pair are lost in paris
There's a Rainbow in My Camel - different versions of this melody are played each time the camel glows
Sunken Pride - trumpet, saxophone, cello - played when the ship sinks
Eccentric Englishmen - trumpet, saxophone, cello, keyboard - played when the couple run off to the posh shop, and when the camera pans up their eccentric clothing
Gaullist Vigilantes - trumpet, saxophone, keyboard, flute - played in the first ninja scene
Race to the Finish - made with software instruments - played for the first time when Jeanne runs along the shore of Loch Ness, then again in the scenes on the motorway, and again at the end when the alien starts being evil
Theme of Espionage - clarinet, violin - played when Jeanne is spying on the couple at Loch Ness
The Loch Ness Monster Attacks - trumpet, saxophone, cello - played when the Ultimate Gaullist Weapon attacks
Arrival at Rodborough Common - oboe, clarinet, keyboard - played in the car at Rodborough Common
Kiss Conquers Camel - violin, flute, recorders, cello, keyboard - played when Questa kisses Thomas at the end
Saving the World - oboe, flute, cello, alto voice, tenor voice, keyboard - played when Thomas and Questa are sat amongst the flames at the end
Final Message - oboe, violin, cello, keyboard - played during the alien's recorded message at the very end.

The film's main theme actually doesn't receive much prominence: it's playing in the background of the wedding reception. It would have appeared during the credits, but it was clear that The Journey Continues was a much better quality piece all round. Nevertheless, the oboe section of the main theme was the basis for the Theme of Espionage, and the subsequent flute section was the basis of The Loch Ness Monster Attacks. The opening theme is merely a shortened version of the main theme played with different instruments. Lost in Paris, Gaullist Vigilantes, Sunken Pride, Saving the World and parts of Race to the Finish and The Journey Continues all contain 'remixes' of this main melody. The part of Race to the Finish that plays when Questa is talking about Jeanne in the car is a remix of the beginning of The Journey Continues, since it is effectively a more frantic 'journey' scene. Kiss Conquers Camel starts off in emulation of the Theme of Romance for obvious reasons.

The tune that plays every time a tripod emerges at Rodborough Common is effectively the camel's theme: it plays for the first time when we see the camel on the mantelpiece, and Conspiratorial Camel makes extensive use of it. Six iterations of this tune, each one higher than the last, appear in Race to the Finish when all of the tripods emit their light, just prior to the hypermarket's emergence. In this way, there is a complex set of leitmotifs that weave their way through the story, evoking different feelings to suit the action but remaining broadly compatible and cohesive.

The film's score could probably not be described as 'cinematic', nor is it of a truly professional quality, but I don't think 'cinematic' would necessarily have been appropriate for a film of this ilk. This is not a serious film; it's a comic romp of sheer absurdity, and it deserved to have a somewhat quirky score. Not to mention the fact that I did not have an orchestra at my disposal and, even if I had, I wouldn't have been able to handle it. What I'm saying is that a full, professional-quality orchestral score would have been overkill for an amateur comedic weird-fest like From Poverty to Africa; it would have been veritably discordant.

Those pieces that we didn't get around to recording at the studio were produced with software instruments in GarageBand - a very basic MIDI composing application that comes with all new Macs - and processed in Soundtrack Pro. The results are actually more than satisfactory, I think. The advantage of doing a piece like Race to the Finish in this way was that it was easier to insert looping drum beats and other sound effects, and I was able to use different instruments, such as the electric guitar that makes a brief appearance in the first iteration of the chorus, or the entirely synthesised instrument that appears in Alien Instruction Manual.

The Journey Continues is quite clearly the best piece in the score. It was played and sung beautifully. It has quite an interesting structure, building up to the introduction of the film's main theme and then elaborating on it in new ways. And who wouldn't fall in love with the little trill that Maddy spontaneously played on the oboe towards the end? The score for this piece did not originally include the oboe, but it was suggested that the oboe could replace the alto's part. We couldn't decide whether the oboe or the alto sounded better, so we included both, thereby duplicating that part. I was concerned that the piece sounded too 'busy', but overall, it seems to have worked very well. Saving the World is probably my second favourite piece, followed by Gaullist Vigilantes, which fits with its subject matter very neatly, especially the part where the ninjas walk across the zebra crossing, which is accompanied by a tune on the piano which sounds to me like a car's indicator. Kiss Conquers Camel (pictured) was the most difficult piece to play because it's very fast and changes key signature three times.

The music that plays during the rolling part of the credits is Un Matin, a piece of Creative Commons licenced, independent French pop music by Christophe Bouvet, which Matthew found on Jamendo. Jamendo is an excellent music sharing website and contains the highest density of good quality music that I've found in any repository of independent music.

Meta-Diegesis

I have made up the term meta-diegesis to refer to a technique which may or may not already have a name - broadly speaking it is the technique of messing with the audience's perception of where a particular element in a scene comes from. In film, 'diegetic sound' is sound that occurs within the film's own universe, such as the dialogue - things the characters can actually hear. 'Non-diegetic sound' is sound that has been added to a scene to create a certain mood, and the audience understands that only they can hear it - not the characters. The clearest example of where From Poverty to Africa deliberately confuses these two types of sound is where the radio broadcast in the car interrupts the music (Race to the Finish) with the words "We interrupt this broadcast of suspenseful film music to bring you the latest headlines". The music comes back again when the announcement ends. Thus, what the audience originally assumed to be non-diegetic sound is actually diegetic. (The fact that the music isn't really on the radio and is added to the scene in exactly the same way as if it were non-diegetic is not relevant.)

The main theme that plays during the wedding reception is supposed to be diegetic, i.e. it is supposedly being played by a band or a stereo system in the background. But it is nevertheless recognisably the main theme tune of the film, which suggests that this music actually has some existence in the film's universe. This idea is backed up by the fact that Monique sings the same tune (using the word 'yam' for each note) as she wanders through the corn field in the Congo. And Questa's mobile phone ring tune is a remix of the Theme of Romance. We might even suggest that the Conspiratorial Camel music that starts playing when Claire comes on the phone and stops playing just before Questa declares that her phone's battery has run out is in fact music that's coming out of the phone's speaker as well. Thus, the non-diegetic music has diegetic parallels, and the effect of this is similar to the more general technique of meta-fiction: to draw attention to the fact that this is a film, a story, a fiction; it's not real. Questa's line "expecting to confront a mad-woman whose position we know well enough for the build-up of dramatic tension" is a concrete example of meta-fiction, where the techniques of film itself are referred to by the film's own characters.

A similar idea is happening with the transitions between the 'past' and 'present' timelines. When Jeanne says "sorry to interrupt your conversation" in the past timeline, Monique comes into the room in the present-day timeline, interrupting the telling of the story, with the exact same words. This again plays on the audience's perception of the origin of the sound and the relationship between the 'story' as it is told and the 'story' as it actually played out at the time that it happened. Both of them, of course, are nothing more than stories being told by the film-makers. This technique is repeated three times in scene 52. The most interesting one is where Questa's mobile phone rings - and we realise that it is ringing in the present-day timeline too.

This 'meta-diegesis', as I have called it, is not restricted to the sound. An exactly parallel phenomenon is used in the 'Race to the Finish' scenes. Questa says "we'll have to go to Rodborough Common ourselves, while there may still be time" and a timer promptly appears on the screen, which we immediately presume is counting down the time that the couple has to arrive on Rodborough Common before it's too late. Such a timer would have to be a non-diegetic timer, since the characters are not aware of it and it has no physical existence in the world. But this is precisely where the film fools you, for at the end of this frantic sequence, the timer reaches zero, and the shot expands to fill the screen, revealing that it did in fact have a physical existence in the story: it was Claire's microwave timer. So the non-diegetic visuals transpired to be diegetic after all, and were not related to the hypermarket, but to the time that it took for Claire to make her crocodile-busting cheeseburgers. This is one of the most subtle jokes in the entire film, and I do hope that it doesn't go unappreciated.

Advice

Music-related advice for amateur film-makers:

If you can get an original score composed for your film, it is definitely worth it!
And if you can do this - it is definitely best to compose the music when the scene is already edited, so that you can fit them together much more neatly.
Having the music played by real instruments has great advantages for the quality and feel of the score, but it is hard work to organise and does limit you to the particular instruments you have available.
If you can't have an original score, you could browse sites like Jamendo, Magnatune, macjams, opsound and so on; it's amazing how much high-quality stuff is out there, available royalty-free.
If you're making a comedic film, meta-diegesis is an interesting idea to play with, but for most genres it would probably be inappropriate.

Now let's delve into the world of green screens.