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:
- Story (this post)
- Characters
- Visual elements
- Audio
- Music
- Green Screen
- Trivia
- Conclusion
"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.
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
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.
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