The Killing Moon

Starting January 2006, filmmaker Sridhar Reddy accounts the process, thoughts, and musings during the creation of his second feature film, THE KILLING MOON.

Thursday, January 18, 2007

The Movie that Started it all.

Gotta love technology. Below you will find the complete film of what I tell everyone is my favourite film of all time. It's "The Street of Crocodiles" by the Brothers Quay.

There's quite a story to my liking of this film, and this story is basically the telling of how I became a filmmaker. Read on, and you might find a parallel to how you too found your passion in life.

I first saw the film on public television in 1987 when I was 12, and it burned several vivid images in my brain, images that I could nary comprehend, but at that age I knew only one thing: that I liked those images very much. I didn't see the film again for almost a year, not knowing what the title was or who had made it. But again, on public television, it aired again and this time I watched it with joy and scientific precision. I made sure to tape it, and I watched it over, and over, and over again. I made notes, drawings, schematics about every frame of the film, and I knew that someday I wanted to make a film like this. I had to.

We didn't have a camera in the house, so my first attempts at animation came through making flip-books. I would spend almost all of my evenings after school drawing on note cards, drawing decrepit figures wandering in a world of decay and rot. I wish I saved those drawings, I spent so much time on them and they probably had a raw beauty to them that I could never possibly replicate today. Each flip book would provide me with about two to three seconds of footage, and I made a collection of them to give me about a twenty five second "film." It was gratifying, but it wasn't nearly enough.

I would spend weekends at the library in Aurora, Colorado reading up about stop motion animation and filmmaking. The Quays hadn't achieved the cult status then that they have now, so there was no mention of their work or how they made films. There were, however, a couple of books on Eastern European animation, particularly the works of Jan Svankmeyer. There were a few works of Svankmeyer on VHS, but none of the libraries in Colorado stocked them. I did however find an old catalog in the library, a catalog to order films through the mail from a store called FACETS in Chicago. They claimed to have every film on Earth, although they didn't have any of the Quay films so I held that comment quite suspect.

The Svankmeyer tape was very expensive for a kid in middle school, so I had to devise a way to get some money (without having to go through the embarrassment of asking my parents to buy me a tape of weird, semi-erotic Eastern European animation). As most Indian kids, I never had an allowance, but I did have one source of revenue- my lunch money. Mom would give me a dollar a day for lunch, and the tape was almost thirty dollars. So I skipped lunch for a month, and acquired my first ever foreign film. It took almost three weeks for the film to arrive in the mail, and I was excited beyond belief.

I watched the Svankmeyer tape in private, and it blew me away. It was so raw, so primal, so gross, and so completely enthralling. Like with the Quay film, I made notes upon notes upon notes. I started to write little scripts for films and comics that dealt with issues of death, of rebirth, and of rotten meat. Good thing my mother never read this stuff, she probably would have put a quick end to whatever fascinations I had with art!

And then the day came- my father bought a Panasonic video camera, and he managed to use it all but once, and it was starting to gather dust in the corner. I confiscated the camera and set up a little studio in the basement of my house, where I built small sets and used the one light that the camera came with to light my scenes. I tried my best to build puppet armatures out of wire and garbage, but it just wasn't happening- I couldn't make the armatures stand up. So i needed my actor, and lo and behold I found an old Mickey Mouse doll that had almost 12 points of articulation. I was robust, it could stand in various positions, and it was perfect but for one thing- it looked like Mickey Mouse.

So I transformed him. I gave Mickey dead eyes and stripped him of his robes- he was a black, almost unrecognizable creature and he had quite a journey ahead of him. My casting was complete.

There was one problem with using a video camera for stop motion animation, and that was that the shortest shot you could take was a one second shot (done by tapping the red record button like a maniac to ensure the fastest start/ stop time). I had made the understanding that good quality animation was done at 24-frames per second, and here I was working at a pitiful 1-frame per second. After much trial and error, i devised a plan to alleviate this, if just a little.

I dug up our old VCR and ran it into our new one, so to make a dubbed copy. The quality was good, and the older VCRs had a limitation in that if you pressed fast-forward during the dub, it would record in fast forward. It was a technical glitch for the technology, but it served me very well. So I went ahead and shot my movie in 24-frames per 24 seconds (over a one month period where I would move Mickey's arms and legs bit by bit, shot by shot), and complied all of my footage on one tape (the movie was edited in camera, I wouldn't figure out how to use the 2-VCR system for editing until later). I would then dub my footage onto a new tape, but while pressing the fast-forward button on the source VCR. This bumped up my frame rate from one frame per second to about eight frames per second. There were distortion lines from the FF funtion, but I could live with that, because in that moment, Mickey came to life. I had given movement to that which was dead and immovable. It was a landmark moment of my life.

Using the dub system, I was also able to put in music directly on the tape, and my music of choice was "Stigmata" by Ministry (I was a twisted child by every means).

And so I had made my version of "Street of Crocodiles," and while it was shit in comparison, I was hooked. For life. It wasn't later until college that I made a second attempt at the Brothers Quay, where I made an 8mm film called "Haus Der Luge (House of Lies)" for a beginning filmmaking class that I took pass/ fail. The intro title card of the film had, in small letters, "apologies to the Brothers Quay." The film was the closest thing to "Street of Crocodiles" I had made, and I sent it to the Denver Underground Film Festival, and it won 3rd place. I still have 'Haus' on tape, but unfortunately the Mickey movie was recorded over, as it was imperative that I had to tape the Denver Broncos' playoff run to the Super Bowl, in which they got their asses kicked. It is gone, forever.

And maybe that's why I had to write this long, exhaustive entry. Because it's the only record of my first movie I ever made. It lives in my head only, but it's still the most important piece of art that I've ever made and ever will make. It's my treasure.

And I owe it all to public television. Enjoy the film below, and I hope you see the magic in it that I first saw so long ago.

http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=1291202799

Monday, January 15, 2007

too long, but much progress made

Howdy folks (should anyone decide to read this, actually).

It's been a very long time (again) since I last posted on this blog, but (again) for good reason. 2006 was a very, very busy year.

First and foremost, I went and got myself married to my college sweetheart. Happiness reigns, and the wedding was far more difficult to put together than doing a feature film. Seriously.

As for the film itself, we were able to get a distributor for the US rights to the film! After so much time, we finally got a taker, a company that appreciates what we're trying to accomplish with this kind of film.

With the distributor set, its become much easier to get potential parties to talk to you, because it means that your film actually has a fighting chance, that it will actually be seen by people. Very reassuring.

I've just returned from India where we've started preliminary casting for the film. I've sat and spoken with John Abraham, who is one of the top up-and-coming talents in the Indian film industry. John made a splash internationally with his work in Deepa Mehta's acclaimed film WATER. Since then he's been receiving offers from around the world.

I like John. He's a model-turned-actor, and in his past performances it shows. But what's great about him is is his vision, his courage, and his want to be better. Very humble guy, very down to Earth. I like him, and I think we can do wonders with this script. Right now all things point positive to him joining the production, and if he does so, we will probably have more access to budgetary resources, given his name has some equity in the Indian and diaspora box offices. Fingers and toes are crossed.

We're also looking at actresses and supporting parts. I've hired Uma DaCuhna, who is unofficially India's first casting director. She's an intelligent, compassionate lady who has a strong desire to make good films in India, and I think we connected on an artistic and idealistic level. She wholeheartedly supports young filmmakers, and is a golden resource to anyone with a good idea and passion for film. I think she'll do a wonderful job for the film, and we're already looking at a few names for the part of Anjali. Some names in particular I've taken notice to- Amrita Rao, Dipannita Sharma, Deepika Padukone, and Neetu Chandra.

Stateside, we were always concerned that the quality of fight and stunt coordinators in India is not up to international standard. We made the decision to look to Hong Kong and the US for fight masters, and that discussion always starts with one man- Master Yuen Woo Ping, he of 'Crouching Tiger' and 'Matrix' fame. We managed to make contact with Master Ping's agent at CAA, and they are interested in reading the script, which I sent over a few days ago. Master Ping is expensive, but his involvement alone will pay for itself, and given that our budget is smaller by Hollywood standards as is, we should not have a problem compensating Master Ping. That is provided he wants to do the project. I've run out of fingers and toes to cross, so I'll cross my eyes or something. That hurts.

I'm keeping very busy, though. I signed a publishing deal to do a 56-page, one shot graphic novel about THE KILLING MOON. I am writing and doing the pencils for the book, which is taking up most of my time right now. I've finished about 28 pages, and it's turning out excellent, if I can say so myself. I'll post more about the book once it nears completion, but I'll leave you with this teaser- the book is set in the future, and the film in the past. It encompasses the entire world and mythology of THE KILLING MOON, and I think readers will really enjoy it. I've described it as a mix between Dave Sim's CEREBUS THE AARDVARK and Frank Miller's THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS, with a hint of Alan Moore's THE WATCHMEN. Lofty ambitions? You bet. But I figure if I want to make the best work, I should aim high.

So as you can see, the hustle continues. I'd be lying if my marriage has made me expedite things and has given me a new sense of urgency- I'm part of a partnership that I have to help provide for, and if that's not a fire under anyone's ass then I don't know what is (children, of course, but luckily neither my wife or I are planning to pass our genetics along anytime soon).

Sleepless days and celebrations lay ahead, and I'm ready to go in head first. As Gabrielle Union so eloquently stated in one of my guilty pleasure films of all time:

Bring it on.

I'll be better with this blog. Promise!