In 2011, I wrote an article for the magazine of our high school. They never ended up using it, and I lost all my copies of the article, or at least I thought I had. I found it again on my Google Drive, and so here it is. Unedited.
And it started with a Bang!
Our film production team had already worked together on numerous occasions through 2010 (our Year 9), designing websites, and so, when we figured out we were all in the same Year 10 Media Studies class, we (James Ashworth, Aaron Wong and I) immediately cottoned on to the idea we would work together. And so Bang Films was born (title reference). Not long after we had a half-hour movie project [a TV ad that went well over duration]. Then we considered moving on to comparably bigger and better things. And we did. The Blank Job was our next big project.
Basically, the plot is this: a disc that the police need as evidence goes missing, and the courier that delivers it is an ex-gang-member and may or may not have deliberately lost it [the disc contained incriminating phone records that would have promised imprisonment for senior members of the gang]. But the disc that the courier lost was a fake disc, and he actually still had the original. The adventure continues under Mangere Bridge, where the gang leader is waiting, in an exchange intended to swap his sister who had been kidnpped as leverage, for the real disc. Considering that we managed to fit all that in five and a half minutes, I don’t think we did too badly (or we did terribly; depends on your outlook).
After that, we immediately started planning a half feature length film (45 minutes) that is of a similar tune to The Blank Job, although, it will invariably be better written. We are also planning an Urban-Western (a modern take on the Western genre, however, instead of starring a chain smoking, gun-welding gunslinger, will have a chain-texting lawyer, who occasionally dons a backwards baseball cap, as the lead.
It’s funny because we thought we’d make heaps of bloopers in each of our productions that meant we needed a huge bloopers reel, but we didn’t. We made bloopers – but not many of them were funny! Although, where our comedy was lacking, our technology and resources weren’t – for example, we created our own boom mike and recording studio.
Our filming processes were otherwise, reasonably standard. We used 1080p cameras, meaning we shot mostly in HD, and that was one (and possibly the only) piece of our process that wasn’t really complicated. We did, however, shoot far too much footage, and have had to cut most of it out of the finished products.
The Blank Job was actually entered into Cut! National Film Competition, which is for films of the drama or documentary genre [of 4 to 6 minutes]. We also produced an ad for the Fair Go School Ad Awards, and wait with baited breath to hear how we fared.
Now we have begun screenwriting for projects that won’t get underway until next year some time, can’t say when – but hoping it’ll all work out. It will, or it’d better …
Dylan Thompson