I’m working as a production runner on the third series of The IT Crowd. Having never been to Pinewood before it’s become something of a myth in my brain, populated with celebrities suckling on peeled grapes in their house-sized trailers while the teamsters smoke cigarettes outside enormous corrugated soundstage doors and buggies maniacally zoom directors from office to set.

I’m not far off.

Well. I am. But it’s a nebulous sprawl of a place, that’s a fact, and everyone still seems to be buzzing from having the latest 007 production in residence. Currently the big man on campus is Prince Of Persia and a lot of the supporting artists I talk to have worked on that as well.

I get through to lunch, and realize I’m having a blast. Pinewood is FUN, I think to myself, grinning like a lunatic as I sprint across a car-park trying not to slosh any of the six coffees I’m juggling over my skinny wrists. Then I stop grinning, because I look like a lunatic. But still. I don’t know if I really expected to have fun!
Because:
a) The last time I was on a multi-camera TV set was as an actor, and the runners never really looked like they were enjoying themselves too much, all frazzled eyes as they frantically checked their pockets for the last receipt they might have forgotten to get and furiously scribbled down dinner orders.

b) Most of us have been there, and while obviously as much an integral part of the structure as any other on-set job, I think it’s fair to say that being a runner is, well, a bit mindless.
Sometimes mindless is nice, and thankfully one is manic enough not to worry about it, or even to concoct this blog, which is scribbled on the long train back from Uxbridge after an even longer day (14 hours? I think?). Hence the scatter-brain. Here’s to sleep, and here’s to next time.

Alex

Despite my occasional ambivalence with days like this – the warming community aspect weighed against everyone plonking on about just how HARD it is to get a film made – there were definite highlights. The panel on New Distribution Channels, which examined how video-on-demand and other online platforms have revolutionised the short film market (and will continue to do so), was one, with Katherine Simpson (Current TV), Vivi Mellegard (Babelgum), Digby Lewis (Dailymotion) and Chris Tidman (Shorts International) all demonstrating their chops. We’re all in the dark when it comes to online! It’s true! Nobody really knows anything! Perhaps Ben Blaine (of Blaine Brothers repute) had possibly the best question of the day when he quipped “There are so MANY of you now. Are we in a VHS/Betamax situation? Should I just hold my breath until you all just DIE?” Apparently not.

Perhaps Tidman summed it up best when on an earlier panel he remarked that the supply of short films far outweighs the demand, and this doesn’t seem likely to change in a hurry. No surprises, but maybe it’s not as bleak as it sounds. Short film has never been a lucrative enterprise and never will be, and so as long as these businesses are sustainable and championing the cause, then it would seem that no-one loses.

So, for all my aforementioned inner conflict – a feeling, I’m sure, echoed in others – the overall attitude seemed to be one of hope. Who cares if budgets to make shorts are exponentially smaller than they were a decade ago? So what if I’m rejected from 15 festivals on the trot? It’s no big deal if I’m destitute! Everyone was really saying the same thing at the end of the day: Get the story right, and the rest of it will be just fine.

Alexander Gandar

Though, am I? It’s under the guise of holiday, but I wonder if I’ve just been tunnel-festival-vision for so long that perhaps I’ve forgotten what it’s like to live the regular creative dream, hopping from job to job, occasionally surviving on cardboard and mixed nuts, occasionally spending an entire week eating at Cha Cha Moon. This conflict led to a discussion with a friend (a burgeoning and successful filmmaker) in which she cried, “I prefer to call it FREELANCE.”

It’s not about the money. Nobody’s here for it (are they?), and I’m no stranger to the intermittent pay-check. I did the working actor thing, and I definitely will again. What fascinates me more is the euphemistic approach people take. There’s something so bleak surrounding the word ‘unemployed’, it’s a word that implies waiting – and if there’s any no-no in this industry it’s waiting – for the next thing to turn up in your lap. Being ‘freelance’ is just a way of owning your shit.

I just got back from chilling my kicks up in Edinburgh on a writing assignment for the international festival, and I think I might conduct an experiment on behalf of all those sprawled on the living room floor surrounded by the Positions Vacant sections and staving off their Hollyoaks cravings by gorging on Hula Hoops. For half of the next week, whenever anyone asks what I do my answer will be “Oh, me? I’m unemployed.” For the following half the answer will be: “I’m a freelance filmmaker/writer/actor/whichever other profession takes my fancy.” On the seventh day, results will be compiled, relayed, and dissected. Late in the day. Over a cup of coffee. And the paper. Stay tuned.

And then little grey cogs started clunking. Clunk-clunk. 6 million people care! Clunk-clunk. But… why? Clunk-clunk. Surely this is just another enterprise (pun not really intended) in sensationalizing a part of the average person’s life so as to garner audience share from those not yet gormlessly addicted to the reality-TV tidal wave? Just another idiotic and desperate squeeze of a mouldy and almost dry kitchen sponge? Clunk-clunk.

What really renders me incredulous and speechless about this fusty fad is that it is, quite blatantly and flagrantly, a fallacy. It simply isn’t reality. As a couple of CEO’s attested, The Apprentice couldn’t possibly be further away from an entrepreneurial business model. We’ve managed to do something quite bizarrely post-modern, and entirely flip the coin. Our “reality-TV” is less real than most of the drama that comes out of HBO or BBC. My televisual viewing cache is currently filled with brilliant series like The Wire and Six Feet Under (on DVD of course… take THAT, ads), and, despite not being an expert on Baltimore crime or running a funeral home, I have a strong feeling both represent reality far more accurately and intelligently than Master Chef, Beauty and the Geek, or Holly & Fearne Go Dating.

It was inevitable, wasn’t it? We love ourselves. We love screens. We love to see ourselves on screen. We love to love ourselves. I just can’t help but feel it’s reached a point of immaturity. It isn’t us up there. It isn’t you. It’s some fame-hungry shill as desperate for a national embarrassment as I am tempted just to sweep the whole mess under the telly cabinet, and just pretend it never, ever happened at all.

This, I have decided, with a Charlie-Brooker-esque gruffness, is an outrage. From whence did this stereotype emerge? Who, what or when is responsible for defaming this intricate, subtle, and varied art? Perhaps it’s television’s fault. We so associate documentary as a televisual form (read: the news) that perhaps it’s no surprise the mode in which we consume television is the same position assumed when people begin discussing documentary: neck loose, torso slouched, seas of flab rolling over a taut belt, legs thrust out at curious angles and a hand creeping subliminally towards the no-no bits.

Viewing someone in this position can only induce upon the observer a kind of vague disgust, and rightly so. By and large we like see fiction as an escape, somewhere we can go and be transported far from the benign movements of our little lives. And yet, how often do people trundle out the mouldy adage: Truth is stranger than fiction! My day-to-day existence has nothing to do with the monogamy of penguins in the Antarctic, or people hurling themselves off the Golden Gate Bridge, or a man who was mauled to death by grizzly bears, or even the war in Iraq.

To be honest, I have just been working on a documentary, so perhaps I feel a little biased. Say the word documentary to a cinema and, mostly, they react like you just libeled their mothers in The Evening Standard. And punters, well, we’ve covered them. It’s time for a change. Groups like the Channel Four British Documentary Foundation (BritDoc) have already begun the revolution. I suppose I could start by making a documentary about it, couldn’t I?

There is something of which we are all technologically guilty. It’s not porn. Well, it might be, depending on your proclivities and your honesty. No, it’s more admissible than that.

Allow me to set a scene. A few people huddle around a laptop as the white light blears up into their pale faces. They are virtually unblinking as the FOX Searchlight logo rolls into the title sequence of Juno. Fine? Well. Juno was only released a day ago at the cinema.

Yet! Despite the persistent rise of cleverly evolving download platforms, still the bigwigs have crawled out and magnanimously announced 2007 as a year of the highest recorded box-office figures.

In my experience there are three clear “download” camps. There are those that sit around proclaiming hawkishly about the quantity and quality of cinema on their computer, sniggering loudly at those who fork out over £10 to go and see There Will Be Blood. There are those who think BitTorrent is a volatile weather pattern. And then there are those who are probably just as smug as the first: the cinephile. This camp is possibly the worst, because as much as they’ll lean around espousing the virtues of the cinematic experience (”you can’t beat the SOUND, you know, and it just reminds me of when I was an innocent kid…”) they’re just as likely to form a percentage of that pale-faced troupe crowding around a 14-inch Mac screen, thereby corroding any ideological superiority they may have otherwise assumed.

Though, perhaps they have a point. David Lynch recently ranted about the “tragedy” of watching “a film on your f*****g telephone.” And IMAX convinced me that cinema might have finally evolved away from the nickelodeon experience it once was and become a truly bodily experience.

There’s nothing new to the epic film, and it’s no news that technological progression has left legislation in the dust and studios gulping for air. Now though, it seems the studios are blearily discovering bigger really is the answer. And, observing the wake of 2007’s cinema that led to such monumental takings: Spiderman 3, Harry Potter and The Order Of The Phoenix, Pirates Of The Carribean: At World’s End, Transformers… it would appear that maybe, just maybe, they could be right.