Synopsis

In a world where football is a religion, one word strikes fear into men's hearts....PENALTIES!

Director's Notes

'98 is a short film that was made for the Quick Flick World challenge in May 2006.

When the Quick Flick challenge was first promoted on the OTT forums I was looking for a suitable script that could fit the criteria of "penalty" and the technical requirement of slow motion. The original idea for '98 came from a Nokia 15 second treatment by John Condon. It outlined the idea of the boy in the backyard playing out the penalty shootout at the end of an England international football match - just him and the ball, and the fence.

I took that idea and, with collaboration from the forum members, created a script for the film. The research led us to the World Cup in 1998 and the eventual miss by David Batty to seal England's fate.

The next step was to find an England shirt from the relevant World Cup, of which thankfully the marvel of ebay provided us two in different kids sizes. Now onto the casting and the location.

Producer Leilani Holmes had worked with Rhyss Spence in a theatre production the previous year, and she soon managed to locate him and get him to agree to his first film role. Kara Browne had come on board as a runner and answered our location prayers with the offer of her Aunt's backyard in north London.

So, on a wet Tuesday afternoon we assembled in Islington for the shoot - Chris Towndrow (DoP), Leilani, Paul Skelton (sound recordist), Kara, Rhyss (and his guardian), and Adekunle Salami (runner). A small band of dedicated people who thought enough of this project to give up an afternoon to produce it.

The weather turned against us and our four hour schedule was reduced to one and a quarter hours for the shoot. We made use of some of the downtime by recording the voiceover inside the house. Rhyss showed maturity beyond his years during this part of the proceedings, as he recorded the dialogue in a just a couple of takes for each segment, in less than ideal conditions, using a lip ribbon microphone to eliminate the background noise. Given the fact that there were a number of people in the room, and some of them were watching television, I would have expected some type of tantrum from more experienced people that I have worked with, but Rhyss sailed through unaffected, a real credit to him.

When the rain stopped it was back outside to shoot the pictures and record the one piece of sync sound we needed. A quick recalculation of the time available led to most of the shotlist being thrown out, and Chris operating on a short jib arm managing multiple setups in quick time with Adekunle's assistance. The unfortunate thing about the time constraints placed upon us now was that we never really got to fully explore the different options afforded us with the arm, it was pretty much change shot and get the next one in the can before it rains again.

Rhyss took to this film thing like a duck to water and he was a pleasure to direct, he seemed to get what we were aiming for straight away, and convey the message in a perfectly understated way. Some of the shots that made it into the completed film were happy mistakes that were made out of the blue, the ball over the fence for example - a feat he was later to repeat, the end result being a lost ball.

At the wrap time I was sure we had enough for a film, perhaps not exactly the one we had set out to make, but these are the challenges afforded the no-budget filmmaker.

The edit was conducted over the next two days in my dining room, with Paul Skelton doing the audio post and me cutting the pictures. Given the overall time constraints of this project, two days for the edit seemed like a luxury. The revamped shooting schedule had left us with very few options and a decision was made that we would show him taking all of the penalties for both sides, whereas the original script had only the England ones in vision. To cover the lack of footage we invented the score device to give us the cutaways that we didn't have on tape. As a result the Executive Producer, my wife Anna, found the scoring easier to understand, and then we knew that you didn't have to understand the complexities of the penalty shootout to get the film.

One of my favourite things in this film is the sound, from the rich voiceover to the effect on the slow motion section. Paul Skelton was able to work on his Powerbook Mac laying down the sound as I cut the pictures on my humble iBook, with us seamlessly able to ferry files between each other to add to the edit or give reference for a sound. I highly recommend this mode of simultaneous sound and vision editing.

I had had an idea for the end of the film that wasn't in the script, in fact had never been mentioned. John Maher had supplied me with a thirty second piece of music that I could hear as a sports show theme, which I wanted to use over the credits with a voiceover. However I didn't have the voiceover written or recorded. Ten minutes later Paul and I had a script and he was holding the lip ribbon to his mouth, a half dozen takes later we had the Clive James sounding voiceover that now adorns the closing credits.

Just to deliver it now, I had to work on the Friday, and I couldn't get hold of the curator Nick Rutter. He had told me that if I could get the film to him by the Saturday he would include it in the showcase Quick Flick Word was having at Cannes the following week. So, my Saturday was spent re-encoding the film in NTSC format and uploading it to a server so he could render it onto the DVD for the showcase. I might have said a few words my mother would be less than pleased with during this process.

It was eventually screened at the Quick Flick World event in London and went on to be shown as one of the two London entries the following month at the screenings at the other locations, including Berlin, Mexico City, Mumbai, Barcelona and six others.

My heartfelt thanks goes out to everyone who worked on this project and helped our little picture become a real film. Thank you.