This film was a defining moment for me. I'd been working as an Assistant Director & working hard on my Photography skills prior to this film and I was desperate to show what I could do and make the move to being the man with a plan behind the camera on all my future film shoots.

 

Then the 50 Kisses Feature Film competition came along. 50 scripts would be chosen, out of thousands submitted, to be made into short films that would then be edited together to make a feature film and Producer/Actor Simon McCay of Barnstorm Pictures asked me to be his DP.

 

Imagine how my heart sank when I showed up to our first meeting at the amazing Roots & Fruits Deli in Glasgow and he told me the Director had backed out and would I like to do that instead. I explained how important it was for me to DP but I agreed to Direct as well as I would be able to split the positions with my good friend Marc Grundy, a very talented filmmaker and foodie who I knew could take on anything I could not. 

 

As the Director as well now, I was in a position to rework the very light two page & American script, so I did. I even contacted the original writer, Phil Berard, in the USA and I was encouraged by his attitude to my changes. The 50 kisses competition had very strict guidelines and he obviously couldn't put everything he wanted into the small script so when he told me he felt I'd added back in a lot of what he had intended, we proceeded with the belief that we were going to win this competition.

 

I knew we only had 6 hours to film this film at our location so I spent 2 weeks planning out every shot, every angle, every light placement, gel and practical, rehearsing my actors and pushing my camera to its technological limits to achieve a real film quality. I had pages upon pages of diagrams for the crew to refer to but I must give full credit to my crew who in many cases instinctively knew what to do and to my actors Simon & Jasmin who gave everything they had to this.

 

The hard work definitely paid off. We not only were featured in the 50 Kisses Trailer, we've been to Cannes, Stockholm, GoNorth and many other festivals worldwide and I was offered my first feature film as DP because of it. 

 

UPDATE: In late January Chris Jones who put the whole 50 Kisses project together rang me up to say he was fighting to keep my film in the final cut and we just needed to get him the sound design files and as high quality a version of the film as possible ASAP. After some scrambling I sent off the files and waited. A few days later an e-mail came with the final list of films and Close Encounters wasn't on it. I was absolutely gutted and gave myself the industry standard pep talk about keeping on going and I quickly put it behind me and moved on. 

 

Fast forward to February 7th. I got a call from Chris Jones, he was looking for Simon but had only my number. I was a bit busy at the gym so I told him I'd text him Simon's number and brought the conversation to a close. A couple of hours later a rather upbeat Simon rang me. Apparently Chris had been wondering why we hadn't been in touch like everyone else who'd been included in the Feature. Simon recalled how he'd said "Chris, I was under the impression we weren't in the film mate". I remember literally having to sit down as Simon repeated to me how Chris had said we were definitely in the film and that there must have been a communication issue. So now we'll be attending the Premiere in London.

 

I've had a lot of successes with this film but finding out it has been selected for the film it was made for was definitely a moment that was worth waiting 16 months and a few weeks more than most for.