Making of Shelter. Production, post-production and film festival entry.

It has been a long time since I have blogged, what better time than to do it now with the release of my short film.

Mike Staniforth Shelter

So, lets start from the beginning, how did this film come about? I had no projects on and my brother, who was studying film and media at College, wanted to shoot something. We went out onto the streets of Didsbury, with my Canon 60D and Zeiss 50mm 1.4, and started looking for inspiration. It was a particularly wet day so we started to capture mirror reflections in the large puddles dotted around. This was the start. I know it doesn’t sound like anything but this got me onto the road of filming the short. I planned another shoot in the centre of Manchester the week after and this is what got me thinking into shooting something bigger.

I have always had an interest in homeless people, their stories, their journey and I had made a short film in University about a local community centre, which regularly opened as a soup kitchen for homeless people. I had always wanted to revisit this subject and it seemed now would be the perfect opportunity.

Leading up to the first day of shooting I had to come up with some sort of solid idea. What could I do that everyone who calls themselves a filmmaker hasn’t done or attempted before? I couldn’t. So I decided to draw up some basic questions and on the day find some homeless people and speak to them.

I put plenty of thought into what to ask and how to approach people, asking people on forums, reading up on other filmmakers experiences, it all came down to, treat them how you would treat any other human being. Simple. If I treat them with respect, I shouldn’t have any problems.

Now, as it’s like with most productions, you don’t really want to head out by yourself into a busy city centre with all your camera gear, one for security reasons and two because your setup is so much quicker if you have at least a couple of people to help. I had my brother, I needed one other. 

Mike Staniforth filmmaker

I got a reply from my man Dean Carter (@DeanCarter), I setup a meeting time and place and I had my small crew.

What to shoot on was a no brainer, at the time I owned a Canon 60D with Zeiss 50mm. Small, light, inconspicuous, great picture, perfect. After all, I didn’t want to over awe anybody, I wanted to make them feel as comfortable as possible with me, especially as I was just approaching them on the street. Coupled this with the extremely light weight and durable Sachtler Ace, Zoom H1 digital audio recorder and clip mic and we were ready to go.

Mike Staniforth Filmmaker

The first person I spoke to was Alan, really interesting looking man with a long white beard, beanie hat, a recorder in hand, sat next to all his possessions in the world. I introduced myself and told him what I was doing and if he was comfortable having a chat on camera, he agreed and we talked, at length, about everything from the weather, where he lives, his family all the way to the Science Fiction novel he is currently writing.
Although it was great to chat Alan, it was hard to get any kind of sound bite from him because he seemed do happy to be speaking to someone, the conversation often tapered off topic.

Mike Staniforth Filmmaker

The second time we went out I arranged for a local photographer to come with us, Jim Backhouse. Jim agreed to follow us round and shoot some BTS shots and did such a great job that one of his photos is used as the poster for the Film. I also persuaded a friend of mine to come along with his Canon 5D mark II. Which gave me a great second angle on the interviews we did that day.

So after two days shooting over two weeks, I had interviewed 4 people, got a load of good sound bites and shot a lot around Manchester. This was all done during the day, when all the homeless people were awake and going about their daily routine. I needed something at night, when they were all bedding down and when it all gets serious for them.

I had spoken to someone I interviewed, Mark, about meeting him at night so he could show me where everybody sleeps. We agreed a time and place to meet.
This is where I had trouble finding someone to accompany me at night. Nobody seemed want to come with me to shoot this important part of the film. The people who had helped me before were not interested, maybe for security reasons I don’t know. I was at a dead end, I had zero budget, no crew and I certainly wasn’t going to make do with the footage I had. 
That was when I met Claude (@ClaudeSadik). 
Claude and I met whilst shooting a wedding video of all things, we spoke at length about cameras and current projects and found out we were following each other on twitter. I mentioned my current predicament with the issues I had in going forward with my film and Claude didn’t hesitate in saying he would come with me. Brilliant. I had a second camera operator. A two man crew was 100% better than it just being myself.

So we met up in Manchester town centre at around midnight. Mark, the person I’d arranged to meet, was no where to be seen. I’d known this was going to be a problem because its not like I had call sheets or anything like that. There was no way of communicating with anybody other than face to face. 
We walked around trying to find Mark, asking everybody who I’d met along the way, and who had come to know me as ‘that filmmaker guy’.
It turned out, Mark had found a house to sleep in that night. Fair enough, I was happy for him, he had somewhere warm to sleep, at least for the night.

Because of this, I met Lukasz.

Lukasz was sitting on the corner of Deansgate. Quietly asking passers by for any spare change. I approached Lukasz to see if he minded us filming around him and he was more than happy to be in the film. He told me where he was sleeping and he offered to take us there. I was slightly cautious about this as he explained the abandoned warehouse he had found shelter in was up toward Cheetham Hill, anyone who is familiar with Manchester knows it is not particularly safe to be walking around at night with expensive camera equipment. That being said, we agreed anyway. 

We packed light for the walk, two cameras, one with Zeiss 50mm, one with 24-70mm L lens. One manfrotto video monopod and one Flycam 3000 steadicam.
As we approached the decrepid building, it was clear this was not going to be easy, the ground leading up to the building was uneven, bricks and rubbish everywhere, we were really going to have to watch our footing. We turned the cameras on, gave Lukasz one of our LED lights for use as a torch and he began giving us the grand tour.

As you will see in the video, this building was a death trap, the walls were falling down, there were holes in the roof, you couldn’t see the floor because of all the rubbish and fallen debris. Lukasz lead the way to the stairs which must have been the dodgiest looking stairs I have ever seen, now I am afraid of heights and if it wasn’t for me concentrating on the camera so hard, I would have had an issue because these stairs went up 4 stories and there was no bannister, in fact there was nothing to prevent you slipping and falling down the middle.

Scared of the death trap stairs
Not looking too confident with the death trap stairs.

Lukasz had found a small room in the corner at the very top of this building. Every night he came back here using his tiny flashlight which didn’t work very well and illuminated only a pin prick compared to the LED light I gave him earlier. What he was doing was extremely dangerous. On the way to his little hideaway he showed us a big basin which had been positioned to capture rain drops falling through the huge holes in the roof. This was where he washed himself. The water was cold, stagment and had a layer of green scum on the top. It was then that the reality of this mans life started to hit me.


We got to his ‘bedroom’ and he showed us how he wrapped himself up and slept. This was when he started to show his emotion, as bad as I fealt for him, I had to keep the cameras rolling to capture this raw emotion. I didn’t have to say anything, I just listened.

The night ended with Lukasz walking us back to where we met him, he sat down and continued what he was doing before, politely asking passers by for spare change. I gave him all I had. I then went home to my warm bed and pondered how lucky I was to even have a roof over my head, I thought about Lukasz every day for a month after that night, I’ve not seen him since.

Mike Staniforth filmmaker

With this footage I had a significant story to add to the short. The edit began and came together nicely. We went out one more time and followed a really nice guy called Jay. He showed us where a lot of people sleep at night, we caught a few people asleep on camera, but I wanted more. I had heard about a place under the railway arches near Castlefield. Nearly everybody I had spoken to told me this place is where a lot of people sleep. Between 30 and 40 a night. Wow, if I could get this on camera we could really have something. I was told it was mainly Russian people who slept there, and if I went down by myself at night, I wouldn’t be coming back.

I wasn’t stupid enough to go by myself, but I wasn’t going risk the safety of anyone else unless we could get a big crew together and that wasn’t going to happen.
Claude and I, one night, walked down toward the arches to see if we could see where everyone was talking about, just to see if it would be possible to get anything on camera. Something would be better than nothing but we wandered as far as we thought it was safe and then gave up. It wasn’t worth risking our safety.

Post-Production

I edited the film in Final Cut X. I’ve been using this program since it was released and have grown fond of its speed. I didn’t think anything of it as I came to edit the film, I just automatically loaded up FCX and began importing the footage. The edit was going well, I produced a rough cut, screened it to a select few and took on board the criticism and changed it drastically.
I worked on the edit pretty much every day after I came home from work, changing little things until I was finally happy with it. The next step was trying to find a soundtrack. I had found some songs that I really liked but there was no way I could afford the licensing. That was until I went onto themusicbed.com and with relative ease found the perfect song to finish the film with. I looked at licensing and because I planned on a festival run, £500. Damn, I really liked this track and it went perfectly. I tried to search for alternatives but this was stuck in my head. Out of nowhere I thought I’d try and email the band, tell them what the music was for and see what they say, the worst thing that could happen is they say no. Within minutes I received a reply.


Wow, ok, I wasn’t expecting that, so I sent them a copy of the film with the track edited in. Again I received a reply very quickly.


I was so happy, $150 (£90) for the license was so much better than £500, considering I had fallen in love with the track and nothing else in my eyes was suitable.
This was it, the edit the was complete, I had picture lock. Now began the search for someone to clean up all the audio and add some atmosphere. Again I took to twitter and was put in touch with Mark Sargison (@MarkSargison). After exchanging emails, Mark agreed to take on the project. Thus beginning the nightmare with FCX.

As we all know, FCX does not have an option to export AAF which is needed for AVID Pro Tools, not natively anyway. However, there is a third party app which converts FCX XML files into AAF called X2Pro. This was a great tool and really simple to use. I exported the XML, threw it into the app and it spat out an AAF for my dubbing mixer.


Bad news, Mark was having trouble opening the file in Pro Tools. Everything was showing up out of sync and crashing the program. So Mark came over to mine and we tried re-exporting the XML and AAF. Same problem, Pro Tools was for some reason really struggling with this file. So we looked into it further, we started to export the XML in smaller chunks, 2 minutes at a time to see if we could localise the problem. The first two minutes went in fine, Pro Tools worked great. What was different in the first two minutes than the rest of the sequence? Some of the audio had been recorded at different sample rates, that must have been it. I spent the rest of the evening converting all the audio to 48khz. Bingo. Exported the XML, threw it into X2PRO got the AAF over to Mark and breathed a sigh of relief.

Mark got in touch, there was still something wrong. He came back over to mine and we looked at the sequence again. For the life of us we couldnt figure out what was happening. Then I spotted it. In FCX there is a really handy tool to sync your external audio with the video. When you put these ‘synced clips’ onto the timeline they do not separate. The audio and video are as one on the timeline. There were a number of these clips on the timeline which I had muted so the waveforms were not visible. Once I doubled clicked them I could see the separated muted audio which, for some insane reason was 96khz!! Once I deleted these offending audio clips, the whole timeline read at 48khz and the exported AAF worked perfectly in Pro Tools.

In this time I had emailed the customer support of X2PRO and they were brilliant in helping me determine the fault. In fact they asked for a copy of the offending sequence so they can improve the application in future. You cannot fault this as they are really listening to their customers and will strive to help improve their product in future updates.

Film Festivals

Before I knew it the audio was complete, it sounded great and I had my finished film. My dilemma was now to either release it online, or wait and send it into some film festivals. I had never done this before, I didn’t know the rules for entering into festivals, whether or not my film was allowed to be available for public viewing or not. I didn’t want to chance it and left it password protected and went about searching for festivals to enter.

Anyone who has made a film and entered into a film festival should know about Withoutabox.com It’s the simplest way to enter your project into festivals. You upload your file and fill out all the relevant info for it, cast, crew, synopsis etc. and you can search for festivals your film is best suited for. Be warned, because it is so easy, it is also quite addictive and can be an expensive game.

The first three I entered I received 3 official selection laurels, although to a seasoned film maker this might not be a big deal, to me it was unbelievable, so I proudly show them off on my poster and vimeo jacket picture.
I am still awaiting to hear back from 4 more film festivals (one of which is Sundance, ambitious I know but if there is one thing I have learned when making this film, it is you don’t get if you don’t try).

Yesterday (October 6th 2012) I attended the Greater Manchester Film Festival. Although not the biggest and only in its first year, It was the most important to me as it is where I am from and where the film is based. It was my first experience seeing my work on the big screen and although I enjoyed it, I am also my biggest critic.


I was extremely proud and it has made me even more determined to make the follow up documentary bigger, better and even more hard hitting.

**TIP JAR** Please consider using the tip button if you like the film. I will donate 50% of the total tips to a local homeless shelter in Manchester and the rest will go toward the budget for the follow up feature documentary hopefully going into production in 2013.

So that’s that, 8 months after I took to the streets of Manchester with my brother and the film is now released online. I hope you all enjoy it as much as I enjoyed making it.

Shelter: a look at Manchester’s homeless. Full film. from Mike Staniforth | Filmmaker on Vimeo.

EDIT

Shelter has been accredited ‘Staff Pick’ from the amazing people at Vimeo.com. This basically means the film is now on the front page of the website for all to see giving it absolutely huge exposure.

Shelter Mike Staniforth Filmmaker
7 months ago | 03:10pm
19 notes · #homeless #film #manchester #canon #7d #life
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