Watching the movie Super 8 recently set off one of my regular and fuzzy waves of nostalgia about the low budget films I used to make as a student. I’ve talked about some of them on this blog before – links below if you’re interested. This time I’ve dusted off a still from a 16mm movie made by friends Phil Tuppin and Andy Wicks during their time on the Film and Photographic Arts course at the Polytechnic of Central London, way back in the mid-1980s.
The film was an Orwellian future fable called This Bloodless Age. My contribution was mostly limited to a bit of casting and location support. However, I did have the privilege of supplying the film’s opening shot of a futuristic building, which you can see above. Please forgive the quality of this particular image – all I had to hand was a slightly grungy DVD transfer. Trust me when I say the original looks a lot cleaner.
As you’ve probably guessed, the shot was a shameless rip-off of homage to the Tyrell Pyramid scenes from the opening of Blade Runner. Once we’d worked out a design that would satisfy our sensibilities without (hopefully) triggering a lawsuit, I painted the building with acrylics on cheap card, then cut out windows in a random pattern and backed up the apertures with tracing paper. When we stuck a big backlight behind the picture, the windows burned out, giving the shot that authentic Ridley Scott lens flare vibe.
The backlight worked pretty well, but the shot still looked a little dead. I solved this by making a slot gag on the back of the painting, fabricating a card mask that I could slide vertically past a column of apertures, neatly creating the effect of an elevator climbing up the side of the building.
We had one more trick up our sleeves. When we shot the painting, we boiled a kettle in front of the camera lens. It didn’t quite create the smoky industrial miasma we were looking for, but it did soften the shot nicely. My only regret was the schoolboy error I’d made by painting the building almost up to the edges of the card, which gave us limited framing options.
Still, having the kettle on hand meant it was easy to make the tea.
This Bloodless Age was the height of sophistication compared to some of our earlier films. Here are a couple of images from those hazy 8mm days.
The first shows a couple of frames from another opening shot, this time from a plasticene animation epic I made with the same reprobates mentioned above. This Lucas-inspired adventure was called Matt Line Tidies Up The Universe. The titular hero wasn’t the only character named from a movie-making glossary, by the way. The film also featured Princess Arriflex and the Evil Lord Multiplane.
The second set of stills is from Fever, which Phil and I shot on Standard rather than Super 8. We were delighted when the film was a runner up in the BBC Screen Test Young Filmmaker’s competition, back in the days when we all had big hair and wore flares. As far as we know, it’s the only film they ever had to censor in order to protect younger viewers …
In case you were wondering, yes, the frames really do show a dressing gown crawling across a bedroom floor. The clothing in question was possessed by a demon, you see …
If you like the pictures, the links below will take you to a couple of short behind-the-scenes articles explaining how we did the shots.
Graham Edwards – Author & Journalist 
I’m in shock. For decades I’ve had in my mind the image of a dressing gown scuttling across the floor and smothering the sleeping boy. I was six when this was transmitted (so the BBC Genome informs me), have never seen it since, but I could call every shot. I thought it was one of those things too obscure for even the Internet to reveal (I’ve never entertained the hope that another person would know what I was talking about)… and here it is! Amazing.
Thanks for dropping by, Michael. How amazing that you remember our little film from all those years ago. I hope we didn’t traumatise your six-year-old self TOO much!