Short Versus Long

I cannot rave enough about Ryan Fleck's amazing film Half Nelson. I saw it a long time ago after hearing Broken Social Scene did an original score for it. Although that is not strictly true, Half Nelson just use mostly BSS existing tracks - each track sounds perfect in the moment it is used in. Amazing scenes of passion and cocaine fuelled steamy sex on the couch to Passport Radio for example.

I ordered the DVD and watched it again, then trawled through all the extras in a bid to find out what caused such a lovely thing. It turns out the writer and director wrote the screenplay, but having trouble finding the $1million they needed, they condensed the script and shot a 20min short following the girl rather than the teacher called "Gowanus, Brooklyn". The most surprising thing? It was pretty rubbish. Badly shot and acted. The handicam/isitadocumentary styled filming was past your average shakiness and into the realms of nausea. But it was obviously enough to inspire some funders to back it!

Gowanus, Brooklyn - Ryan Fleck


But then, the film was amazing - trailer here.


Same thing with Sean Ellis's Cashback. It started as a short, but interestingly, it was received so well that he re-wrote the script in 7 weeks and shot the rest of the film, turning it into a brilliant feature film. Well worth checking out. Basically Sean Ellis was a fashion photographer, and so really captures a sense of style in this spin on life on the night shift at Sainsbury's. Don't let Michelle Ryan being in the feature put you off. Part one of the short here.



And finally, another wonderfully exciting short film that had a previous life as a home made rough short. Our favourite Terry Tate: Office Linebacker was an original short film, before it was picked up by a network to be reshot. The upside are the production values, the downside is that we lost all the swearing. Motherfuckers.



Pure class.