June Club Night

Our June meeting was held in our usual hall, and we were delighted to welcome via Zoom link Alan Cross the Writer and Director of ‘The Briefcase’ together with Chris Morgan and Ray Coggin who were also involved with making the film.

Alan Cross presented a very comprehensive programme for the evening which commenced with a viewing of the film, Alan explained that he was very keen to get the tension of the film’s storyline correct from the beginning.

A Pre-Production Reel and stills were created to obtain image ideas together with narrative suggestions, these were presented to the South Downs Film Makers Committee for review. The final script took a year to write. Pre-Production artwork was created and included such things as making ‘bullet wounds’ look realistic.

The film had fantastic titles created by Alan using ‘After Effects’ which were created to enhance the storyline. Acting roles, locations, make-up, props, artwork for documents etc and costumes were all meticulously detailed. As with any bigger club film production there were obstacles to overcome such as Actors availability, weather and lighting challenges and sound issues and of course there is usually a limited budget.

We were shown some of the ‘Bloopers’ which occurred during filming (we all make them) Chris Morgan and Ray Coggin explained how and why they happened and how they were overcome they also discussed how some of the film was edited and the sound mix created.

Alan Cross started his career in photography, wrote music, created music videos and also made 3D animation films.

The audience had plenty of questions to ask at the end of the evening and we would like to thank him for presenting our club with such an interesting insight into the making of ‘The Briefcase’ The film can be viewed on the Surrey Border Movie Makers website.

We were very pleased to welcome Tim Stannard back to the club to compere the evening, he was presented with a thank you gift by our Chairman Mike Sanders.

By Kathy Butcher