"Of Shark and Man" Pogress, Something New and Something Very Cool!

 Going back to the sun for a bit!

Sorry for the silence lately, it's unusual for me to neglect the blog for so long but there is a very good reason for it. In the last couple of months I have been absolutely swamped with work, both for "Of Shark and Man" and for the day job, although Scarlet View Media isn't something I'd consider a day job, more a passion which allows me to survive through doing something I genuinely love to do. Since starting the company I have always focused on doing commercial work of the highest quality to earn a living and grow the brand's reputation and the last twelve months has seen more interest in what we do, more work and a growth I'm really happy with, plus the feedback from our clients is nothing short of exceptional.

Wanting to build the company is twofold, firstly, I have to eat and have bills to pay and even more importantly, so does the little sharkboy Lucas and secondly, when I come to release Of Shark and Man it will be through Scarlet View Media as our first feature length film and I want the platform to be as strong as possible.

As well as completing a hugely time consuming commercial project, a music video and pitching for some very exciting and big jobs, the Of Shark and Man juggernaut continues to roll. We have started the "Making Of" featurette and I did my first interview a couple of weeks ago along with getting some of the footage together.

Sound Design is coming along very nicely, it's amazing the difference a proper layering of sound can make to the footage, it's not merely background sound however, every single element is carefully thought out, constructed and mixed to really bring everything to life and aid the storytelling in the film. I am approaching this in the same way big budget features are put together, it is of course way more time consuming but will provide a far more satisfactory experience for you the viewer, essentially, absolutely everything you see must come alive and put you in a position where you feel a part of the action.

The system for doing this is that I am cutting the whole film into sections, the sound design I created as a guide has been separated into dozens of different tracks, some of those tracks featuring only maybe two seconds of a particular sound. If you can imagine doing that for a two hour first cut, you might be able to imagine just how mind numbingly tedious a job this is, definitely worth it, but tedious nonetheless. These sections are then sent over to David Lawrie in the States and he works his magic and sends them back over to place back into the edit.

Work has also started on the title sequence, this is something I am really excited about. In a weird sense of serendipity, one of my best mates from school, just so happened to become one of the UK's leading graphic animation artists for film and TV, doing a lot of work for the BBC alongside the band Gorrillaz. Just before Xmas, he got in touch to say he'd seen the trailers and wanted to offer his services, I was absolutely over the moon to say the least! I can't say too much about what we have planned but as with everything else in the film, it will stand apart from everything else going on at the moment and given his stupendous talent, I am sure it's going to be incredible.

As it stands, until I get the go ahead from the studio on recording the voice over, I am now in a position of farming out the work I can't do, to the talented people who can.

The timing is pretty handy as well as I fly out on the 22nd to do a short commercial job in the Med but not only that, I am using the time over there to finally get around to shooting a project I have been working on for the last two years, if you are a regular reader, you watch my stuff and you've been following the journey, you don't need to be a genius to figure out what it might be and to say I'm excited is an understatement! I am away from the 22nd of April for two and a half weeks and to be quite frank, for reasons I won't be going into here, I need a break and some time away, it's not a holiday, it's work, but if I had two weeks doing nothing but spending time in my own mind, I would most likely end up in the puzzle factory, as such, it's a much needed break with close friends, an awesome project to get my teeth into and some sun on my back and salt in my gills.

I've spent the last month burning the candle at both ends to get all the pieces in place so I can go away and have work being done on Of Shark and Man whilst I'm out of the UK and when I come back, come back to completed Sound Design sections, a closer idea of the title sequence and a date to record the voice over. I really need this but not only that it's also another project out there in the smaller and more niche festivals whilst the main event takes on the gauntlet of screenings, big festival submissions and yes, distribution (hopefully).

So that's where we are with everything at the moment, completion of Of Shark and Man is now something which is going to happen in the short term future for the first time and it's a pretty incredible feeling to have made it here!

As I leave you here until the next blog which won't be as long coming as this one, I promised you something cool. You may well have seen the promo video for "Gimme Chocolate" on social media, but I wanted to share this as this just blew me away when I heard it for the first time. Regular readers know I love my music, especially Metal and *bold statement alert* BabyMetal are the only band I can think of other than Gojira who have made me sit up and say "wow!!" (in a good way) in quite some time, years in fact, yes it's manufactured, yes it's probably highly cynical, yes it's really, really weird, but who gives a shit, I think it's really fucking cool.

Yes seriously, I think this is one of the coolest things I've heard in a long time.

Enjoy.