Blogzene

The Video below is by Tom Marshall  .Tom completed a DigitalCity fellowship in 2009 as part of the company Hallows Media and produced the short film, God & Lucy which had award winning potential and was distributed to high-end festivals including Edinburgh and Venice.  Tom also worked as scriptwriter on ‘Soldier to Man’ and ‘Scribble’ both shortlisted for the BBC drama shorts scheme, ‘The Reception’ and ‘The Grill’ which were shortlisted for the Digital Nation Scheme. Below the video Tom describes the making of this film.

The film was made to fit a brief for a competition being run by reed.co.uk, they wanted films based around the theme ‘workplace’ and under 3 minutes in length. I used the competition as a reason to do something I had wanted to do for a long time, write and record a comedy song and then shoot a video to it. I’m a huge fan of ‘Flight of  the Concords’ who do this brilliantly.  I think our attempt isn’t quite up to their standards! But I am still very proud of how it has turned out.

I wrote the lyrics to the song, I gave these to Aaron Turner who then came up with the track and the arrangement. We went more ‘Pet Shop Boys’ than ‘G Unit’ a sort of white middle class rap thing which I thought was going to be best comedy-wise! We recorded the song in one afternoon, and it was a great experience, although I’m not planning a career change to record producer just yet! (As I let Aaron do most of the work, my input was mostly “Be a bit more like Bowie on this bit)

The guy playing the lead is actually my old English/drama teacher from secondary school, who was the young trendy teacher everyone wanted to be friends with.  I think he carries the video brilliantly, I knew he would, as he was just as entertaining in the classroom.

We filmed the whole video in one day, all the dolly movements you can see in the video were done on a peice of equipment that I managed to blag. All filmed in the Phoenix Building (Thanks again Kieran Weatherill, IDI) with a skeleton crew of 4.  For extras I was just a bit cheeky and roped people in who were working in the building (spot the cameo from Kieran’s glamorous assistant Kylie).

I have always wanted to make a film like this, so I guess even though there is a very small chance we will win, I am still very proud of the fact I just went out and made it. That’s not to say I won’t be having a few bitter rants once I find out who has won instead of us!