Tag Archive for short film

Peripheral Neuropathy – A Short Film

Allow me to present my latest short film “Peripheral Neuropathy”

I started thinking about this idea about 8 months ago and even filmed a few bits to check and see if it was going to work.
I had drawn up a storyboard and planned out 80% of it but had hit a brick wall with how to end it.
It got shelved but kept bubbling away in the back of my mind every time I looked at the crudely hand drawn storyboard taped to my speaker stand.

Then text to image AI models exploded into my world, adding an entirely new tool to the toolbox.
Quite simple film making and some finessed After Effects skills had gotten me most of the way, could I leverage this new tool to finally get this finished?

I’d already been using Stable Diffusion on another short Directed by Martin Cooper to generate backgrounds for some green screen footage we had shot and was increasingly excited about the possible uses in other work.

There ended up being very little actual Stable Diffusion stuff in this film, but what has ended up in there made it possible to finish the film, something I was beginning to worry might not happen. It had helped in other ways by inspiring experimentation and ultimately provided a much needed creative spark, so deserves more credit than the amount of it’s inclusion would suggest.

I used the Deforum animation plugin in the Automatic web UI of Stable diffusion to create a low poly moving “field” to mirror the actual field seen in the piece.
I also used Stable diffusion to generate an image of an aged me from a video frame, I attempted to use EbSynth to map the image back onto the video but was not really getting anything I was happy with. I ended up using FILM to map the image onto the footage, which gave a much more satisfying result.

I knew it needed more than the natural sounds present to bring it all together and asked my long time friend and musical talent Danny Griffin to see what he could do, the only real brief being I didn’t want it to end up being like a music video. I think he absolutely nailed the soundtrack, adding so much more to the piece.

You can draw your own conclusions on what it’s about or why it has the title it does.

I’m very pleased with how it’s turned out. I hope you like it.

*Note to self: Figure out the whole story before starting something in future otherwise it just gnaws away at you :)*

In Praise Of Young Men

It gives me great pleasure to present my latest short film, a collaboration with writer/photographer/armchair philosopher and handsome bastard – Mr Sean Lotman.
Written by and Staring Mr Lotman, it was filmed basically in 1 day on a 5DmkII at various locations around Tokyo and Directed, Shot and Edited by me.

The process has been an interesting one as a film maker as I have truly learnt the value of having separate sound/wardrobe/lighting and camera people,as doing it all by myself was, even for a short piece like this, incredibly difficult.
I love doing everything myself, having the control to be able to move a title over by 20 pixels because I don’t like it where it is for example.
But in film making as opposed to still photography, doing EVERYTHING by yourself is not really practical.
A lesson learned.

The music in the film is a Domenico Scarlatti choral piece called ‘Quis Non Posset’ and is performed by the rather wonderful ‘The Tudor Consort’.
(The page for the group is here:- http://freemusicarchive.org/music/The_Tudor_Consort/)
I stumbled across it whilst searching for some choral music to use for the film over on the free music archive, a great resource for Creative Commons licensed music.

Please leave a comment letting us know what you think of the film here or over on the vimeo page:- vimeo.com/uchujin/inpraiseofyoungmen where you can also watch the film in HD (v. highly recommended)