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CAST:
Sarah – KATY HARRISON REED
Lenny – ANDREW SMITH
Stuart – PETER LANGTON
Kate – LUCY SESSIONS
Maynard – THE VOICE OF STUART OLESKER
Bookshop Boss – HEATHER TODD
New Housemate#1-KATHERINE SEARLE
New Housemate#2 - DANIELLA FRENCH
New Housemate#3 - NAOMI GREGSON
New Housemate#4 - JAKE DOVEY |
CREW:
Music by PAUL TERRY
Special Effects by ALEX COLIAS
Cinematography & Editing by JAKE DOVEY
Produced by NAOMI GREGSON & PAUL WILLIAMS
Written & Directed by PAUL WILLIAMS
Duration: 30 minutes
Format: Digital 8 |
| WHAT
WOULD YOU GIVE IF YOU COULD GIVE SOMETHING? |
Where
did it all begin? Way back in the autumn of 1999 that’s
where! The erstwhile brothers of film Paul Williams and
Paul Terry met at University after sharing make-up. What?
Isn’t that how all male chums meet; over a half-used
lipstick? Ok, PW will explain:
After a year on a Palaeontology course (don’t ask,
that’s a whole other story) I switched to English
and Creative Studies at Portsmouth University. Portsmouth
– the gateway to the Isle of Wight and basically
a town that suddenly stops and the sea starts, like someone
forgot to put the coastline in and just added the sea.
The course was a mixture of English (that’s reading
lots of books and philosophising over the meaning of art
and reality to those of you who took Sports Science) and
Creative Studies, which covered the whole, writing, drama,
theatre, film thing.
It was a great three years, a time when you could experiment
with all different styles of writing and theatre and hair
colour and not have to worry about anyone wondering what
the hell you were doing. Our first task for the theatre
element of the course was to write and perform a four
minute monologue, in an actual theatre, to an audience
of actual living and breathing people. We all cacked our
collective pants.
Being the cheery fellow’s that we are I wrote a
comedy monologue about Death and Paul Terry explored his
tortured artistic soul with a monologue about a tortured
man tied to a chair. We portrayed pale characters and
both wore white face paint (and you all thought we met
at a Rocky Horror Show performance). We shared
make up and fast became firm friends, sharing that passion
to be creative and fly in the face of convention –
or at the very least sneak up to it and trip convention
up when it wasn’t looking.
Over the next two years we worked on projects at University
which accumulated in our final piece, the short film Sold.
We had a choice at the end of our course: you could either
write a long and boring dissertation that would only be
read once and then filed away under ‘collect dust’
or you could create a short theatre piece. It took us
a month or so to convince our lectures that a film was
a theatre piece – only on a tape rather than a stage.
After fighting hard and making a two minute film that
involved my then flatmate Alex pretending to slit his
wrists and dying in a bath (I am a cheery person, I swear)
they allowed us to make Sold.
So, in the autumn of 1999 the Evil Hypnotist was born
and Sold was made.
|
SOLD
“Terribly sorry, Maynard. So
embarrassing having company when the flat’s such
a mess.” |
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Have
you ever been so drunk that you can’t remember what
you did the night before? What if you did something terrible
in that lost time – and I don’t mean sleep
with someone you shouldn’t have – I mean something
horrifying.
This was the basic premise for Sold. A group
of housemates, Sarah, Lenny, Stuart and Kate, have a drunken
night of swearing and, well, drinking and wake in the
morning feeling more than a little worse for wear. That
day they are each individually visited by Richard Maynard
who claims to be a lawyer and further claims that they
have each sold there mortal soul to his client and he
wishes to collect by 11.15pm that night, 24 hours after
the signing of the contract. |
Naturally
each housemate freaks out, not remembering any of this
and not believing a word Maynard is saying. The lawyer
demonstrates his clients seriousness by being able to
stop their life for a few seconds. Upon being revived
each housemate believes Maynard and desperately beg for
their lives, at which point Maynard informs them of a
loop hole in the contract. If they take someone else’s
life before 11.15pm their place would be forfeit –
a soul for a soul.
Each housemate returns home that evening knowing that
they will have to kill or be killed. |
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Hell
breaks loose. Knives, stiletto shoes, ashtrays, frying
pans, and cookies all become murder weapons as the house
descends into chaos. When the dust settles everyone is
dead and as the bell strikes 11.15 one of the housemates
returns from the dead to thank Maynard for a job well
done.
The last shot we see is the only remaining housemate moving
into a new house and a whole new set of souls.
Sold was a very steep learning curve. It took
an intense week to film and an even intenser month to
edit. With the help of another English and Creative Studies
student, Jake Dovey, we shot on Digital 8 and edited on
an ancient analogue SVHS machine. |
Because
we were an English course, the arts department wouldn’t
let us use any of their equipment or new edit suites,
so we ended up in a drafty old room using a machine that
had been cobbled together with parts the technicians in
the Languages department had stolen.
The filming went smoothly, we used a lot of first year
students to fill out the cast (so sweet and innocent)
and covered my friends bedroom in chocolate sauce. Before
you all go and get the wrong idea – we decided early
on the film should be in black and white, to have a noir
feel, and as Hitchcock knew the best substitute for blood
in B&W is good old chocolate sauce. In fact we covered
the house in it. By the end of the shoot I think my housemates
wished I had sold my soul and been dispatched at the end
of the film along with my unlucky cast. |
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While
Jake and I struggled with the ancient editing machine
Paul Terry had a nightmare of his own recording the music
for Sold. Learn how it all almost didn’t
happen in Paul’s fraught adventures in Portsmouth
by clicking here.
The film was too long, but we didn’t have the time
or the right equipment to make a re-edit so it stayed
at thirty minutes with what has to be the longest slo-mo
fight sequence ever to grace the silver screen. We had
to re-do the sound the afternoon before the premiere because
it was too quiet and we were all suffering from lack of
sleep and being malnourished. All that said, it was a
sign of things to come and for the first EHP film it went
down a storm. |
We
asked if we could have an evening to ourselves –
all the other final year pieces were shown on another
night – this was not us thinking we were better,
it's just through our cunning teaser poster campaign which
asked ‘What has been sold?’, the
expectation and word of mouth had ripped through Pompey
like wild fire, or at least a cosy log fire.
The
night arrived and the evening kicked off with a Hollywood
style trailer, complete with deep, hammed-up voice over.
Then there was a live set by Paul and star bassist Nick
Jones performing songs from the soundtrack. Finally, the
lights dimmed and Sold played to a packed audience
in the small, cold Wiltshire studios, where you could
hear the traffic humming by through the walls.
The opening credits rolled and the rest is history.
|
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Paul
Williams 23/10/03
MORE
STILLS FROM SOLD |
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