Apologies to the folks reading this wanting to hear about Virtual Production. This post is more about where the project originated and about writing. We’ll get to Unreal soon enough.
The be-doodled first draft cover page…
I’ll be honest, I fancy myself a writer. Always did. My brother’s one, so it might run in the family.
I’m a bit of a jack-of-all-trades. I was always able to write and draw quite well, I can edit video okay, I played mediocre bass guitar in a couple of above-average bands, I can animate well but I wasn’t good enough (or patient enough) to do it for movie VFX. I can do a wide range of 3D graphics stuff to a middling standard.
I’ve done pretty well out of previs lately, which is lot of the above jobs rolled into one.
Between 2005 and 2015 I wrote probably more than half a dozen animated shorts that didn’t get made, I wrote a feature-length Batman fan-film called SHADOW OF THE BAT for reasons best known to myself at the time. My first “proper” feature screenplay is LIKE GOLD DUST, which has been in screenwriting competitions and charts and such. It always scores 6 or 7 out of 10 - not bad, but not enough to get me anywhere. More recently I’ve written THE BLACK SEAM and FOXHUNT, the latter being a short that we were hoping to be making in June 2020 until the pandemic hit.
I was pretty pleased with this action line describing how Duggy, a fellow northerner, would have spoken.
So, shortly before 7am, on June 1st 2020, while walking the dogs, I was exploring in my head the settings and situations in which I could write a film to be made in Unreal. In aiming to do it the way we make previs, by kit-bashing available assets and focusing on the story, I needed a setting for which there would be plenty of free or cheap assets available online.
Sci-fi’s the obvious one, another is fantasy. There’s hordes of assets available that can be used together, and no one’s going to tell you the car you’ve got the hero driving didn’t exist in the period you’ve chosen, or anything like that. It’s basically a free-for-all, which is handy when you’re on a budget.
But I had no story, I’d just be making something up for the sake of it - and I’m not above that, don’t get me wrong. It just seemed somehow hollow, and cynical, to me.
And I’m not above that either. So unless anything else came to mind, I resolved I’d just do a short sci-fi action piece.
I doodled thumbnails and notes all across this draft. Many of these shots exist in the film.
War, on the other hand, was also a suitable scenario and my mind soon came to it. Not only was 1917 very fresh in my head (and on my CV, I was Postvis supervisor on it for a little while), but there would be lots of assets on the Marketplace as it’s well-worn ground for games. Also, as it would be outdoors it would mean I could get away with very simple lighting solutions, as that’s not one of my strongest skills.
By chance, my brother’s second book is soon to be published - it’s the story of Douglas Clark, a rugby star, wrestling champion and surviving hero of World War I. I’d proof-read it for him and remembered a couple of very exciting war sequences. I chatted with him and a few hours later I was laid in my hammock with my dog-eared A4 print of his first draft, scouring it for something that would make a good short film.
And there it was, right in the middle of his book - “Prazinburk Ridge”, Duggy Clark’s last battle, in the year 1917, in the infamous Battle of Passchendaele.
That evening, I sent my him my first pass at a screenplay for it. We send each other everything we write. He came back to me with his consent, and PRAZINBURK RIDGE was born.
NEXT: Assets, and what you do when you have none.
For more information on the source material, please see the publisher’s page here:
THE MAN OF ALL TALENTS: The Extraordinary Life of Douglas Clark