Last week I sent off a private screener of Cats of Malta to our Kickstarter backers. The next day I received a reply from an actor/filmmaker I knew from my past life working out of Studio 106 in St Kilda. Katrina asked me about our improvised process of filmmaking, how we make films, and if she could see an example of my favorite improvised NPG film.
This request got me thinking and sent me down a rabbit hole of reminiscing about our improvised work and how we started producing and shooting films using this unique method. All this thinking led me to Tubi TV and getting lost within the first twenty minutes of Friends, Foes & Fireworks – the first improvised film Ivan and I produced and directed, plus shot in a single night.
Within the body of the email reply to Katrina I pasted the Tubi TV link to Friends, Foes & Fireworks and filled the rest of the blank space with our improvisation inspirations, directors and films we admire – one of which is Mike Leigh. His name led me to thinking about the whole improvisation journey and business transition which NPG has gone through since making Friends, Foes & Fireworks in 2017. Again this led to yet another fond memory – the five days Ivan and I spent in Basel during 2019 taking part in the Character Based Improvisation (CBI) workshop Robert Marchand teaches.
I also mentioned the CBI workshop to Katrina, then I hit ‘send’. Sitting at my desk I realized it's been a few years since Basel, and that realization brought on some wonderful memories.
2020: The Year Film was Forced to Adapt
If there is one phase to sum up the year in film at all levels, be it Hollywood or the independent and micro-budget filmmaking scene for the year of 2020, it would have to be ‘geeze, never saw that coming, mate’.
With the Covid-19 pandemic beginning to spread worldwide as early as February and still raging now to varied degrees across the globe, film distribution and releases, both in cinema and through streaming platforms went through a major shift, and the playing field between Hollywood and independent filmmakers was almost levelled out as nobody quite knew what to do.
This was due to most cinemas in North America shutting down earlier in the year (unfortunately some went into bankruptcy and closed their doors permanently), causing big budget Hollywood films that were planned for release like Black Widow and the latest James Bond installment No Time to Die to be pushed back until 2021. Also halted or delayed were anticipated films which were to move into production at the beginning of 2020, such as Mission Impossible 7 andThor: Love and Thunder.
Read MoreReleasing an Indie Film During a Pandemic
In February this year, Sarah Jayne wrote an article about self-distributing our feature In Corpore. She talked about screening the film in a cinema in New York, one of the settings of the film, perhaps doing a tour of the country à la The Joyful Vampire Tour of America, and then doing cinema screenings in the remaining countries we filmed in: Australia, Germany, and Malta.
Well, none of that went ahead. The world changed, as we all know; a global pandemic brought everything to a standstill. And still we aren’t clear of the spectre of this virus, with different parts of Europe facing another lockdown, America still out of control, and Australia suffering too. The way films are distributed changed, perhaps irrevocably. Cinemas shut like so much else. The traditional release windowing model was scrapped, blockbuster films like Mulan streaming for free on Disney+ as a $200 million dollar experiment, while Tenet by Christopher Nolan stuck to its guns and became the first Hollywood tent-pole to launch in theaters following their prolonged shutdown, the bold move hailed by executives and media as the saviour of cinema.
It bombed. Studios were spooked. Cinema wasn’t saved.
Read More