Well, we’ve remembered about the tradition we tried to start last year and we’ve spent the week arguing over our Top 10 Movies of 2011. Charlotte was last to vote so she’s getting a forfeit – suggestions welcomed.

10. The Dark Knight Rises Prologue

A little housekeeping to start with – I (KK) foolishly set the criteria for this chart as anything with a “UK theatrical release between 1^st January 2011 and 31^st December 2011 inclusive” – so technically I suppose this is eligible.

Ryan M: I don’t care if it was only SIX minutes, it’s been the most exciting SIX minutes of film I’ve seen all year… IN 70mm IMAX!! Bane is f**king bad ass!

Ryan C: Seen it 3 times. In IMAX. Actually can’t wait to see the whole thing, just as long as they make Bane understandable…

9. Rise of the Planet of the Apes

Ryan C: Never have I felt so much for a chimp, great special effects and a nice way to lead into the inevitable sequels

Nic: I was surprised by this film. I thought it was going to be average at best, but it was fantastic.  Very nicely done, Lithgow was on form as ever and Weta are simply amazing.

Ryan M: This was my surprise of the year. Wasn’t sold by the trailers, but thought the film was brilliant. CGI was incredible, as was Andy Serkis’ motion captured performance.

8. Arthur Christmas

KK: Dangerously close to perfect, and that’s all I have to say on the matter.

Nic: It’s been a very long time since I’ve seen such a wonderfully magical Christmas movie.  The little Christmas nuances that are in both the script and the animation are fantastic, and really get you in the holiday mood.  Aardman are the British Pixar…great animation with great stories!!

7. Troll Hunter

Naysun: a tad unoriginal in format with crappy characterisation save for a couple of characters, but engrossing with great humour and awesome trolls.

KK: I know I’m not meant to say this sort of thing out loud, but I really hate subtitles.  I struggle to sit still for more than a couple of hours, but throw reading into the mix and it’s normally only a matter of time before I’m sound asleep in the cinema. For some reason, Troll Hunter was different – and in all honestly I think the subtitles made the whole thing funnier. By no means an original idea, but really well executed and thoroughly enjoyable.

6. Crazy, Stupid, Love

Bizarrely, this in the only one of Bob’s choices to make the Top 10, and he doesn’t even seem to like it that much…

Bob: […] This wasn’t a ‘bad’ film per se, but it wasn’t great either. I felt that the story arc took too long to resolve (a happy resolution 45 minutes earlier wouldn’t have been out of place) and the characters were too obviously shallow. That being said it was a good romp with some fun little moments.

Ryan M: A smart romantic comedy which isn’t cheesy and very original. Carell and Gosling make a great double act.

KK: Deceptively and refreshingly sophisticated for a rom-com , ticked all the boxes and exceeded all my expectations.  Gosling and Carell are a brilliant combination.

5. The King’s Speech

Charlotte Very British is the first thing that comes to mind.  The acting, pacing and directing were all superb – very engrossing for such a simple storyline.  A story well told.

Naysun: Yes, it was directed like a TV show and it is unbelievable that it won the Best Director Oscar, but despite that the cast brought a very tight script to life and managed to make royalty relatable and even a little bit fun. The two leading men showed us what chemistry means on screen.

Justin: Thought the premise sounded boring, but I was quickly engrossed in the story and the characters. Also gave me the strange feeling of being momentarily interested in royalty.

Justin: Did not expect to enjoy this as much as I did – just the right tone of humour, with great characters and an exciting story. Might not recommend it to kids, but definitely would to adults

Charlotte: As good a Disney movie as they come!  The sequence with the horse fighting the man holding a frying pan sold it for me.  I like it when things make fun of themselves.

Nic: Best Disney film for a long time- classic humour, great animation, and a really good soundtrack

3. Drive

Naysun: A little self-indulgent on the director’s part, but this film shows that Ryan Gosling has real depth to his acting ability. And the opening car chase is just pure film making excellence.

Justin: I love movies with little dialogue and thought Gosling did a great job of not talking. I especially loved the music and how surreal it made the action

KK: Admittedly, I wouldn’t have bothered with this movie if it wasn’t for Gosling, but I did and he was bloody brilliant.

2. Super 8

Naysun: Super 8: The thing that bugs me most about this film is how much people went on and on that’s it’s not as good as Close Encounters or E.T, and that I’m too young to remember those films. I watched those films as a kid too, and I do love them, but this was a great fun homage, with an astounding young cast. Abrams did a great job to get what he did from them, and I did get just enough of that childish magic feeling to leave me happy for the rest of the day. Fun stuff.

Nic: As soon as I had watched this I said “this is the kind of film I want to make.”  It just reminded me of classic Spielberg. “Production Value!!!!”

Charlotte: Like Nic says, coming out of the cinema all I could think was “This is exactly the kind of movie I want to be making.”  Love the power of that “childish magic.”

1. Warrior

Ryan M: This gets number one as not many films brings me close to tears like this film did, even on repeat viewing. Tom Hardy gives a great performance, especially in his last fight, but I was surprised to see what an outstanding job Nick Nolte did. What a film!

Justin: I don’t really like MMA in real life, but the action inthis was great. After I got over not cringing, really enjoyed the acting in this, especially from the old man. Surprisingly emotional.

Ryan C: Amazing performances from Hardy and Edgerton, and quite cool to see Kurt Angle up there as Koba. Brilliant movie!

Naysun: Yes, it was essentially a conventional sports film, but it did it beautifully and brilliantly, and acting, directing and cinematography were superb, the emotion palpable, and it put MMA into a film without making it stupid, which is no mean task. Shame no one went to see it.

And there we have it – the Haphazard Top 10 of 2011. Interestingly, not a single choice on this was unanimous. I’ve used a highly exciting and complicated algorithm to calculate scores and table positions, but if we were to go more down the road of “broad agreement”, Super 8, Troll Hunter and The Kings Speech would all be tied for the top spot.

 
While I would like to think there is some degree of diversity to this list, we’re clearly swinging more toward geeky fandom than life as art house regulars. That said, I think there’s a sense that these movies reflect the kind of things we aspire to make – and I’m more than happy with that!

Sloppy kisses

KK

It’s been an interesting and slightly frantic few weeks for us here at Haphazard. There have been lots of new experiences and all round unfamiliar territory, which really has been a great, if challenging thing. Not that I’m complaining – it’s always been that way for us ever since we all started out making films, because the films we want to make are in themselves sometimes stupidly ambitious. Luckily for us, our stupidity (or is it ambition?) has usually paid off.

Recently we’ve had two projects filming at the same time, which is new for us and quite a test since we’ve grown to rely on our tightly knit Haphazard family for crewing. One three person team buggered off to shoot in the Gambia (more on this from Charlotte soon), and the other group – myself included – stayed in disgustingly wet and windy Glasgow to shoot a concept trailer for our aspiring to be upcoming web/TV series LEGEND OF THE FOUR FISTS.

LEGEND is a kung fu comedy, because there aren’t enough around. It’s fun, childish, with a lot of heart and amazing stunts, and is my dream project because all I really aim to do when I make films is to have playtime. But turns out you really should be careful what you wish for because this time I got my wish and actually had to act. Or at least, try to. I think legally it’s known as attempted acting.

I have done this acting thing before, but it’s been years and I’ve always kind of sucked at it (unless I’m acting an angry person, in which case I just enjoy shouting loudly). When fellow creator/star/fight choreographer William Barber and I came up with the idea for a short film in the summer, it was going to be something fun and silly and ultimately pointless. And I’m fine acting in pointless things. But when we asked the immensely talented Marcus Harben to come on board to helm the project, I should have known it would not end up being something half hearted.

So what we’ve ended up with is something much greater and better than I imagined we could have achieved in the time scale, but therefore it’s also something I’m altogether uncomfortable with being in front of the camera for.

On the other hand, despite my discomfort, it was a real eye opener as to the skill, talent and dedication of those around me. When producing you tend to take a step back and come in to fill the gaps and solve problems when they appear, so you naturally end up seeing the holes and screw ups. From the perspective of an actor I instead got to see how things I take for granted are really bloody hard to achieve. Marcus’ crafting of performance using an in depth knowledge of the mechanisms of comedy, the attention to detail of Costume, Make up, and our Art Director, the physical ability of our stunt guys (mainly sourced from the awesome Glasgow Parkour club) and everyone else involved in the process.

And that’s not to mention how astonished I am at how hard it is just to be funny and yet how easily it seems to come to so many of the talented actors who were involved. I’d watch the takes of Sanjeev Kohli or Innes Smith (whose roles we’ll keep under wraps for the moment along with all details of the story) and try to understand what they’re doing that’s making all the crew crack up every time, but I simply couldn’t put my finger on it. I’d try to replicate it, and yet somehow end up just badly acting my normal self.

I think it’s what I’ve known all along – during those sleepless nights when I’ve been thinking up those witty comebacks, or when I attempt a light-hearted insult that cuts a little too deep, or when I have to rewrite a sentence in a blog seven times before I think there’s just the right balance between dry wit and eloquence.

I’m just not funny.

Luckily, there’s a lot of other funny people working with me, including Marcus, Sanjeev, Innes, William, James Kirk and Vivien Taylor. Even KK is quite funny as a 1AD. Instead I’ll be content with kicking some ass and looking like a bit of a douchebag.

And I’ll be content because the promo will be awesome, since the script, production design, comedy and action are all brilliant – I have no worries that you are all going to love it!

Watch this space for a teaser coming in the next few weeks.

Naysun

Greetings, people of the internet.

Apologies for the delay in what I’m sure will be a highly anticipated second blog. We’ve had some really productive brainstorming sessions over the past few weeks but right now I want to talk about a project that we have currently have in post, Going Viral. Here’s a blurby bit:

Written and directed by Stewart Robertson and Alan McDonald, GOING VIRAL is an online sitcom (5×5 minute episodes) about a man who will do anything to become an Internet sensation. Justin Cole’s life might be on a downward spiral – he’s stuck in a dead-end cinema job, his best friend is tuned to the moon and his ex-girlfriend just became his newest flatmate – but he knows that his whole life can turn around in just the click of a mouse. Well, lots of clicks. And there is no Internet trend too humiliating for Justin – parkour, Internet dating, singing animals… he’s willing to try them all. At the same time, if need be.

Going Viral is the first project we’ve produced exclusively for online distribution. Obviously, we have a few projects under our belt now – but what with the festival circuit and the on going development of Zombie Musical, we’re still not able to put this stuff up on our website and go “Hey! Look what we can do!”

I’ve always found this a bit frustrating – it would be nice to be able to refer people to YouTube to see our work but patience is a virtue and we are trying very hard to be virtuous. With this in mind, we figured now was the time to do something explicitly for the online audience.  This isn’t about festivals, this isn’t a pilot for a feature – this is an absolutely self-contained project which will be online, free and hopefully a great demonstration of what we can do on a shoestring budget.

We shot the whole series on location in Cumbernauld in August 2011. It’s by far the fastest we’ve ever had to work on a project, but we can eat lunch pretty quickly these days and we seem to have got away with it. For those of you who are interested, we shot 50 script pages across 5 days - contrast that to the 11 pages in 6 days we took for Zombie Musical and you’ll start to get an idea of the pace we were chasing.

As always, I should extend a huge thanks to our lovely cast and crew (some returning, some new faces) for a colossal effort in pulling the whole thing together in such a short space of time. Haphazard really has been extraordinarily lucky over the last couple of years to work with people with such a great attitude and enthusiasm for our projects – we don’t run glamorous sets but we genuinely have a lot of fun with the people we work with – something that will always be fundamental to what Haphazard is and aspires to be.

A couple of months since wrap and we’re currently at first assembly on a couple of episodes – Nic has been working surprisingly hard (“we don’t need a dining table, we need an edit suite”) and Haphazard buddy Mike Callaghan has just completed a first run at our season finale.

We’re hoping to launch Going Viral in early 2012. Until then, you can keep up to date with our progress by following the project on Twitter  or “liking” the Facebook Page. Please do spread the word – it will make us feel better if we have a big audience to launch to come January!

Sloppy kisses all round,

KK

A new website at last! It’s been a particularly long time coming, and it’s a bit of a point of shame for us seeing as we’re supposed to be young whiz kids who know everything about the digital era. Despite that, we couldn’t figure out how to 1) make a website that was good and 2) update the website. Thankfully, with the aid of long time Haphazard friends Sam Goodwin and William Barber we’ve finally dealt with the problem! Read more