Best Wishes to Danny Boyle

Our best wishes go out to Danny Boyle, Film Director and ‘Ringmaster’ for tonight’s 2012 Olympic Opening Ceremony.

With the start of the games now upon us. Team RM have entered the Pentathlon of title sequences, having just completed out latest marathon Frankenweenie.

Our next events up are:

Theatre of Dreams
Muhammad Ali’s Greatest Fight
The Numbers Station
Riot on Redchurch Street
Zaytoun

We also meet with organisers next week, to discuss entering into more events before the games finish.

Paris rendezvous with Zaytoun’s Eran Riklis

Over the years, meeting with directors and editors in a cutting room for the first time, has always been a special time and place for me. It’s the real starting point in the creative process of developing a title sequence and also the defining point for both the editor and the director.

Yesterday was another one of those moments and a real joy for me to meet with Zaytoun’s Director Eran Riklis and Editor Hervé Schneid, who both had the look of tired joy etched on their faces.

For the last two days I have been in Boulevard Ney, Paris – one of fours homes in Paris and LA for CGI and effects company BUF.

BUF has been responsible for delivering world-class CG animated films. Which includes Dark Shadows, The Green Lantern, Thor and Total Recall. BUF is also the post-house for Zaytoun, where the editing suite is located and where I met with both Eran and Herve, along with Assistant Editor Melanie Bigeard and Post Production Supervisor Michael Saxton, to discuss our approved creative approach and arrange the next stages of production.

I’m now returning back to Soho today, where I’ll be attending a screening of the film with Eran at Molinare this Saturday, along with Producer Gareth Unwin.

Theatre of Dreams

We’ve scored another one in the back of the net! After our meeting and screening yesterday with producers Manuela Nobel and Ben Timlett. The whistle blew for full-time with us picking up the trophy for the title sequence for their new film ‘Theatre of Dreams‘.

From the same camp that made ‘A Liar’s Autobiography‘, Bill (Jones) and Ben (Timlett) Productions and Written and directed by David Scheinmann. The film has been poised as ‘Billy Elliot‘ meets ‘Bend it Like Beckham‘, telling a warm family fictional tale of Matt Busby who helps a young boy fulfill his footballing dreams, whilst still overcoming the tragedy of Manchester United’s Busby Babes plane disaster.

Newcomer to film 11 year old Jack Smith plays the young boy Georgie, having outplayed hundreds of hopefuls to win the lead role. He stars opposite Brian Cox (The Bourne Identity) who plays Sir Matt and Natascha McElhone (The Truman Show) who plays his mum.

We are now starting to warm up and we’ll give you running commentary once we have kicked-off.

The Numbers Station

The number count of films we are now currently working on has just been increased! As we are very pleased to announce that we have cracked the code on the title sequence for ‘The Numbers Station‘, which has been directed by Kasper Barfoed.

The film is based around the secret world of intelligence agencies. Who since World War II have used secret stations to broadcast untraceable short-wave radio communications, in the form of encoded numbers to carry assignments to the field. Even though governments deny the use of such stations, the numbers from which the code has never been broken, can still be heard today.

John Cusack plays Emerson, a disgraced black ops agent, tasked with the job of protecting Katherine (Malin Akerman) a code operator working for a CIA broadcast station in the middle of a remote location.

From the producers of ‘Daybreakers‘ and ‘The Matador‘. ‘The Numbers Station‘ is set to be an explosive code-breaking thriller, in which we’re sure Agent Cusack will be able to decipher.

We’ll broadcast more code as we progress.

 

In Remembrance Ernest Borgnine

The actor with a head that looked hard enough to shatter granite, was the veteran star Ernest Borgnine who died yesterday at 95.

The films that I will always remember him for are ‘The Dirty Dozen‘, ‘The Wild Bunch‘, ‘The Flight of the Phoenix‘, ‘The Poseidon Adventure‘ and ‘Escape from New York‘.

“I don’t care whether a role is 10 minutes long or two hours,” he said in 1973. “And I don’t care whether my name is up there on top, either. Matter of fact, I’d rather have someone else get top billing; then if the picture bombs, he gets the blame, not me.”

Zaytoun

We are really pleased to announce that we have been awarded the title sequence for Eran Riklis‘s new feature film Zaytoun.

The film has been produced by Academy Award winner Gareth Unwin (The King’s Speech) at Bedlam Productions and Fred Ritzenberg of Far Films.

After a few meetings with Gareth and a presentation of our vision for the title sequence. We had the green light this week.

Written by first-time Palestinian writer Nader Rizq. Zaytoun (Arabic for olive), tells the personal human story of an Israeli fighter pilot (Stephen Dorff), who is shot down over hostile Lebanon in 1982 and has to find his way to the border in the company of an at first hostile teenage Palestinian refugee (Abdallah El Akal).

We will keep you posted with further development as we proceed.

The unsung Monty Python

The Pythons are always being asked, “Who’s this André chap that keeps appearing on your credits?”

Well, André Jacquemin is the co-owner of Redwood Studios with Michael Palin, and is undoubtedly one of the unsung members of the Monty Python team.

I have myself worked alongside André on ‘A Fish Called Wanda‘ for John Cleese and numerous films for Terry Gilliam.

So, I popped in to see André at his studios in Great Chapel Street, to find out how he got involved with the Python team in the very beginning?

André recalls, “Back in the early 70s, I had been working as a tea boy at a studio in Wardour Street, Soho, under chief engineer Alan Bailey. One day, one of the engineers was ill and I was asked to the session even though I was only a few weeks into the new job. Although it was a lot simpler then, I didn’t know too much. It turned out I handled it quite well and I had a natural talent for it.”

He went on to say, “Then one day shortly after, I was looking after reception. I went to nip-out and get a sandwich and as I was walking out, Michael Palin walked in. It was the year their first Python TV series came out, but I didn’t know who Michael was or who Monty Python were. So I went back upstairs to see what this guy wanted. He said, I want to do a voice over demo reel for a friend of mine. Well, my mentor Alan Bailey, who had worked with everyone from The Beatles to Frank Sinatra, was busy in another session the day Michael wanted to record. But I said, I could do that and we had a studio free, so I booked him in with me to start working on the voice reel.”

“When I got the scripts for Michael’s friend, I thought they were really funny, but I still didn’t realise that they were extracts from Python scripts!

In the end, the voice demo took about a year to do, as Michael was always out filming whenever I wanted to play the sketches back for him to listen too. During this year, in my spare time I would work on the sketches by adding sound effects, putting music on and so on. At the end Michael said… André this is amazing work you have done here… Would you like to work on an album I’ll be recording soon?”

André continued “Still not knowing who Michael was and in the same week, I was also offered a job on a Wild West show, running the sound department, creating live show tapes etc… Michael then rung me back in the same week and said, come down and meet the rest of the guys.

I had a decision to make. Do I want to go with this Wild West roadshow which was going to go around the world and seemed like a good opportunity? But at the time I was also in a band which was going well and I was also happy in London. None of these things were at that time more important than each other, but in the end I decided to go and see Michael and stay in London.

So I went down to Michael’s house for a meeting. I walked in and got introduced to Eric, the two Terrys and Graham. The doorbell then rung and in walked John Cleese. It was then the penny dropped and I realised who they were! I thought, oh my god I’m in big trouble here. There were all these Oxford / Cambridge people and there was me having left school with a swimming and bicycle certificate, I wondered if they had one of them as well! Michael then showed me a two foot high pile of scripts on a table and said, go through that and see which ones you think we should do? I was only 19 at the time… can you imagine?”

Since then André has gone on to be involved on countless tv shows, radio commercials, movies and the production of hit singles and albums. He has accumulated over 130 major awards, including 2 BAFTA nominations as composer with fellow writer, life long friend and band member Dave Howman, for Monty Python’s ‘Every Sperm is Sacred‘ from the film ‘The Meaning of Life’.

André says “My band is still going. I remember when we first started out, I was playing guitar at the time… the bass player had left and nobody we knew wanted to play an instrument with four strings, so I picked it up. I do a bit of keyboards too. We compose our own music and Dave and I do all our writing together still after all these years. Dave is defiantly a more talented composer than I am and a brilliant guitar player as well and still can play a mean solo behind his back! But I tend to do the creative studio side of things these days, we have been working together since I was about 14. So it was only natural that Dave and I worked on the Python stuff when asked to come up with the odd ditty.”

Now André has just finished working on Graham Chapman’s ‘A Liar’s Autobiography‘, as supervising sound editor and sound engineer. The animated 3D movie based on the book of the memoir of the late Python member, who died in 1989 at the age of 48. Produced by Bill and Ben Productions, the film is not a Monty Python movie as such, although the Pythons did do the voice over, apart from Eric.

I will also be working with André again on another feature called ‘Theatre of Dreams‘, over the next coming weeks. We will post an update about this later.

To read more about André, you can visit his website by clicking here at www.redwoodstudios.co.uk