Everything Is Going To Be Fine

Someone is attached to the car by their guts after a crash...for the entire film!
That was the core idea Neil Rickatson (co-writer/producer) pitched to me when we started throwing around ideas for a short film.

Neil and I have been writing scripts and making films together since school but they were only made for friends and family. With this film we wanted to break that cycle and create something that could reach further and more people could enjoy. We’ve always been huge comedy horror fans, the two genres compliment each other so well and give you so much to play with in terms of audience emotions, so we focused in on that.

We spent a lot of time on the writing, taking it in turns doing full passes on the script. Limiting the locations and characters was key to ensure we could get it through production but we found the restriction helped spur on our creativity too. The final piece of the puzzle was making the characters a past-their-prime rock band. Previously they were a family and this had made the tone too dark; once they were in band the humour was much easier to add in. We were both thrilled with the end result; we know neither of us could have created it alone and we’d both love to watch it.

We threw everything into pre-production as we created a colour scheme for the band, I roped my wife in to making props and designed prop posters and CD covers with the awesome Luiz Felipe Leite who also designed our fantastic film poster. The extremely talented makeup artist Hannah Chestnutt helped us with the bands makeup (KISS meets Marilyn Manson) and their gory injuries, which were integral to the film.

I brought Luke Collins on board as our cinematographer having seen his stunning portfolio and after chatting I knew he was on the same page as me in both tone and style. I wanted the film to have the tone of Very Bad Things, Double Date and Evil Dead 2 but have a similar shooting style to Blue Ruin, Green Room and The Endless. I feel the theme through all of those is people in situations where they lose control and panic, if they just took a little time to think through their actions they would be okay, but they don’t. That is what drives our film too.

Luke achieved this tone along with his 1st AC the ever resourceful Tom Laxton and our excellent sound team Lee Viesnik, Jonathan Cartwright and Oscar Pérez.

Our brilliant cast Imogen Wilde, Fran McAteer and Luke de Belder brought the characters to life more than we could have ever hoped for. They threw themselves (quite literally) into the action despite, or maybe because of, the cold weather throughout the six day shoot. Imogen bought the required strength for Keys, Fran the menace for Bass and Luke the comic stupidity for Drums.

In post production, I worked on the edit myself as it is my day job. From the outset I had a clear idea of the cutting style I wanted especially for how we would transition back and forth from the flashbacks with match cuts. For the grade, Felipe Fernandes brought the images to life, creating the look we had aimed for from the beginning and Sam Mason did the sound mix giving the film a new depth.

You can’t have a film about a rock band without music. The score was composed, to counteract the rock songs, by Tim Alcock and the bands heavy riffs were written by Andrea Nonni. I then wrote the lyrics and finally singer Xander Rawlins provided the theatrical vocals required to go with them.

I learnt so much from making this film and I am so proud of how it has ended up. Unlike previous projects, where we tried to do everything ourselves, this film has truly end up as we intended. Actually it’s better as it got improved and tweaked along the way by all those involved and for that I thank my new film family.

The film title served as an on-set mantra and this continued into post production.
Despite our little film having such a small budget I knew that thanks to a brilliant and insanely talented cast and crew that in the end Everything Is Going To Be Fine.