Se7en Green Bottles

I, like many filmmakers, have tried to keep filming during the lockdown. I was attracted to film on zoom because it offered an opportunity to explore multiple character story-telling and to work with actors in a more theatrical way.

I had a simple idea for a story

A group of political activists meets online to celebrate their 3 years together, only to be taken out, one by one, by the forces they are fighting against.

I could see exciting opportunities for visual storytelling on zoom and the theme of political suppression is all too relevant today. With recent events in Russia and Belarus, I felt this story needs to be made

Francois Zaidi came on board the project very early on. He had helped with notes on the Pretty Bonnets edit and i was excited to work with him again for his keen grasp on story and extensive experience in multi-camera editing

Under the clinic eye of zoom, the focus is on the actors As everyone is on screen at the same time this suggested a more theatrical approach to filming. Rather than cutting the script up. Filming the script in one take would allow the actors to feed off each other and build a believable world together.

We had no script when we started. Just the basic idea. This allowed me to cast a group of actors I already knew and then write the script around their characters.

I chose actors experienced in theatre and film. To make the party feel real there would have to be an element of improvisation and as we were filming everything in one take it was going to be more like directing a play than traditional filming.

Alexander Mackendrick in "On Film-making" talks about how every character walks into a scene with something in their pocket. Meaning every character in the scene has an intension and that they hold a piece of information that they think will help change the situation

So though this was only a 6-minute script, much of the writing for the film was in the creation of each character's backstories, so that everyone had something in their pocket.

During this process, Francois was also devising how we were going to record the 7 simultaneous video streams on the actors’ oddball collection of different PC's, Macs, and mobile phones.

All credit is due to Francois for the edit. It was his experiments with dynamic windows that allowed us to create the rhythm pace and impact of a traditional edit in a multiple screen format.

Though at the beginning my focus might have been on directing the actors and Francois’ was directing camera. Working on zoom became very much a collaborative affair where it would be very hard to put a finger on the dividing line between our work.

Mick Dow

I met Mick at a US film festival we both attended to present our films (Le défi du rade and Hope in a box, respectively). Unlike many of these encounters, we kept in touch and eventually exchanged quite a bit about the editing of our next films.

One day, during the Covid confinement in the UK, he contacted me with an idea he had, to make a fiction film, proposing that we worked together.

What first attracted me to the project was that it was a narrative. Though shot remotely through a zoom-like software, it wouldn’t be just talking heads, it would be a story, and a story not about Covid.

As a french director I was also very interested in working with a cast of British actors. Moreover, the script wasn’t just a cheap trick. It has political implications about the state of western democracies, about digital surveillance, private life jeopardy, coercion and other, very actual themes, so much so that we set the date of the film in memoriam to the 75th anniversary one of George Orwell’s most remarkable works.

Though we proposed to rehearse and film on Zoom, I did not want to rely on one specific graphic interface. Plus, since we were setting the story in the future, you may expect a more advanced, more predictive interface. (And there you have another concerning theme with AI.)

So while the actors performed on zoom, I recorded each actors video feeds on their own ipads or computers. Seven individual video feeds, meant we were free to create any GUI we would want. This naturally led to developing dynamic windows, Moving windows which told the story, just as standard editing does in film.

In the meantime, I acted as director to Mick as the writer. His writing I felt was neat, primal even, and very creative. We both added ideas to the script and went over maybe ten versions in a process I really enjoyed.

The edit was not simple. It was a matter of seven screens always in sight, but making it more like there was only one: To make the audience eyes go where we want them to go (Mick referred to this as the “Magician’s trick”) took an understanding of where the human eye naturally falls and a lot of VFX! But these are the kind of VFX I prefer because they are not meant to be seen.

Se7en Green Bottles is our first film together. Hardly can it be our last.

François Zaidi