THE RESIDUE OF A RELATIONSHIP: THE STORY SO FAR

My film 'The Residue of a Relationship' was released online by Short of the Week on June 5th and it's been quite the ride watching it find its own little audience ever since.

I just wanted to give a little run down of all the places it's appeared so far and where you might be able to find it in the future. 

The movie premiered on Short of the Week via Vimeo and got some really nice feedback from a few reviewers and publications...

Short of the Week said: "Reminiscent of a John Green or Woody Allen movie, Chapman’s visual diary is campy to the point of cheesiness, but gets away with it because of how utterly charming it is." https://www.shortoftheweek.com/2017/06/05/the-residue-of-a-relationship/

Film School Rejects said: "Every single person in the world can relate to what Chapman’s documenting, because regardless of the specifics, we have all loved someone we couldn’t quite have, even when we deserved them. How Chapman uses what he’s lost to discover more about himself and the conundrum of love is inspiring, endearing, honest, heartbreaking, and ultimately hopeful.” https://filmschoolrejects.com/short-day-residue-relationship-documents-ramifications-love/

Director’s Notes called it “A short that feels impossible not to like.” http://directorsnotes.com/2017/06/05/residue-relationship-brett-chapman/

It was also released as a featured short by Film Shortage here: http://filmshortage.com/shorts/the-residue-of-a-relationship/

I was pretty happy with the reviews the film got at this stage and it managed to garner a respectable enough number of views. I also received a heap of messages from people who watched the film and wanted to share their own stories with me or just talk about what it had meant to them. This was an unexpected but really heartening side effect.

Then I was contacted by a company called 'Omeleto' - I guess they're sort of like 'Upworthy' but just for video content. I was skeptical at first - I'm always skeptical of unsolicited emails from people claiming to like my work. All that considered, I decided to trust in them and they released Residue on their Facebook page and YouTube channel. Despite them slapping a clickbait title on the film that I'm not in love with, they managed to snag over 110,000 views (at the time of writing) across their platforms.

Hello, World!

Residue has also made it into a bunch of festivals and recently won the Audience Choice award at Indie Flicks. I'm still waiting to hear back from a lot of the festivals it's been entered into but I'm hopeful.

The majority of people commenting online or speaking to me about the movie have been really positive and I have to say that it's helped me to keep the faith in my own particular style of filmmaking and point of view. The support and encouragement I've also had from my local community of filmmakers has been amazing. 

I'm really excited to see how much further Residue can go but, also, I can't wait to get to work on the next project. Watch this space.

INTERVIEWED BY THE SHEFFIELD CREATIVE GUILD

I was recently interviewed about my work by the Sheffield Creative guild. You can read the full interview here

THE RESIDUE OF A RELATIONSHIP SCREENINGS

January came and went as a bit of a blur for me - I used it to put in place the groundwork for a year of projects so I've not really had a moment to reflect on some of the cool stuff that's happened yet.

The Residue of a Relationship was accepted into the 10th annual Love Actually Short Film Showcase in New York, which is amazing news. Add to that the fact that it'll be screened on Valentine's Day and I think it's a pretty great setting for my little film.

It'll also be getting a screening at an Arkade event in my native Sheffield which should be a good opportunity for my friends and peers to get a look at it amongst some other great work by Sheffield folks.

Feedback that I've had from advanced copies of the film has been overwhelmingly positive so far, which has been super heartening, but I can't deny that I'm slightly nervous about the prospect of it going out into the world. 

THE MEMORY BOOK

I've always been fascinated by my nan, I think this will be the fourth film I've made about her. For me she is a person full of contradictions. As a small child I recall being terrified of her but as we both aged and I became aware of her creeping vulnerability and her ever so slightly warming personality. I began to feel close to her.

She's a woman who has been plagued by tragedies and illness her whole life and in her 91st year dementia is one of the many obstacles she has to overcome on a daily basis. She's essentially bedridden and seems to have lost her appetite for most things. 

As Christmas approached I knew that I wanted to do something special for her, something that would reach outside of our usual interactions and try to muster something new. I wanted to bring back her appetite for life, even if it was just for a moment. What I came up with is detailed in my new film:

FREDDIE WOODWARD: BREAKTHROUGH

Freddie Woodward is an Olympic diver with team GB. He competed at Rio in 2016 and looks to have a super bright future ahead of him. I recently got the opportunity to produce a short film with him and it turned out to be a really interesting project.

Freddie is currently training for the Tokyo 2020 Olympics so obviously his time is relatively precious and as such we had roughly a two hour time slot to shoot the entire film. With this in mind I was pretty meticulous about putting together a realistic shot list for the day.

I did my research and watched a number of diving videos and also took inspiration from one of my favourite directors of short sport films, Gareth Bowler. His movie 'Sober' is a really great example of the dramatic and cinematic results you can get from a DSLR if you put real thought into shot selection. 

That leads onto the kit set up for the day. We were going to have to move quickly so decided to go with a Canon 6D teamed up with a Sony RX100 IV and a GoPro Hero 4. In terms of lenses we shot primarily on a 50mm 1.4 and a 24-105mm 4.0. I figured this set up would give me the range of shot options I was after and I'd be able to rig everything up quickly enough to work within the time frame we had. 

On the day my assistant Hannah and I arrived about 25 minutes early to scope out the location and eventually met Freddie and signed in. He was a natural in front of camera and a dream to work with. This was one of the key factors in making the shoot a success - Hannah and I were able to get on with setting up shots and Freddie was always ready and always nailed what we were after. 

It was an intense two hours but by the end we felt pretty satisfied that we had got everything we went there for and had managed to avoid dropping any kit or personnel into a pool. We shot our interview with Freddie First so that we could add anything new that arose to our shot list and because of this we ended up getting some really interesting angles with our GoPro and were even able to fit in a bit of lens whacking!

Once the edit was complete I sent the film to Freddie and his PR who both really loved the cut. Because of that we decided to throw together a quick teaser film that Freddie could share with his follower on Instagram. Within three hours of posting this 17 second clip had over 2,000 views and 600 likes. Not bad.

Excited to share this with you all on Thursday! #diving #olympics #athlete

See this Instagram video by @freddie_woodward * 883 likes

So today the film has gone live via Instagram, YouTube, Twitter and Vimeo. I think everyone involved is really happy with the end result and it's been a great exercise in quick production and online distribution. The film was conceived, shot, edited and released over the course of four days. 

PEREGRINATION: A SERIES

Earlier this year I put together a series of four films that all shared some DNA. The connecting thread that ran through all of them was an appreciation or acknowledgment of a particular journey. 

It only occurred to me recently that I never specified that they should be viewed together, as a series, so this is my attempt to rectify that. Viewed in order, there is a story to be decoded and understood.