First think of a simple story i.e. ‘It's a man who wants to be a horse but is actually a cow’ then enthused with your idea open a document and write it. Use wonderfully descriptive wording, poetic sentences and deep, profound dialogue, then realise you have written a 5 minute verbose story.
Condense what you have written into 90 seconds, getting down to the necessary bare bones, thus deleting any lines of any philosophical merit (sadly, this means getting rid of some of the most valued sentences such as ‘I laugh at the cows as they stand around like… like sheep').
Good. Once you have nailed the story, get it shot.
Now, upon constructing your shot list, you may find that you have enough shots for a short feature film. This is fine, as long as you have 3 months in the edit, which for many people will be no problem (us included).
Also, you may find that you have included quite a few crane shots, or high altitude aircraft perspective shots or even guns and explosions. Not saying for a moment that any of these things are unnecessary, or indeed unattainable, but with ‘Le Cheval', we found the skydiving shots, mountain climbing and lizard wrestling scenes felt too contrived, and thus decided to keep to the simple running shots.
You will need an actor, or you could persuade a valued member of the crew to don a suit and run, run like the wind.
When deciding to shoot a French film in French it is advisable to secure the services of someone speaks French we thought about this and decided to use a Frenchman.
In summary, to quote from the now famous French vocal actor Franck Delannoy when discussing Depict! Films: "C'est mieux si c'est simple."
For those that need to know it was shot on Mini DV and cost £30 in total, this includes the suit, tape and petrol to Wiltshire, and the wonderful music was composed and played by Adam Coombs.
The introduction of the web streaming was a nice touch this year, as was being able to read the reviews that people posted. (Our favourite was the woman that thought that there wasn't enough difference between horses and cows to be funny, genius.)
Winning the competition was fantastic as was the response following it. We have got a distribution deal with Dazzle films, the film has been broadcast on BBC3 and we appeared at Aspen shorts fest. There was something wonderfully surreal about being flown to America to show our 90-second short alongside the cream of the short film world, bizarre. ‘Le Cheval:2.1’ is still being requested for film festivals around the world and we still receive about two requests for it a week nearly a year later.
Most recently it was short-listed and went on to win the Supershorts competition in London. We are currently working on several shorts and are in the process of signing for Pallmall pictures a new Production company in London with a view to writing surrealist viral adverts.
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