Forever Never
as i lie

DoP - Robin Brigham
Telecine - Dave Ludlum

Forever Never's manager, Annette, called us after seeing a couple of our promos for Panic Cell with whom they were touring. We swapped a couple of different treatments with the band before agreeing on an idea centred around interactive late night tv chatrooms. We used the title'As I Lie' as a reference to the flipside of the girls sexy tv personas.

The bands singer, Rene, made our lives a lot easier by having pre arranged the female cast. We're not sure how many auditions he did, the poor soul! Then in a stroke of genius, he enlisted the help a couple of the presenters of Alternative music channel Redemption TV, Samara and Georgie, who were both keen to play bolemic, self abusing victims of domestic abuse! And then lie about on a sofa in their underwear.

We shot Georgie's sequence first at Dukes Island Studio. The opening of the promo is a track from behind her into the lens of a video camera. We shot this on the VFX co's Milo motion control rig, which enabled us to track precisely and at speed, right into the camera lens without hitting either it or Georgie!

We then filmed Georgie in one of the makeup rooms revealing her self abuse scars (the makeup for which was kindly supplied by our mate Connor Sullivan..he got an Oscar nomination for Nicole Kidman's nose you know...) and then, and this was above and beyond the call of duty, forcing down a couple of BK Whopper Burgers. What a star!

We shot this all hand held on an Arri 2c continuously racking the focus and using existing light where possible to give it an even grittier feel.

The next day we shot our Babecast scene. I broke the cardinal rule of never let a film crew in your flat (well you would, wouldn't you). Having bought up half of Berwick Streets cheapest, nastiest pink chiffon, we turned the front room into a Babecast Boudoir and filmed the girls, Samara, Georgie, Ria and Alice on DV. Tim O'Connell lit and shot it for us, quite gladly too!

Once we'd shot that we pulled down the chiffon and filmed Rene's actress sister Ria, who was playing one of the girls and baby Spike who mugged shamelessly at the camera.

The rest of the shoot took place over the weekend of the 3 rd March.

Our DoP, Gary Shaw's wife gave birth at 6am to beautiful Emily.  

At 7am we got a call from Gary saying "I'm on my way!" fortunately good sense prevailed and he didn't.

So once again, with absolutely no idea what lights were on the truck, where or what we were shooting, Robin stepped up to DoP duties.

The location was an old disused refrigeration building belonging to Phelps Transport in Hackney Wick, It was a perfect space for the band performance and had lots of smaller rooms adjacent which we could use for Alice's scene.

The band arrived, looking remarkably coherent, having played a gig some 300 miles away the night before and therefore having had no sleep. We shot the band performance for about six hours. Impressively, there were no signs of flagging or complaining from any of the band. Once that was done we moved onto Alice's drug addict tableaux. For the introduction of Alice's character we shot on the tow path of a nearby canal which Robin made look cinematically impressive.

On the Sunday we filmed Samara's scene in Yan's house. We placed her in the capable hands of our actor Glen, who is also a fight coordinator and stuntman. He ensured that she didn't twist or sprain anything and remained safe throughout a very physical shoot.

We were really impressed with the enthusiasm both Samara and Glen brought to the shoot; Samara's willingness to be thrown around a room repeatedly and Glen's ability stop a punch about 2mm in front of our lens!

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