WHAT WOULD YOU GIVE IF YOU COULD GIVE SOMETHING?

THE MAKING OF EHP's FIRST SHORT 'SOLD'

By Paul Williams

I am migrating articles over from the EHP website to this blog. This piece was originally written on 23 October 2003.

Where did it all begin? Way back in the autumn of 1999 that’s where! The erstwhile brothers of film Paul Williams and Paul Terry met at University after sharing make-up. What? Isn’t that how all male chums meet; over a half-used lipstick? Ok, I will explain:

After a year on a Palaeontology course (don’t ask, that’s a whole other story) I switched to English and Creative Studies at Portsmouth University. Portsmouth – the gateway to the Isle of Wight and basically a town that suddenly stops and the sea starts, like someone forgot to put the coastline in and just added the sea. The course was a mixture of English (that’s reading lots of books and philosophising over the meaning of art and reality to those of you who took Sports Science) and Creative Studies, which covered the whole, writing, drama, theatre, film thing.

It was a great three years, a time when you could experiment with all different styles of writing and theatre and hair colour and not have to worry about anyone wondering what the hell you were doing. Our first task for the theatre element of the course was to write and perform a four minute monologue, in an actual theatre, to an audience of actual living and breathing people. We all cacked our collective pants.

Being the cheery fellow’s that we are I wrote a comedy monologue about Death and Paul Terry explored his tortured artistic soul with a monologue about a tortured man tied to a chair. We portrayed pale characters and both wore white face paint (and you all thought we met at a Rocky Horror Show performance). We shared make up and fast became firm friends, sharing that passion to be creative and fly in the face of convention – or at the very least sneak up to it and trip convention up when it wasn’t looking.

Over the next two years we worked on projects at University which accumulated in our final piece, the short film Sold. We had a choice at the end of our course: you could either write a long and boring dissertation that would only be read once and then filed away under ‘collect dust’ or you could create a short theatre piece. It took us a month or so to convince our lectures that a film was a theatre piece – only on a tape rather than a stage. After fighting hard and making a two minute film that involved my then flatmate Alex pretending to slit his wrists and dying in a bath (I am a cheery person, I swear) they allowed us to make Sold.

So, in the autumn of 1999 the Evil Hypnotist was born and Sold was made.

SOLD

“Terribly sorry, Maynard. So embarrassing having company when the flat’s such a mess.”

Have you ever been so drunk that you can’t remember what you did the night before? What if you did something terrible in that lost time – and I don’t mean sleep with someone you shouldn’t have – I mean something horrifying.

This was the basic premise for Sold. A group of housemates, Sarah, Lenny, Stuart and Kate, have a drunken night of swearing and, well, drinking and wake in the morning feeling more than a little worse for wear. That day they are each individually visited by Richard Maynard who claims to be a lawyer and further claims that they have each sold there mortal soul to his client and he wishes to collect by 11.15pm that night, 24 hours after the signing of the contract.

Naturally each housemate freaks out, not remembering any of this and not believing a word Maynard is saying. The lawyer demonstrates his clients seriousness by being able to stop their life for a few seconds. Upon being revived each housemate believes Maynard and desperately beg for their lives, at which point Maynard informs them of a loop hole in the contract. If they take someone else’s life before 11.15pm their place would be forfeit – a soul for a soul.

Each housemate returns home that evening knowing that they will have to kill or be killed.

Hell breaks loose. Knives, stiletto shoes, ashtrays, frying pans, and cookies all become murder weapons as the house descends into chaos. When the dust settles everyone is dead and as the bell strikes 11.15 one of the housemates returns from the dead to thank Maynard for a job well done.

The last shot we see is the only remaining housemate moving into a new house and a whole new set of souls.

Sold was a very steep learning curve. It took an intense week to film and an even intenser month to edit. With the help of another English and Creative Studies student, Jake Dovey, we shot on Digital 8 and edited on an ancient analogue SVHS machine.

Because we were an English course, the arts department wouldn’t let us use any of their equipment or new edit suites, so we ended up in a drafty old room using a machine that had been cobbled together with parts the technicians in the Languages department had stolen.

The filming went smoothly, we used a lot of first year students to fill out the cast (so sweet and innocent) and covered my friends bedroom in chocolate sauce. Before you all go and get the wrong idea – we decided early on the film should be in black and white, to have a noir feel, and as Hitchcock knew the best substitute for blood in B&W is good old chocolate sauce. In fact we covered the house in it. By the end of the shoot I think my housemates wished I had sold my soul and been dispatched at the end of the film along with my unlucky cast.

While Jake and I struggled with the ancient editing machine Paul Terry had a nightmare of his own recording the music for Sold. The film was too long, but we didn’t have the time or the right equipment to make a re-edit so it stayed at thirty minutes with what has to be the longest slo-mo fight sequence ever to grace the silver screen. We had to re-do the sound the afternoon before the premiere because it was too quiet and we were all suffering from lack of sleep and being malnourished. All that said, it was a sign of things to come and for the first EHP film it went down a storm.

We asked if we could have an evening to ourselves – all the other final year pieces were shown on another night – this was not us thinking we were better, it's just through our cunning teaser poster campaign which asked ‘What has been sold?’, the expectation and word of mouth had ripped through Pompey like wild fire, or at least a cosy log fire.

The night arrived and the evening kicked off with a Hollywood style trailer, complete with deep, hammed-up voice over. Then there was a live set by Paul and star bassist Nick Jones performing songs from the soundtrack. Finally, the lights dimmed and Sold played to a packed audience in the small, cold Wiltshire studios, where you could hear the traffic humming by through the walls.

The opening credits rolled and the rest is history.