The final script that I worked on for third year students was for Daniel Daley and his film ‘Cake Break’.

This film is difficult to talk about, mainly because it is one of the weirdest things I have ever been a part of. It is inspired by Fanny Cradock and a video that Dan found on YouTube called ‘Pickle Surprise’ (made by video Artist Tom Rubnitz).

 

I think I should explain Mr Daley a little bit before describing the film as it might make some things make more sense. Dan is an experimental film student so he is looking to push, or even break, the boundaries of film making conventions. Dan’s films are so experimental that even other experimental film makers can’t explain Dan’s films. What makes his film successful, as opposed to a complete mess, is that as soon as you find out the subject matter for the film then it strangely makes sense. His last film, ‘Cow Bell’ is a film in which people in a bear costume cut up different body parts of dead animals, including cutting the eyeball out of a sheep’s head, smashing a brain with a hammer, and cutting up a heart and kidneys. The film is about animal cruelty and how animal testing is cruel and disgusting.

 

‘Cake Break’ is a cooking show hosted by Dusty and his/her tormented and abused husband Bunny. The dialogue in the film is not spoken on set, and is instead read out in a voice over (by a man who sounds strangely similar to Tim Curry), this makes the film even weirder as the characters mouths never move, but they are talking in the film.

The script for this film was the hardest one I worked on, mainly because the thing that I am best at when writing a script is the dialogue, and making sure the dialogue is natural sounding and makes sense for what the subject matter of the film and the character who is saying it. The best description I can think of for the dialogue in ‘Cake Break’ is it is like ‘A Clockwork Orange’ on drugs. I was originally left to my own devices to edit the script, but I was confused so much by the dialogue (and it gave me a pretty bad headache) that I had to organise a meeting with Dan so we could go through the script together so he could pretty much describe every word that I was reading. Once again though, in pure Dan Daley style, once he described what the words meant and why they were written like that it made so much sense.

As the dialogue for this film was so weird and out there, there wasn’t much I could to change it; pretty much everything I thought was wrong with the dialogue was intentional. My main role in script editing for Dan was making sure the story made sense, and that all of the characters actions made sense in the context of the film. This ended up being even more difficult than attempting to edit the dialogue as Dan is such a passionate film maker, so anything I tried to change in any way he defended to his last breath, no matter how silly or irrelevant the thing was. The main example I can think of is a thing called hypno-wheel; Dan wanted the end of the film to be for the set to pull away and the main character to be looking evilly at the camera as a giant spiral wheel hypnotises the audience. He wanted this ending so much that trying to explain that this wouldn’t make much sense in any film, let alone his film and that this ending went from making strangely making sense, like Dan’s other films, and was just starting to be random just for the sake of it. We ended up spending a few hours “discussing” whether hypno-wheel should stay in the film, luckily in the end he finally saw sense and decided to let me write the ending so that it made more sense for the film.

The hypno-wheel argument pretty much describes the whole process of editing Dan’s script, but this isn’t a negative thing, it showed both of our passion for what we do and we ended up arguing so much as we both wanted the film to be the best that it could be; even though the arguments got pretty heated at times we both saw this, if we hadn’t then his script wouldn’t have improved and we probably wouldn’t work together in the future. Luckily we both feel as though the long, difficult script editing process was for the best and we finished both being happy with the final draft.

I learnt so much from working with Dan, mainly that sometimes it is better to argue your point instead of just rolling over and letting someone getting their own way even if it is detrimental to the project. I also learnt that people can be extremely passionate about their projects, and that may make them more difficult to work with, you just have to equal their passion in whatever role you are filling in order to make the working relationship work.

I hope you have enjoyed hearing about by experiences in crewing for the third years at university. Thanks for reading