Last Saturday night, the Rialto Channel 48Hours found its champion with team Chess Club’s bread-stealing revenge musical Bread Winner (full list of winners here). See the glorious short above and check out the other superb Grand Finalists at the 48Hours Screening Room.
We posed some questions to four of the five good blokes that make up Chess Club – Barnaby Fredric, Paul Harrop, Sam Bunkall and Tom Cottle – about how they pulled it off.
FLICKS: What were your best and worst 48Hours experiences going into this year’s competition?
BARNABY FREDRIC: Best: Every year working with our awesome team. Worst: Last year when I was very sick, yellow and itchy. I actually had a Liver transplant between the shooting and screening of the film in the Auckland finals so that let you know what kinda state I was in.
PAUL HARROP: Last year was particularly bad, Barnaby was very unwell and Sam was out of town for the first half of the weekend. Kinda felt like we were on the back foot the whole time. Best is Definitely sitting in the theatre with my mates and listening to the audience react to whatever it is that we’ve made.
SAM BUNKALL: My favourite Chess Club film is still Alex, His Kids and Miracle World from 2009. Had a lot of fun that year and a lot of great memories. Worst definitely last year with Barns being so unwell and I had my dear Grandad’s funeral the day before so I missed half the shoot.
Musical is a much-maligned genre to end up with, but yours wasn’t the only one to go deep in this year’s competition. What did you first think when you drew it, and how did that initial feeling change over the weekend?
BARNABY: Initially I felt a bit sick, it was only after we hit upon the idea at 4am Saturday that I started having fun and it grew from there.
PAUL: I always wanted us to get musical for the reason that it’s one of the 48 hours bogey men and I wanted to see how we’d tackle it. After slogging through the writing I just got more and more excited as the weekend went on. I felt like we were making one of our best films yet.
TOM COTTLE: I was quite sceptical we could pull it off well. We had issues in the past trying to dub over dialogue and I didn’t want a repeat of that experience. It really throws the timing off the production because we needed to have all the songs recorded before we could get anything in camera. Once filming began I was relieved we didn’t have to worry about audio levels and microphones sneaking into the shot, unconvincing lip syncing became the new fear.
SAM: For years we said that it would be great to get musical because we could then do a homage to R. Kelly’s “Trapped in the Closet”. But then we finally got it and we realised that it’s actually a hard homage to pull off. Then we thought we could do an investigative doco as to the whereabouts of NZ band Rubicon. And finally we settled on a revenge film about bread.
Your match cut is amazing because it implies that you shot the opening Countdown scene last (unless Barnaby has some Spartan-level beard-growing abilities). At what point during the filmmaking weekend did you shoot that scene?
BARNABY: My beard-growing skills are legendary – but that would be beyond even me. We shot everything else on Saturday, then started editing it and went back out at about 2pm Sunday to get the beginning shot. Stressful? Yeah. But worth it for the drop.
SAM: His beard had grown back by Monday though…
Did you record the songs while shooting or separately in post?
PAUL: After writing the lyrics, recording the songs was the first thing we did on Saturday morning. We headed into my work (I’m an audio describer at Able, TV for the blind) and used my AD booth to lay down the vocals. Then it was just a matter of lip syncing along to our recorded tracks as we shot the scenes.
How did the writing of your Award-Winning screenplay go down? Was this the first idea that came to mind? Were there any fist-fights in the think tank or are you all a cohesive mind at this point?
BARNABY: For the most part we’re on the same wavelength, but some of the best jokes this year were hotly debated. The writing is just all of us hammering away until we find something we’re into, but a lot of jokes can come out of ideas during filming.
PAUL: Having worked together for so long, we pretty much all know where each other is coming from, but that doesn’t necessarily translate to a fast and easy process. I think we fleshed out three different films before settling on Bread Winner. Though once we were set on the idea, the actual script writing was easier. Although we didn’t finish scripting till 5am Saturday morning.
TOM: James [Kupa] had a killer idea called Death Room. The title intrigued us but we couldn’t quite get the plot working. There was also a very convoluted story about clones that I liked but would have been impossible given the time constraints.
Did you do rehearsals?
PAUL: Nope, no time for that. We just shoot and hope for the best! We all knew what we wanted and trusted each other to have our backs if the performances were rubbish or whatever. We are all open and generous with feedback and we’ve all got pretty good instincts so the only reason we’d need to go re-shoot the scene was if there were any technical difficulties (e.g. me not being able to lip sync all that well).
Who should have beaten you?
PAUL: All the finalists were bloody great in different ways. Tide was flawlessly shot, TBALC’s The Silent Man’s script was tight, snappy and hilarious. The Couch Kumaras had a heartfelt and stunning film. Peru’s music was outstanding and beautifully sung. Who knows how the judges make their decisions.
SAM: I second the above. And this is the second time I’ve seen an amazing film from Christchurch miss out. TBALC this year and The Eh Team from 2013 – so shout out to them definitely. I have no idea how the judging goes down but we were very fortunate this year that it went in our favour – thanks guys, we’re honoured!
What was going on as you entered the final hour of the comp?
TOM: We were trying to output the film and the loading bar was stuck at 0% for around 5 minutes. A restart solved the issue. Together we watched back what we had made and we frantically tried to fix various sound and syncing issues on the way to the hand in.
There are many scenes and gags that hit well the first time and only get better on repeat. One for me is the pan down to a grim trolley-dweller in Vic Park Market – and especially his departure from frame. Was sleep deprivation a factor in this awesome, non-sensical gag?
TOM: That was James’ idea while we were filming. A complete afterthought but it is one of my favorite moments in the film too.
PAUL: I reckon it was also a reaction to the song and Barnaby’s performance being so menacing and dark. A bit of the old Chess Club humour thrown in at the end.
You’re going to have to defend your title. At risk of helping the competition, what did you learn from this year?
BARNABY: Keep it simple. Or take what you have and simplify it at the very least.
PAUL: You have to keep an eye on the whole thing. Make sure you be specific in your choices but don’t let that distract you into focusing on one thing for too long.
SAM: One thing we’ve learnt over the years is that it’s really hard to try and cram a feature length idea into seven minutes. So better to write to that time-frame – write a story that you can tell well in seven minutes.
Finally, do you still like bread?
BARNABY: I love bread. I’m more than gluten-tolerant, I’m gluten-dependent.
PAUL: Fruit toast?
Or musicals?
PAUL: Hell yes I still love musicals. Musicals are great. Anyone who says they don’t like them just haven’t seen any good ones. Or are soulless monster people.
SAM: I’d definitely take bread over a musical any day.
