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Scratch is our very first effort, shot with a couple of friends. It's a parody on several movies, including Titanic, Pitch Black and the Blair Witch Project. We even made a trailer!
Except for animation every movie depends on actors. In this case even more since most of the actors were heavily involved with the writing of the script, not to mention the improvisation of the dialogue. Therefore our thanks go out to our actors:
We started out on Scratch by gathering with a few friends on a friday night in October 2001. Nothing was done beforehand but dinner preparations (yes, those have been filmed and may or may not be available on the Special Limited Edition Directors Choice Ultimate DVD Collectors Box Set). After dinner we set out to brainstorm about the script. The basic story was agreed on; the making of a movie by a bunch of amateurs. In the course of the shooting we changed many details, the main story line however stayed virtually intact.
In our idea, the amateurs were going to fail at shooting about eight movies or so. We found out the hard way we didn't have time for this, so only three made it into the final version, with another three being mentioned in passing.
Although we call it a script it is actually a description of scenes with some notes on dialogue items which we though funny or good enough to remain. Most of the dialogue in the movie is either improvisation or made up just before the actual shooting.
Shooting was done on Saturday and Sunday with two MiniDV cameras. Saturday saw outdoor shots on locations in the vicinity of Eindhoven (Netherlands). Sunday we shot the indoor shots as well as the garden shots. As we had two more friends joining us on Sunday, we had two more actors to be included in the script... which worked quite well, actually!
Editing was done one or two weeks later in one weekend. The music was collected via Internet and our own music collections. Unfortunately, the audio track from the shooting proved to be of a very low quality - we really will need external mikes at our next project. The audio track on tape was slightly out of sync with the movie due to the transfer back to the camcorder not working as it should. Also, the original cut was lost in a hard disk crash several months later and had to be recovered from the DV tape used at the premiere. The downloadable version has been created from this tape, with divx and of course modifications to the audio sync.
The final version went into general release at an afp-meet on the 26th of January 2002.
The movie was shot on mini DV tape (in normal consumer DV format) with two DV cameras (Panasonic NV-DS5EG and JVC GR-DVL 157) and one tripod. Yes, the list of absolutely necessary gear missing is larger than the gear we
actually had.
As far as props are concerned, there was nothing specifically made for the movie, we just used whatever was available.
In one of the scenes we actually took the effort to hide a bit of unwanted stuff behind a curtain, which was the
whole extent of our stage making.
In the end the movie was edited on a normal windows systems using Studio 7 software by Pinnacle. The sound
synchronisation problem was solved using VirtualDub.
On our downloads page
"The brilliant though simple basic story-line is about the
making of a great movie, from its earliest planning phase to its
realisation. It is the amalgamation of SF, Horror and Drama, combined
with a gripping sound-track, into a spectacular production bringing
technological understatement to a new art-form."
(by Uwe Milde on alt.fan.pratchett)
BTW, if we were a Hollywood production company the above would have read:
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