This intertitle is from CRY FOR BOBO — I made it out of lettering and borders I photocopied and stuck together, sourced from a book of naughty Victorian/Edwardian imagery found lying around in the office space we’d rented to make the film. It turned out that there was a print shop next door and I had them flip the white paper to black acetate, with transparent border and lettering. The day after the shoot was a Sunday, so we couldn’t return the camera gear until Monday, so cinematographer Scott Ward and assistant Steph Bates came in and shot some stuff, including the main title and this one, hanging them from lighting stands and backlighting them so the letters glowed. Scott tried a few fog filters, giving the glow a softness– like a 1970s movie set in the 1930s.
Strange how everything was so handy on that film. All the locations/sets (about fifteen of them for a ten-minute film — crazy!) were within half an hour’s walk of my house, as if I were Kubrick or something. But more than that, stuff fell into our laps.
The Glasgow Short Film Festival is going to show CRY FOR BOBO next Sunday in memory of Scott, along with THE PERPETUAL TWILIGHT OF GREGOR BLACK, a visually stunning film with oneiric rear projected backgrounds. Thanks to Matt Lloyd. Remembering that Scott had shot that film, I thought of using rear projection for our reconstruction scenes in NATAN, and Scott was able to put actor Niall Greig Fulton into backgrounds from LES VAMPIRES… Particularly apt since Bernard Natan was responsible, in a roundabout way, for the popularisation of the rear-screen process in Hollywood.
The screening is at 9:30pm at the CCA in Glasgow, accompanying the prize-giving. BOBO producer Nigel Smith and I plan to attend.
Cry for Bobo from David Cairns on Vimeo.
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