A live action web-series set in an alternate-universe, contemporary England where every neighbourhood is a fiefdom and every wrong look can end in blood.
At first glance, the Birmingham in Streets of Myth looks a lot like ours. The buildings look about right. The clothes are the same. The kids listen to hip-hop and hard rock. Birmingham's neighbourhoods are roughly the same too: Aston, Digbeth, Nechells, The Jewellery Quarter & more.
But instead of a city, they are a loose collection of gangs and petty rivalries, tied together and policed by the weakened and corrupt forces of The Crown. These gangs aren't quite like our gangs though. They don't have guns.
They have swords, spears and the ancient martial traditions of the Far East. Each neighbourhood has their own power structure, their own laws and their own fighting style.
The Streets of Myth are a place that lies at the intersection of DJ's and dim-maks, kings and graffiti, B-boys and bloodied swords.
One guy spins, one dude rhymes and another does a back flip off the wall. Yup, we're in the Streets of Myth for sure.
We can go toe to toe, blow for blow. I'll take you out, Mad Flow you know I put on a show.
The Streets resident freestyler Mad Flow (@Flow_Mad) nailed it: We put on a show.
It was important to us to make the world of the film bigger than our two main characters and their conflict, so we went out of our way to fill the set with loads of interesting people. We wanted it to feel like we could have followed any one of these characters out of the building and still made a really entertaining film.
I was thinking of it like a hip-hop / kung-fu version of the Mos Eisley cantina .
We put out a call for extras and performers (special thanks to UrbanTrix Academy again!) and the Midlands came out in a big way.
We have moved past the "rough cut" stage and, while we're not quite at the fabled "picture lock", we're close enough to start working on sound.
Which, in my opinion, is when a movie goes from "awkward, random crap" to an actual movie. It's said often, but does need to be repeated even more often: sound is 50% of the information your audience is receiving. In my experience, it's also the more important 50%.
Somewhere in Leeds, there's a dude who looks just like this.
Most audiences are more than willing to overlook subpar lighting or camerawork (sorry DPs, but it's true), but if your sound is off, they are thrown right out of the movie. I don't mean you have to wow anyone with your mad sound skillz, I simply mean that the overall sound mix, and particularly transitions between scenes, need to feel natural. Much like good picture editing, that sound mix needs to mostly be invisible. A weird bit of ambient tone or an oddly mixed sound effect just murders suspension of disbelief. It's as primal as jumping at loud noises.
Thankfully, we're very lucky to have some very talented people making sure the sound and music kick as much ass as our performers.
Meanwhile, somewhere in Birmingham, they're recording music.
Do you want to shoot a whole load of fairly complicated stuff in a short period of time?
Make your life easier and find someone who can draw. Cause then, instead of huddling with your camera team and saying, "yeah I want the character over here and this stuff over there and the camera should be about so high and blah blah blah", you can say "hey, check out this storyboard where I already had a long conversation on some other magical day when I had a second to breathe."
To whit:
Mad propers go out to Ollie Jones (@Ollie_jones / www.betterfeelingfilms.com) for the impossibly useful drawings!
