We never considered ourselves movie makers. My Brother would by a 50ft spool in Dixons and when i came home from school he would say, "lets go out the back, (or down the park) and make a film. So we did,
It was usually a cowboy, (Brothers favourites), a nonsense pointless one such as the keep a straight face competition, comedy vampire, (gran was usually the victim), a spoof spy, One of our atom bombs is missing or some other scilly stuff.
As much as i loved filming i was hopeless at those cine camera len's, (now i get it, but too late ). As i got older i got my mates from school to join in but one day Brother decided he fancied going out on the moors and using his American civil war black powder muskets, replica guns, uniforms and sabres he collected, (all gone now thanks to the crappy license laws here), and making a film set in the background of the Civil War.
We had everything we needed. The film is around 20 minutes and we titled it "The Hunted". The simple story is a Yankee shoots dead a confederate and the chase is on. Thats it!! .
Well, bollocks to mobile phones and x-boxes, this is what we did and had great days and laughs doing it. With the films still in A1 order and all in there original shot formats, (no added sounds etc) we look back on them at sheer fondness and fun.
When we shot this film on Dartmoor, (Shaugh Prior area) it was literally a few weeks after the film Revolution was made in the area.
We couldn't use any of what was left behind as we didn't want to stray off what we already planned. This film was the first one we actually sat down, wrote and planned. We visited the area three times to plan roughly what we were going to do and all of us took a day off work to film it.
In the last few years we had a couple of our reasonable home shot movies transferred to the PC in order for me to have more fun putting on some "borrowed" music and very good sound effects onto it to liven it all up.
Many years later when we shot our war time movie we didn't require sound effects as we spend nearly £500 on blanks to fire from what was real WW2 guns and rifles which were utterly great until a guy helping us make it F***** it up by taking them off to put in stupid sound effects that sounded like pop guns, my Brother was jumping. We later found out that the war film we made (which was being done to go into the IAC award competition), What we didn't know was, the guy behind the camera was also making one to go in. This was obviously why he sabotaged our sound.
Back to the Hunted, one of Brothers friends was so keen, he wanted us to include a fight in the river, (and it was freezing), when they did it they certainly got into it & it had to be done in one take, no time for drying off and re doing.
While this lock-down is still on i thought i would get back into this and start trimming it and tightening things up, add some decent titles and put on some great musket rifle sounds. The only downside is that when we had it transferred to a file for the computer it just isn't the same quality, (obviously), i dont think the guy did a very good job at all, you lose all the detail and colour. I'm sure today someone could do it much better.

Anyway, i know we dont generally talk about film making on here but i thought i'd put this up as a one off because we really did have great fun making our little films, we never took it seriously, we always kept the out takes for a laugh, and did we have some laughs making them? Great days.

Wow Tom! It is truly great to see these pics--I can only imagine how much fun you and your brother had in making the film. Really great that you have hung onto this through the years. Would it be possible to share the final electronic version somehow so that we could all enjoy a watch??

Many of us would thoroughly enjoy seeing this!

Thanks Greg, yes it was so much fun, we couldn't wait to get those little yellow bags back from Kodak. W always worried one would go adrift in the post and the whole project would be ruined, luckily it never happened. We actually shot 11 of those reels before editing it down to an equivalent of 5

I will be happy to pop up some parts of it later only because, (and i do say this embarrassingly), we really wernt movie makers and i always get a bit red faced watching it but for me, it's in a good way. Does that make sense?

Tom,

Oh, of course. I like to think that we all would view this purely for the enjoyment of seeing a cool story, Civil War pistols/rifles, and the earnest effort involved in the making of an actual movie on film. I can't imagine anyone is expecting 'world class' cinematography etc--if that occurs then they are clearly missing the whole point. As much as I enjoy our family home movies of yesteryear, this is something different and unique which is why I really want to see it.

Back in high school some friends of my older sister made a war movie on Super 8. They used the little model rocket engines which can be 'detonated' electronically for small explosive special effects. One of the teachers actually let them show their film in the classroom which is where I saw it. Needless to say it was very fun to watch...

Would be good to see this Tom; I remember your war film, was very impressed with that.

Thank you, i will put some up once i get it a little more refined
Funnily enough, one of the simplest things i saw for a basic hand grenade effect was on a Spielberg documentary. His Dad was in the RAF so as a young boy with a camera he use to be able to get into aeroplanes etc, (wouldn't be allowed now i guess), but what he did in a scene where one of his young actors was running away was to put a simple small plank of wood behind a mound like a see saw, the end on the ground was loaded with leaves and twigs etc, with camera behind the running man a shot shows a guy throwing a grenade, close up of it landing, (like in our war effort), then as the running man hits the other end of the balanced plank, up goes all the leaves and twigs, pop on a sound effect and bingo. So simple.

No doubt a much more realistic special effect than some CGI crap....

Defiantly, it's great to see someone like Spielberg showing such simple ideas, i wish i had seen it before we did our efforts.
My Brother use to pay fortunes for civil war ( and now WW2) uniforms. Johnny Reb caps, Belt buckles, boots and all sorts of items often bought in the states when he went for his history holidays, and still does. It amazes me what he does manage to get.
Music wise, i tend to copy Sergio Leone's idea of editing the film to the music, in his case with Morriconnie he use to get him to write the music before making or completing a film, then he made the film to his music, i think its a great way to do it. Having said that, i aint no Leone and certainly no Morriconie . And no i dont use Morriconies music, that would be an insult to him, as well as very naughty.

That effect is simple, but so effective. Had you not told us we wouldn't know how it was done. It's interesting learning about the special effects used on the earlier Bond films, in the DVD Extras. I always wanted to try my hand at special effects, but circumstances at that time didn't permit me. The only ones I got around to were adding white titles over the film by double exposure, and using a split screen for another effect.

How great to have this and look back to the time you made it :-)