Ferand Peek
"I guess when I was finishing school, there were a couple of possible directions I could see myself going at that time. One was becoming a novelist, because I had always loved reading scifi, and the other was going into the film industry to make movies."
"When I finished secondary school, I booked flights to Australia, where I had planned to start travelling for a couple of years. Just before I was due to fly out, my father invited me to come and hang out on the set of the ‘Lord of the Rings’ with him for a couple of days."
"I had been onset with him when I was younger, but this was very different to anything I had seen before. There was something incredibly special about this particular shoot. Everyone’s attitude, love and care for their film-craft really impressed me."
"I guess the scale of what was being created here, had never been done in New Zealand before and by the end of the two days I’d fallen in love with it and settled on the idea of becoming a director. I still went onto Australia to travel, but for one year instead of the five I had planned to do. After cutting my trip short, I came straight back to New Zealand and went to film school in Wellington."
"After finishing film school, my father gave me some advice on what the best roles in the industry to learn about directing were. He suggested either becoming a boom operator or an assistant editor as these were two places where you really have to understand and learn a lot about film-making to succeed."
"Thought I had done some editing of my own, after my experience on the ‘Lord of the Rings’, on-set was where I wanted to be and so I chose to become a boom operator."
"In this role, you have to be aware of so many things, from the size of the camera lens, to how the actors are going to deliver their lines, to the shadows you’re making with the pole, and all while still having the mic close enough to get good sound! You are interacting with many different departments all the time, from putting on radio mics with wardrobe, liaising with art department to lay mats down on the set to muffle footsteps, to making sure the lines are covered with the script supervisor."
"I guess the final bonus is that you’ve got the headphones on with a very sensitive microphone. So any time the director gets up to give the actors any sort of instruction, you can simply point the mic in their direction and listen in. Great training for someone wanting to be a director!"
"I did this for about six or seven years, taking everything I could from the experience, but eventually I got to a point where I wasn’t going to learn much more about directing from boom operating. If I wanted to learn more, then I was going to have to get out there and start directing."
"I had been trying to get funding through the New Zealand Film Commission for a short film. For a number of years, I’d been writing scripts that I hoped ticked all their boxes for funding. At the end of the day, they are a cultural commission, so there’s quite specific criteria about what they’re allowed to give money to. As it turned out, I was short listed on a number of occasions, but in the end nothing came of it."
"After a couple of years of trying this, I got a good contract on a local TV series as a boom operator. I decided to use the income to self fund a short film. And if I was going to spend my own money I was going to make it a scifi!"
"I have always been into scifi as a genre. I was really impressed by Neil Blomkamp’s journey. He made a scifi short film, ‘Alive in Joburg’ which he put online. Peter Jackson backed him to make Halo here in Wellington which subsequently fell over, so instead they made ‘District 9’ which was based on his short. I figured that was a pretty good template to go for."
"I was worried because I didn’t want to do a sci-fi that felt cheap. I love the film ‘Aliens’ and wanted to do something at that level of production value, but knew that with my budget, it would be impossible unless I restricted what the audience could see."
"That was how I came up with the idea to do it in one shot with the camera itself as part of the overall story. This way it could only catch glimpses of things that were happening around you. Thereby, restricting the amount of CGI and then the rest could be told through sound. So that’s how I came up with the script for my short film ‘Mis-drop’."
"I had done some editing in the past, but doing a scifi was going to need a lot of heavy VFX work. My sister had a friend at the time, who was a really good compositor, so I asked what it would take to do this sort of film from a VFX stand point."
"He talked me through all of the different plates I would need to film to build up the layers for the composite. Basically taking me through all of the ingredients so that I knew what to shoot even though I didn’t know how to put it all together. I figured that once I had all of those ingredients, I could do a rough edit and show it to people and hopefully get help to finish the post-production – which was the bit of film-making I knew less about."
"But once I had cut it together, it was pretty obvious that this wasn’t going to work. I couldn’t show anyone the rough cut without having to stand over their shoulder explaining each scene to them."
"I soon realized that if I wanted the sort of help I was going to need, then I needed something a whole lot better than a rough edit. I needed something that had all of the bits in place to a level where I didn’t have to explain anything. I needed something approximating my final vision that I could show everyone: a rough composite - and to do that I would have to learn how to composite on the computer. So I shut myself in a room for 6 months and taught myself how to comp by doing my film."
"When I shot the movie, I was very knowledgeable about what happens on set, but not so good on the post production side of things. After four years of working on this film, guiding it through the post-production process, and subsequently becoming a contractor in visual effects, I’m now very comfortable with the post side of things as well."
"The guys at Workshop FX and Park Road Post were both hugely generous, working on this project. Park Road Post worked on the film for about two and half years, whenever they had spare time providing me with excellent graphics and assets that I then comped into the film. And eventually, through working on the film myself, I up-skilled enough that they ended up employing me as a VFX artist where I got to work on the Hobbit movies; which was totally unexpected!"
"By the time I was finishing up on ‘Mis-drop’, it became a lot more popular to do a VFX heavy short film for release online, which is always where I saw this film living and breathing. My hope was for the right people in L.A to see it. Within 36 hours of releasing the film online I started to get emails from agents and managers in L.A, including CAA who I eventually signed with."
"I got to pitch ‘Mis-drop’ as a feature film idea to Fox Studios last year. They looked seriously at picking it up, but the form it was in wasn’t quite right for a feature. So I am currently reworking that pitch while working on another project as well. I’m polishing these two pitches with a writerand doing a bunch of concept art for them so we can send it allto some of the producers I met with in LA."
"In terms of the payback for all the time and money invested, short film’s don’t really make any money, but can become a spring-board to further your career. That’s really what ‘Mis-drop’ has done for me with gaining representation in LA and the meetings that can flow from that. Being able to get in the room to talk to people who can actually make things happen is a huge amount of the battle I think."
"It was kind of great that after I became focused on filmmaking as a consequence of my father working on the ‘Lord of the Rings’ trilogy, I got to work on the ‘Hobbit’ trilogy years later. Kind of like coming full circle. Now I still contract to Park Road Post as a VFX artist, as I move my own projects forward. This means I can continue to deepen my knowledge of post-production and gives me great tools to prepare projects and ideas to pitch. And will, I think, hold me in good stead in the future when I direct, what I hope will be, epic scifi feature films!"