Aubrey's Seat Graham Large Placed 2nd Overall
It's often the case that ideas for films can be triggered by small, quite ordinary, incidents that occur in one's everyday life, an overheard conversation, for example, or something glimpsed from a train window. And the end product can turn out to be very different from what was originally envisaged. That is certainly true in the case of Aubrey's Seat, my film about two people meeting on a bench by the river.
Being keen on cycling I would often ride along the towpath of the River Thames between Teddington and Richmond in Surrey and cycle back along a different route to my home in Hampton, a round trip of around 10 miles. One particular sunny Saturday afternoon I decided to stop and watch the boats travelling up and down the river and spotted a wooden seat which looked pretty comfortable, and in a nice shady spot too. The inscription on the back was a dedication, to a man called Aubrey who had obviously enjoyed this stretch of the river.
What tickled my imagination, though, was the phrase ‘for pondering’ carved after his name. It’s such a lovely word, and you don't come across it often these days, conjuring up lazy afternoons when you have nothing particular to do but sit and watch the world go by. ‘Idling' was what Jerome K. Jerome called it, approvingly.
It certainly had the intended effect on me as, instead of nodding off; as I might have done had I not seen the inscription, I began to think about the type of person Aubrey might have been and what he might have seen from this vantage-point on the river. Luckily I had a pen and some paper in my saddlebag and started jotting a few ideas down as though I was Aubrey watching life going on before him along the towpath.
It only occurred to me later that evening on reading my notes that here was the basis for a film. I had my principal actor in mind, Laurie Miller, a friend of mine of the Staines club who was about the right age to play Aubrey, and I had the location. I would film him sitting on the bench and then follow him as he climbed up to the Terrace, the famous heritage viewpoint overlooking the river and the Petersham meadow complete with its herd of dairy cows. A voice-over would read a more polished version of what I had written on the bench, in essence a sort of elegy about gelling old and seeing your life passing by all too quickly. The trouble was that there was no ending or twist to make it memorable; it would end up as one of those films, which however beautifully shot, would have little impact.
So I decided that instead of playing Aubrey, Laurie would be someone of a similar age, but with no connection whatsoever to him, who liked to ponder his hours away on Aubrey's inscribed bench. The film would have no commentary or voice-over, just mood music and I would digitally enhance the colours of every scene to create a dreamlike effect. It was also necessary to have a 'love interest', and my wife agreed to play the part of the woman. She, like Aubrey, was bereaved and the meeting on the bench was to give her a new start in life.
However, the story was still nothing more than the chance meeting between two strangers on a park bench, and I'd seen enough of those to last me a lifetime. But the brain works in mysterious ways and out of the blue it came to me - the woman could be Aubrey's widow and she had paid for the bench and its inscription. Eureka! The only problem was how to reveal who she was for the twist at the end. The dedication in the book by Aubrey to his wife was the key, and it was fairly easy to mock up the slats of the bench at home and blow the pages open using a hair dryer - no clever computer wizardry in this production!
So that was the story, and I entered the finished film in one of the Staines club competitions, hoping that the audience would be wowed by my 21st century version of ‘Brief Encounter'. They weren't. The trouble was, I quickly discovered, that I hadn't made clear that the male character wasn't Aubrey himself, which most people assumed he was. One member of the audience thought that Laurie was playing Aubrey's ghost, which is not what I intended at all! The effect was total confusion and people don't like not understanding what they are watching. Like a lot of amateur film makers who have to direct, shoot and edit everything themselves 1 hadn't seen the wood for the trees and had failed to tell the story properly.
So I decided on one last re-edit in which I took out some of the more whimsical sequences where ghostly faces of their lost loves appear to each character. 1 also added a voice-over by Laurie, which gave the film a much clearer storyline, and replaced a 1930s film song at the end with a quieter solo piano piece. And that is the version I submitted to the Frome 5-minute Festival. I also decided to inflict this new version on the Staines audience a second time in this year's ‘Unclassified' competition, which, happily, it won.
So if I've learned one thing in all this, it is to listen to criticism and trust the audience's judgement, because it's seldom wrong.
It's often the case that ideas for films can be triggered by small, quite ordinary, incidents that occur in one's everyday life, an overheard conversation, for example, or something glimpsed from a train window. And the end product can turn out to be very different from what was originally envisaged. That is certainly true in the case of Aubrey's Seat, my film about two people meeting on a bench by the river.
Being keen on cycling I would often ride along the towpath of the River Thames between Teddington and Richmond in Surrey and cycle back along a different route to my home in Hampton, a round trip of around 10 miles. One particular sunny Saturday afternoon I decided to stop and watch the boats travelling up and down the river and spotted a wooden seat which looked pretty comfortable, and in a nice shady spot too. The inscription on the back was a dedication, to a man called Aubrey who had obviously enjoyed this stretch of the river.
What tickled my imagination, though, was the phrase ‘for pondering’ carved after his name. It’s such a lovely word, and you don't come across it often these days, conjuring up lazy afternoons when you have nothing particular to do but sit and watch the world go by. ‘Idling' was what Jerome K. Jerome called it, approvingly.
It certainly had the intended effect on me as, instead of nodding off; as I might have done had I not seen the inscription, I began to think about the type of person Aubrey might have been and what he might have seen from this vantage-
It only occurred to me later that evening on reading my notes that here was the basis for a film. I had my principal actor in mind, Laurie Miller, a friend of mine of the Staines club who was about the right age to play Aubrey, and I had the location. I would film him sitting on the bench and then follow him as he climbed up to the Terrace, the famous heritage viewpoint overlooking the river and the Petersham meadow complete with its herd of dairy cows. A voice-
So I decided that instead of playing Aubrey, Laurie would be someone of a similar age, but with no connection whatsoever to him, who liked to ponder his hours away on Aubrey's inscribed bench. The film would have no commentary or voice-
However, the story was still nothing more than the chance meeting between two strangers on a park bench, and I'd seen enough of those to last me a lifetime. But the brain works in mysterious ways and out of the blue it came to me -
So that was the story, and I entered the finished film in one of the Staines club competitions, hoping that the audience would be wowed by my 21st century version of ‘Brief Encounter'. They weren't. The trouble was, I quickly discovered, that I hadn't made clear that the male character wasn't Aubrey himself, which most people assumed he was. One member of the audience thought that Laurie was playing Aubrey's ghost, which is not what I intended at all! The effect was total confusion and people don't like not understanding what they are watching. Like a lot of amateur film makers who have to direct, shoot and edit everything themselves 1 hadn't seen the wood for the trees and had failed to tell the story properly.
So I decided on one last re-
So if I've learned one thing in all this, it is to listen to criticism and trust the audience's judgement, because it's seldom wrong.
