Shadows of a Stranger Emerges from the Shadows

It’s a day that some people thought would never happen, but our film Shadows of a Stranger is soon about to get a release…

August 27th 2017 is the date for your diary, and it’s a significant day because it was on this very day 8 years ago that the journey essentially began. I had just turned 30 back then, wondering what I should be doing with my life, when I embarked on the start of our own feature film production. That was the day that I met up with Chris and another filmmaker friend Brad and we set up a green screen in a pub in Swineshead.

Shadows of a Stranger Showpiece Video

Filming the showpiece – Don’t we all look so young back then?

There we filmed a sample scene from my script (called just Strangers back then) and from that footage we created a ‘showpiece’ video that would serve as a test for us to gauge how to film the entire script, and also serve as a demonstration to people as to what we were trying to achieve. It was a great tool for attracting actors as they were able to see our vision.

Shadows of a Stranger Showpiece Video

A shot of the Joe’s Parlour cafe from the 2009 Showpiece video.

Shadows of a Stranger

And this is how that same shot turned out in the final film.

It was the following year, in 2010, when the main production of the film took place. We built our own blue screen studio (it was blue because the jacket that Chris wore in the film was green) in a farmer’s barn somewhere down the fen. The following years saw us painstakingly compositing all the shots, filming further pick ups, recording dialogue, recording sound effects, recording music, and filming even more pick ups – in fact, the actors that you see in the final film are spread across 5 different years. Because of the nature of our production, we could have people in different years in the same shot, sometimes interacting with each other, and sometimes it was the same person in the same shot because their appearance had changed so much!

Shadows of a Stranger

Strangers across the years: the guy farthest right and farthest left is the same guy (Ben) in 2013 and 2010, the foreground actors are in 2010, the couple at the rear are in 2012. The music video on the TV is from 2011 and only made it into this edit of the film in 2017!

To be honest, I didn’t think it would be a whole 8 years before I would be unveiling the film to the world – and by the way, by ‘the world’ I mean the UK, the USA, Japan, Germany and Austria, for those are the only available territories on our chosen distribution avenue. We’ve chosen Amazon Video for that particular purpose, somewhat an uncharted territory for independent filmmakers looking to get their work out there, but there’s potentially a large audience base there and it allows us control over everything. So we’ll soon see how that pans out.

Until then, please check out the new trailer for the film that I put together. And come August 27th make sure to search us out on Amazon and watch our long awaited production.

2 thoughts on “Shadows of a Stranger Emerges from the Shadows

  1. G.S.Hamer

    The trailer scenes are quite tantalising as to how the film will unfold and end.
    I hope to see more.
    Taff.

  2. Pingback: Shadows of a Stranger is Released on Amazon Video - Shadows of a Stranger

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