The WriteAngle filmmaking group

The WriteAngle group started a number of years back as an ad-hoc grouping formed to compete in the clubs annual 'film in an evening' competition. They have stayed together ever since and made many new movies including: The Party, Hair of the Dog, Double Take, Endangered Species, Wrong Footed, The Scenic Route, In an English Country Garden, Aunt Maude, My Flexible Friend, Dead in Bead, Gone with the Wind, Cross Currents, Come Fly with me, The WriteAngle Gaumont British News, Great Expectations, Heart Attack (a 2 hour musical), Paradise Lost, A Bright Thread and promotional films for external organisations including Coming Home and a very recent one for the local Cardiac Rehabilitation Centre.

Democracy (the WriteAngle sort)? - Marjorie Dickens

In answer to the chairman’s request in Border Post (the club's newspaper) for information on resolving interpretation, here’s how WriteAngle does it.

We start with a discussion about a possible film, be it a given theme or one of our own. Ideas are tossed back and forth - Dick is full of them, some outrageous, usually funny and sometimes quite unusable even in today’s enlightened times.

At the end of this, Jacky Wilson has the task of making sense of it all to come up with a Treatment, which is circulated by e-mail to the whole group.

Subsequently, further discussion sees the outline altered, amended and changed around until it bears little resemblance to the original, as each of us adds his or her little bit. Jacky is very philosophical!

Finally a script is produced and it is decided who shall do what - camera, lighting, sound, “acting” etc. Not being trained in this latter category and unable to call to mind sequences of words from a script, we all memorise the main points and ad lib around them (not always easy for our fellow thespians).

At every stage continuity girl, Pauline Tate, keeps a note of any changes that are made to try to keep us all on the straight and narrow.

It is a very strange things that, more often than not, the final film is exactly as Dick suggested in the first place!!!

 WriteAngle at the 2003 'Film in an evening' competition

WriteAngle at the club 'Film in an evening' competition. David Tate, Jacky Wilson, Peter Dickens, Dick Hibberd, David , Jean Hibberd, Pauline Tate, Marjorie Dickens, Neil Cryer

Filming for a project which has been underway for over a year now 

The group is busy working on a number of new movies at the moment. One long term project requires the mapping of life through the ages. The starting point was with two school age actors who had attended a course with a training organisation called Stagecoach. The location was in the gardens of Gilbert White's house in Selbourne. The time, after school in early May while the apple blossom was still out. The shooting team arrived on location more than an hour before the children in order to decide on the positions for the action, camera angles etc. In the picture on the right the director, Dick, is framing a shot while one of the group runs by in place of one of the young actors. 

Here the young actors have arrived and are busy changing into clothing more appropriate to the early 1940s.

Here is some of the early action being captured. The camera man is not at all comfortable but couldn't find a better way of being prepared to pan round as the young actors exited to the right of this shot, in front of director Dick who is carefully monitoring. The young actors were superb and took direction in a completely professional fashion. In the end each scene was shot three or four times to get everything just right.