King of Drag
“We’ll have a laugh, how much work can two minutes twenty seconds be?” I said four months ago when Gravel and Sugar decided to enter the Nikon European Film Competition. In retrospect I was right about the first part, the second not so much.
Being able to take on unpaid ‘passion projects’ for the love of filmmaking and to develop our skills has always been something me Tina and Matylda have been keen to do. The idea of doing a visually led, stylised narrative short was something we were all keen to do, but, we may have been a touch naïve about the work involved when you’re aiming to do something really good.
Documentary and commercial filmmaking has its own challenges, but stepping into the world of set design, auditions, actors and extras was fairly new to us. At the end of the process I can say that it’s been awesome, but knackering.
Our film – provisionally titled King of Drag – follows a young woman who holds down an office job in the day but who has a secret identity as a drag king. Filming was a blast, something that I can’t thank our lead actress for enough. Finding her might have meant holding and organising a whole day of auditions but Naomi was amazing, or at least during all the time I saw her. Some parts of the drag transformation sequence were women only on set!
Our extras, Lydia, Ruth and Emily, all of whom turned up in amazing self assembled drag outfits all deserve a ton of thanks as well. It really felt like we had the pros on board on our final night of filming.
That said, it was a tough couple of weeks. I was fitting in producing around my daily work schedule but the closer we got to our weekend of shooting the more and more King of Drag seemed like the main part of our job for all of us. The weekend of filming was great, but I was pretty glad the next weekend when I got to stay in and watch Master of None.
One final guy who deserves a massive mention is Joe Lukin, local drummer extraordinaire who provided a soundtrack which lifted our film immeasurably . For me this was the first time I have been able to work with a talented musician creating original compositions for my film. Personally I don’t’ think there will be any going back.
The day job and paying the bills is always, obviously essential. But for anybody working in a creative field I couldn’t advise enough taking the odd project on purely for the love to push yourself to do things you struggle to fit in with everyday work. It’s been fantastic – and check out the cool split screen edit when the film is available to stream (and yes, we have been watching Fargo!).
