TOMPATON CASE STUDY
“In 2015 I decided we could make a movie. I was 29, making great money in the commercial world but movies is where I felt I belonged,” he says. “I knew I’d take a pay cut. For the first movie I didn’t take any money, I put it all into the film. So you have to anticipate life is going to get a bit harder for a while. “I never made short films, just music videos. If you can make a music video and a commercial, then you can make a feature film. It’s just stamina! You’ll come into day one fresh-faced and ready to go. But come in to day 13 and 500 slates later, and you’ll be asking yourself why you’re doing it. You have to have the stamina to see it through to the end.” And, of course, you need the money to fund a major project as well as the script itself, which are two of the biggest
“I was passionate about being a filmmaker – it was the dream” ABOVE Tom Paton on set. BELOW Tom has worked with DOP George Burt for about ten years and they find that their skills complement each other‘s. stumbling blocks for any commercial filmmaker often used to getting paid for filming someone else’s ideas. Tom decided to risk everything he had into seeing through his dream, and convince the bank to lend him enough to make it really happen. With years of working under tight budgets for clients and doing lots of work himself, he figured out a way of making the feature film dream a reality. “The best advice is stop listening to anyone else. I had so many people saying this is how you have to make films. I wrote the script for a film called Pandorica and my movie broke all the rules. I borrowed 50 grand from the bank, had 25 grand in savings and we shot this thing at 20,000 ISO on a Sony A7S prosumer camera at night with two LED Rotolights. It should have been a disaster but we got a theatrical release. “If I’d have listened to what others were saying, I’d never had the balls to do it. You have to have faith in your own ability. If you think you’re ready for it, you probably are. “I’m quite business savvy, I treat everything as a business. Film is the only art formwhere you can’t really just go and do it. It has been democratised to some extent but you need to go and borrowmoney from an investor. So you have to treat it like a business.
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WINTER 2018 PRO MOVIEMAKER
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