Your Ass Is Mine: A short film behind the scenes

I’ve worked with Peter Johnstone on various things over the years. We were once neighbours and he would pop in for coffee and we’d discuss music and films and whatever we were both working on. This has resulted in various collaborations:

Eventually I helped him edit a short film during lockdown about Van Gogh:

He clearly enjoyed the process, because he would bounce various ideas off me about short films and how we would produce them and what the challenges were. He was the writer that would have an ideal vision and I was the arsehole asking him where he would get 300 extras in period dress. That kind of thing.

One such conversation was based on a true story of something that happened to one of his friends. They’d made plaster casts of each other’s bums. It started the mental juices flowing and a tale of a post-relationship awkward exchange of bahookies was born.

I often wonder if I’m the first person to write a particular combination of words. ‘Post-relationship awkward exchange of bahookies’ is one of those combinations.

Peter wanted two locations to represent the personal growth and moving-on involved in “recovering” from a relationship. This coincided with me moving to Greenock and him moving to Govanhill. So the two locations were born.

Peter wears various creative hats(see below) and one of them is music. He already had a score in place of synth music that he had made with Ryan Morcombe. It was both jolly and cold at the same time. The synthetic nature providing an analogue for the plaster cast Booty. Maybe I’m reading too much into it and it was just cheap and available :)

So with a bit of planning and some script editing, we decided to film across two days, one day would be in Glasgow where we would film the indoor scenes and the telephone conversations and then finish with some street scenes of Glasgow.

The second day would be less full on and would be in Greenock - but it would be all outside and we would be recording audio.

Day 1

In front of the camera we had Chrissy Bell, Hannah Cecylia Bialic and Keir Wilson-Sim. Behind the camera we had me and Peter. There was a real balance to get the costs down and get everyone to muck in and me doing my best not to be doing 20 jobs at once. The cost of film making is having lots of people knowing their jobs and sitting about doing nothing most of the time. Its completely necessary to try and mitigate those costs and cut corners when you are making small indy short films, so I kind of surf this wave of trying to make it as good as we possibly can on the budget while not running about like a sweaty mess and making mistakes.

The big challenges for the shoot were the location and the audio. We were shooting in Peter’s flat, and I should have done a recce. The shape and the size of the rooms limited the shots that I could do and I spent most of the time wedged against walls to fit shots together.

We struggled to get anyone to do the audio for us. Peter, Keir and I did it between us. If anyone out there wants to do audio on film shoots for little to no pay, I’d love to hear from you :)

In a nice call back, the Andy Warhol poster in Peter’s bedroom is from an exhibition Rachel and I went to on our first ever holiday as a couple :)

We then finished the day by taking some atmospheric shots of Chrissy/Nicola’s trip to Greenock with bum in hand:

We had a few giggles at the fun of sitting around bus and train stops and stations with a plaster cast bum… but no one batted an eyelid. Obviously not the first time someone has cut about Glasgow with a prosthetic bum.

Day 2

The plan on day 2 was to film some “travelling shots” for Keir/David and then do the final and longest scene where they have an awkward dialogue while carrying out the exchange. Having recently moved to Greenock - I had been scouting picturesque shots for a few months and relished the opportunity to use some interesting views.

For the final scene we had chosen The Esplanade in Greenock. It’s an absolute hidden gem of the West of Scotland. The joys of planning outside shoots on even a tiny little production like ours meant there was lots of moving parts to find a day when everyone was free. Then you just cross your fingers and hope that it’s dry enough to film outside. Not only were we filming, we were also recording audio. The ‘fortune favours the brave’ gods had shone down upon us and it was a glorious day with blues skies and sun. Our only remaining challenge was wind on the audio and lots of punters walking up and down the esplanade proving that the gem was maybe not that hidden on sunnier days.

I hate recording audio outside!! Even Scotland’s sunniest days are really windy.

I record every instrument in every situation you can imagine, but recording spoken audio outside is either hard or expensive. Without really good wind proofing(that would hopefully come with the sound person who is willing to work on short films for little to no wage) you end up having to do a patchwork quilt in the edit. I think I got away with it, but it at least doubles the editing time.

Editing

The script was nice and tight with it being a short film. We used the travelling shots to link between day 1 and 2 and played these over the synth soundtrack. This meant we could keep the dialogue scenes quite snappy. While there’s no jokes in the dialogue the theme of a plaster cast bum makes the film quite light, which lets us tap dance quite lightly around the ultimate theme of loss of a relationship which can be quite painful. For a 6 minute film, we tried to use silence and pondering looks quite a lot. The aim was to emphasise the passage of time, which was one of the themes.

For the budget, I’m wonderfully happy with the film and I smile when I watch it back. It’s a lovely little piece that covers so much ground and I love the physical manifestation of lost loves by having your ex-girlfriend’s bum above your bed. I won’t say any more because whatever meaning you apply to it, is probably even better than the ones I’ve thought of.

Peter did a wee premier for friends in his flat and the there was a showing at Cafe Flicker at GMAC. It was also selected for the Lift-Off film festival. It’s been submitted to another few, so we might have random trip to a European ilm festival in 2024 :)

You can watch it here: