Me & My Shadow

Me & My Shadow was my baby. A project I came up with in my first year of university, I worked on the idea throughout my first and second year, and by the end of my second, we had decided we would make it. Getting to that point however, was not easy.

Casting

After my producer, Lily Allmark, and I decided we would make the film, our first challenge was casting. After employing my good friend Max Meadows as a casting director, he got to work. He introduced me to an acquaintance of his, Luke Milligan who, after reading for the role, we thought would be great as our Sam. But who would play The Shadow? Well, our casting director actually thought he would be perfect for the role.

In fairness to Max, I had approached him at the start of the project asking him if he'd like to play The Shadow, but after seeing him reading for the role and his screen tests with Luke, we were off to the races.

After employing a crack team of people from university as our crew, I voiced my ideas for the creative look of the film to Robyn Fairfax, the cinematographer. I wanted the world of the film to be colourful to show both how chaotic Sam's life was, but also to represent the chaos of The Shadow itself – something we achieved pretty well with Max' costume.

Locations

I could talk about the locations we used for this film until the cows come home, but here are a few highlights:

The Atlantis Bookshop: A bookshop specialising in books relating to witchcraft and wizardry. The two owners were very generous in allowing us to film in there for a reduced rate, but when I tell you they got their money's worth back in advertising, I mean it. Not a single person with us on that day would shut up about how much they loved it for weeks.

The Tube: The train we used for the tube scenes was a 1967 Victoria line train parked outside the Walthamstow Pumphouse museum. People who know me will know I had a bit of an obsession with trains as a kid, so being able to film on a real '67 stock carriage and have it all to ourselves made my inner child overflow with excitement.

Music Mayhem

After shooting the project in June 2024, beside the grade (for which we had created a look beforehand) the most daunting task that lay ahead for myself and Lily was the licensing of a specific recording of 'Puttin' on the Ritz', by Ella Fitzgerald. I had written the montage sequence to this song, and we budgeted for it to be our single biggest expense, as the equipment we used to shoot the project either belonged to me, or was leased from the university. The total cost in film terms wasn't much, but for us, it was huge. We managed to license the song for a year-long festival run, and for use in cinemas for screenings. I'm not someone who ordinarily gloats when something works in a project, but if you were with us at the premiere, you'll know that it was worth every penny.

Post-Production

Editing and colour-grading was done over the summer of 2024 using tools like Dehancer and plugins from VideoVillage, which we combined to create a vivid, chaotic and filmic look for Sam's world – in stark contrast with the drab office of the university psychiatrist, Dr Miller, played by the lovely Kat Taylor-Smith.

The Title Sequence

I've always maintained that a good title sequence at the beginning of a film can bring up the energy and make you excited to sit and watch the rest. I had been saying this to my friends for the first 2 years of film school, and I decided to put my money where my mouth was, and come up with something creative. When I say my money, our budget for hiring an animator came to a grand-total of £0.00, so one August afternoon, I decided I'd give it a go myself.

I had just watched Monsters Inc. with a young member of the family, and, memes aside, I think that film has the best opening sequence of any computer animated film. It's fun, the music by Randy Newman hits in such a good way… I love it, so I wanted to pay a small homage to it in Me & My Shadow.

When I started designing the sequence on a bit of paper, I thought the S at the start of the word 'Shadow' should start hopping away from the rest of the logo, symbolising Sam's thoughts running away from him. As a bonus, our title music worked very well with this motion, so after around a day of constant (and I mean constant) work in After Effects, I came up with this…

Audience screenings (showing the title sequence to my extended family during lunch one day) suggested the sequence was funny, and the deeper meaning of it landed. I slapped it onto the beginning of the edit, and to this day, it is the thing about the film people ask me about most. Only a single person got the reference to Monsters Inc., but when they did, I will admit, I let out a very small squeal of excitement when they told me.

Epilogue

Me & My Shadow holds a really special place in my heart. It was a project about something which I really do care about which I got to film with a lot of good people. It was my first film project where I had a crew who genuinely did know what they were doing – and that's not me being full of myself. On previous projects in Cyprus, I didn't have a group of people who had chosen to go to film school. They were all working on the project to help out which, while amazing, and I will always be grateful to them for it, I found myself teaching while filming, meaning I couldn't pay as much attention as I would've wanted to the process of making the film itself.

TL/DR it was my first project with like-minded people, where we were all able to learn at the same pace and make mistakes together while creating something fun. The crew who worked on it really did enjoy themselves and, being a film about a topic like this, that speaks just as loud as the result itself.