Written by Duane Adamoli
Introduction
SURFING is a 10-minute character drama set in 1969 Birmingham, about a struggling musician whose life changes over the course of three phone calls. It’s funny to say that now, like we knew what we were doing when we made it. We didn’t. Not quite. We’d never made a period film before, and I’d never directed something where the main character barely leaves a sofa. On top of everything else, I also had to figure out how to keep a single-location movie interesting so our audience didn’t fall asleep. This is a story about how much of filmmaking is just admitting you don’t know something yet, setting a deadline, and doing it anyway.
Inspiration
I met Harry at the Everyman Cinema. Two people who talk too much about films, who inevitably found out they both liked making them too. Our first project together was a Shakespeare monologue, a favour really, something to sharpen his acting reel and my filmmaking skills. Somewhere in there we realised we wanted to make something of our own, and I remember telling him, a bit sheepishly, that I only direct things I write myself. He was cool about it. And then went home to send me his own script the next day anyway.
That script became SURFING. The story grew out of things Harry and the team knew firsthand: desperation, ambition, the particular kind of loneliness that comes from wanting something you can’t quite reach. We set it in Birmingham because it’s Harry’s city, and because there’s something in its music history, its Black Sabbath DNA, that felt exactly right.
The Process
Here’s the part I think is more useful than inspiring: we spent almost three months planning and only two days shooting.
I got obsessed early on with previsualising the whole film in 3D. First in Unreal Engine, which I very quickly discovered was way beyond what I actually knew how to do, and then in a much simpler home design app that let me lay out the actual room, plot the sofa, and sketch out every camera angle before we’d even scheduled a shoot day. That meant that by the time we were on location, we weren’t discovering the film; we already had the map and all that was left was execution.
We’d planned for weeks without ever committing to a date, and nothing moved. The moment I picked a day in July and said it out loud, everything else fell into place around it. Harry panicked. I was sweating. But the date was set.
On the practical side: we shot in a friend’s living room in the Jewellery Quarter, dressed by our production designer Emily to look convincingly like 1969, right down to a genuine period phone and an actual Birmingham City Football Club magazine from the era. We stretched a nylon stocking over the lens for softness. Yes, a stocking. All because a friend told me an anecdote about how one was used in Atonement, so obviously I had to try it myself.
When it comes to score, we were in search of neurotic improvised jazz drums, and the algorithmic version I tried first had no nerves in it. No mistakes. And the character needed mistakes. So the score came together on an iPad, fingerdrummed live into GarageBand. Even the film’s fly (yes, there’s a fly) was animated afterwards, and it only looked right once we studied how flies actually move. That’s down to Harry, who whipped out Netflix mid-edit and put on the Breaking Bad episode literally called “Fly.”
What It Means to Be an Official Selection
Being selected by Worcester Film Festival is awesome, and I won’t pretend we didn’t pour everything we had into this. We did. All three of us. What SURFING proves to me, though, is that you can achieve something great with the smallest of resources if you actually commit to it. No budget, no crew, not enough time, a full- time job eating your evenings, none of that has to be the reason you don’t make the thing. I know it’s not easy, believe me; otherwise this would have been my tenth film and not my third. But if you love it, keep trying.
Having that recognised by the festival is the proof we can stop wondering if we were kidding ourselves and start treating this as the beginning of something bigger.
Duane Adamoli
Where to Watch / Follow:
Watch SURFING here: SURFING | Short Film
If you want the longer, more honest version of everything above, including the parts where things didn’t work, I made a behind-the-scenes video essay covering the whole process: Making a Movie Is Just a Series of Deadlines.
Follow along for what’s next:
YouTube: @duaneadamoli
Dormiveglia: dormiveglia.com
Dormiveglia Instagram: @dormivegliapictures
Harry Clarke (writer/actor/producer): @hclarke95
Emily (production design): @emilymaicannon
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