In The Tapings Special: The Making of 'To The Shore'

Back during the less than heady summer of 2001, I rendezvoused with my two brothers at the family home in Sandgate, near Folkestone. The objective of this fraternal get together was not to celebrate anyone's birthday, although two of us had just cause, but was instead to do the principal photography for a joint venture of ours - a short film called TO THE SHORE. The idea behind this enterprise is a relatively simple one. I have just set up a website to distribute (for free!) entertainment over the internet. The site obviously relies on content, and stuff we can legally be said to be the copyright holders of at that. So, since a pirated copy of THE MUMMY RETURNS was out of the question, myself, Peter and Steven found ourselves planning a two day shoot one for one weekend last August. TO THE SHORE is actually based on an old short story of mine, first published in a now defunct horror magazine called "Nasty Piece OF Work". The story concerns an Investigator (played by Pete) whose examination of a sinister beach leads to some quite spectacular paranormal activity. Originally, it was set by a river, outside a chemical factory, but given that the coastline in that part of Kent is frankly bizarre, the decision to make the switch was an astonishingly easy one. I can't say that my script was the most detailed in cinema history, as I had full confidence in Steve, the director's, ability to come up with some visually brilliant story-telling. However, to be honest, the brevity of the screenplay did cause us some problems of the "what the hell do we do next?" variety. Still, film-making is more fun when it's on the hoof, as I argued at the time, unconvincingly. The most severe problem we encountered over the 48 hours was due to our unfortunate failure to suss out the location we'd chosen properly. We had been there several times previously, but never in the height of summer. This isn't exactly Brighton, we reasoned, so holiday-makers aren't going to be a problem. Well, we were partly right. It was warm and sunny on the first day, if a bit windy, yet we had only the odd dog-walker to factor into our shooting. However there was, slightly along the way from where we were based, a naked bloke, sunbathing. Okay, we thought, a bit strange, but then this was Folkestone and hey, he wasn't doing us any harm. Unfortunately, TO THE SHORE is largely set in this one place, and we had to go back the next morning to get some more shots and generally

finish up. I have to say that of  all the things that could have gone wrong for us, discovering on our return to our crucial location that it was in fact an unmarked nudist beach, and an apparently quite popular one, at that, was not high on the list. Although in many internet ventures, people without clothes are extremely numerous, ours is not one of them and we had to move down the beach to a place where covering oneself up was again the norm. In the end we got everything on tape we needed and Steve took the footage away with him to his Cambridge retreat to edit it, and add in the really rather impressive FX. Meanwhile I constructed the website and concentrated on getting the means of distribution up and running. Now, everything is complete and the finished product can be downloaded from www.ClergymanFilms.org - meanwhile our next, more ambitious, project is in development for another summer shoot. Chris Denton.

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