BEHIND THE SCENES

Shane Abbess - Director
This was our first 'big' film. I had a very basic feel for the style of 'Gangster' story I wanted to tell but had no structure. So we recruited scriptwriter Ben Fletcher for this one and he worked on the script for 2 months. Rehearsals started in Early November and went through for 3 months till the start of February. From start to finish, there were over 100 people involved in the production. The shoot itself was more stressful than I could possibly have imagined. We worked from 2 in the afternoon through to 5 the next morning for 3 days solid. Toward the end of the last night, tensions were high and some of us, including myself, were just about at breaking point. But once the film had been edited and the final glossy touches applied, I felt and still feel it was worth the stress, and considering it spent a year in Post-production using mainly people's downtime, I hope many of you also feel that it was worth the wait. I have to thank everyone in the cast and crew for their time, dedication and skills. It was much appreciated and will never be forgotten. Special thanks to the Post-Production guys who put in alot of mid-dawn shifts to complete the project. Lastly, thanks to everyone for enjoying the bloodshed, swearing and excessive violence that is the film 'Ravage'.


Ben Fletcher - Screenwriter
I was always enthusiastic about working commercially with Shane and came up with the idea of a double-double-cross, based on the films that were fairly popular at the time - Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Killing Zoe and several films that were just making it to western audiences from the Asian new wave directors. This may make the script better than it actually is, but it is basically a homage to those type of movies. So I set out to write the film, which took about one month, then another month of rewrites and plot negotiations with Shane. Various people had there two cents, but at the end of it all, the produced version is very close to the finished script.


Matt Todd - Actor
I felt Ravage was interesting enough to stand on it's own as a quite unique little film with a weird plot and hints of black comedy. As a lead actor, it was a pleasure to work on. We had more than enough rehearsal time and the opportunity to play with fake blood, guns and attractive women, was one not to be missed. It was a great introduction of things to come and I feel that the action to twist ratio is something that will continue to grow within the Redline Films throughout the years.


Sean O'Reilly - Sound Design/Location/Dialog/FX/Final Mix
This film was always going to be dark. Brian's score was the major driving factor behind this and with some careful use of FX it kept this feel.
This posed an interesting challenge because I was also a producer for the film and this kept me extremely busy and probably not focused enough on sound. However, the location work was handled with borrowed equipment including the boom so I can't tell you what the mic was but it was recorded to DAT. This was a pretty intense shoot and involved a lot of setups and wide shots keeping my arms at full stretch for most of the time. The film was set inside an old warehouse and was quite good acoustically, probably because of the size and uneven nature of the walls and high roof. Unfortunately it started to rain through a number of takes that were used in the edit so I had to cut together the dialogue from unused edits - a challenge to say the least. There was a number of Foley parts in the film which was fun to record and edit in. The final mix involved Brian Cachia's score and a number of other FX.
This was cut together using Premiere - definitely not the best program to use for sound editing but turned out ok in the end.


Brian Cachia - Score Composition
The score for Ravage was a very serious learning curve for me. I chose to use a dirty and very electric sound in the instrumentation. The use of heavy metal guitars allowed the film to feel very under ground, which suited its look. The opening scene where the vehicle enters the gates was full steam ahead on real drums, bass and a repeating riff on a detuned electric guitar with the Wah pedal in full motion. A lot of fun to record, all though entering the warehouse I took on an experiment in a panning electronic drum loop which left us with different results at every festival, depending on the sound system. Despite this I was pleased when the film received first prize at Cronulla short film Festival and I put this film down to experience.


Scott James Smith - FX & end titles
My first project with the growing Redline team, and worked solely on the end titles. Issues of appropriateness were raised after the fact, but the job was done in isolation of the rest of the project in an overnight dash, so the result was OK. The background imagery was me walking through Sydney's Central tunnel.