It all started when Damian Seagar was shooting Edward Lynden-Bell's documentary and forgot to organise a grip.

I offered my help (I didn't know better at the time). So there we were: Damian very hung over, Edward with far less hair than he had in future meetings, shooting "Drawing on Walls", Ed’s doco about graffiti art in Wellington. I had never gripped before but it couldn’t be that hard. Then I discovered the pulling, the pushing, the laying - well, it was hard, but that was how the three of us first met.

A year later I was flying to Australia to live. On my way out, Edward said; "hey, want to come and talk about a film I want to make?" So I went along. We talked about what kind of film he wanted to do, how much money we thought we would need to shoot on film, about getting a really good crew together, and so on. We came up with a few numbers, a few time frames, and I left knowing that somewhere along the way Ed would have to write a script.

I had a great feeling about Ed and this script. I thought a lot about the possibility of making this film in New Zealand - could we pull it off? And then I flew to Australia.

I had a great time in Melbourne, and every so often pages would filter through and I loved the ideas. Budgets kept floating around and then finally we got the call. We would get investment, hopefully enough money to make a film that would be good enough to do the things we wanted to do. That day I booked my tickets back to New Zealand.

For the first three months Ed would send through drafts while I worked on the dairy farm, among the cows and the green, green grass.

In April I moved to Wellington and started pre-production. Ed has a production company called Pocket String Pictures, in a little office, and we started the mammoth task of breaking everything down and working out how to produce it. We still didn't have a final script. Ed kept handing out drafts, and slowly we honed it down to 91 pages long - a 90 minute film. We couldn’t afford to shoot a frame more and fix it in the edit - we just couldn’t afford it.

That’s how it went.

While Ed was still writing, I was investigating what our budget could stand. It was not a lot. Somehow we needed people and who would take a huge pay cut, over the seven months of pre-production we were able to secure people with talent and experience.

Throughout the few first months we needed to work out the best month to film, knowing that if a Peter Jackson film went ahead, our people would be instantly employed on jobs that they could not turn down. We had months where we knew something was starting, but no one could tell us when. There was the odd wink and nod, but nothing definite. So we just had to go with our gut. We booked in November, and we dodged a bullet as nothing really happened, well that affected us.

We begged, borrowed and stole everything we could. In fact, I don’t even want to admit how many things we stole.

Our locations were for free, or for a cup of coffee or a case of beer. We had done everything we could to get everything cheaper than anyone else had ever got it. That was our benchmark: if someone else had done it in 1986 for ten dollars, we were determined to do it for less. We were so tight with a shooting ratio of 5 to 1 on super-sixteen that we could not afford to bugger up at all. If we blew the budget, we would have to close down production. We paid all the rental companies upfront because they gave us such good deals. If we did close down we would lose all of the money and wouldn't have a film. Three of us in the production office would work on production all day, then we would wash up the catering dishes - anything to save money. We even re-washed the eye pieces for the cinematographer as obviously that is cheaper than buying an replacement.

When we were building our sets, the builders ran out of timber. I got a call from our Art Director: “If you don't find us timber, we will go over budget by at least $5000”. This was before we had even started filming! I just happened to be driving past a skip bin with pallets lying beside it. “That looks like timber" I thought. So that’s what we built sets out of – scrap pallets, raided from every supermarket in town.

We really were flying by the seat of our pants.

Then, the first day of shooting - an outdoor scene. It rained, and we sent everyone to the rain cover in a condemned flat. It was scheduled for demolition, so we were able to repaint, bang holes in the walls, and generally do whatever we wanted to to the building. And once everyone was there, I joined them. There is this feeling you get, when you walk onto a set where everyone is working for you and it goes, “God, I hope Ed and I don’t piss them all off too much, so that they stay, and I don’t bollocks this whole thing up completely.”

That first day, the head of wardrobe quit. Assistant head of wardrobe became head of wardrobe. In the first week, the assistant director was dismissed. But the shoot went on: Annie Frear, our very experienced key grip, became first assistant director, the grip assist became key grip, and it all worked out.

And every time we scheduled outdoor shots, it rained. We needed blue sky for the FX shots. Of course, we had indoor scenes, but we’d done all of those by the end of the first two weeks. We needed two weeks of sun. We could not go over schedule. All of our gear needed to be back on the 25th day.

People made the most amazing sacrifices, people skipped out on their day jobs, others worked through the night, roles had to be re-cast the night before, locations had to be found with 8 hours to go. Five days of full crew and a sixth day of guerilla filming, and then one very long day with the director, cinematographer and myself doing pack shots before we went into the last night of shooting, and then we were done! We kept within our ratio, even slightly under budget. And we finished filming, exhausted but triumphant, on Sunday 3 December 2006.

Ed had one day off, then started editing on Tuesday.

Sound started soon after that.

Sound people don’t think that real sound sounds real enough, so every sound in the film has been recreated all over again.

Of course, visual effects were being computed all the way through. You have no idea how long it takes to make a realistic looking amphibious whale by computer, and neither did we but we have one......nearly.

By the time you read this, the picture is locked, the sound sounds like sound, the whale is roaming the streets, possibly hunting for airborne krill…

So I will keep this website updated as we go along, but I hope you enjoyed the story so far.

David White
Producer
The Last Great Snail Chase.