Outlaw – My Story

Back in 2011 around October I got approached by a production company called Never Blink Films and this is my Story of working with them to produce the film “Outlaw”.

Never Blink Films is a production company set up by Third Year Students at the University of Lincoln, UK whom for their final year single camera film project took the plunge into the 15th Century and tackled a medieval style film.

The team were the talk of the year as a medieval film is well known to be difficult and they definitely had their work cut out for them.

Taking into account the minimal budget and funding coming from none other than the students themselves, the Never Blink team had very little resources to work with and had to resort to drastic measures that nearly sent the film’s editor Tom Mann, into an early grave syncing audio and video together due to a problem way of their control.

They pulled through however and created some incredible footage, thanks to the artistic vision of Tom Ladlow, and the challenge of medieval film was being well and truly tackled.

Here are a few photographs from the set of “Outlaw”

So the story of the film was very familiar to most medieval films. Adventure, brotherhood, trust and honour featured heavily in the characters Robert and Clydas, a Knight and Monk who embark on a quest to save a girl who has been kidnapped by Outlaws.

So taking this into account I set to work on a score for the films theme which needed to accomodate adventure, friendship and betrayal and this was the result of many attempts to get it perfect in terms of melody at least:

After this I set out to compose as I received more scenes directly from the editing process. As this happened I wrote ideas to each scene and tried to stitch them together hopelessly.

After realising that this wasn’t the most productive method, I decided to just wait until I had the full film and compose in real time as the footage was played back to me. This provided what I, along with the Never Blink Team, thought provided the best result which you can view below. The film is only 15-17 minutes long so won’t take up too much of your time.

Thanks for reading