Mick McCleery's video: NAT UPLIFTER THE DOWNTRODDEN 2015 - a 48 hour film project Richmond VA

Winner - Best Musical Score! Winner - Best Use of the Line of Dialogue Winner - Audience Choice Award! Required Elements (Richmond 48-hour Film Project - 2015) Genre: Buddy Picture Character: Nat Uplifter - Therapist Prop: A Letter Line of Dialogue: “I’ve been trying to tell you that.” OR “I have been trying to tell you that.” THE PLOT: Music therapist Nat Uplifter decides the time is right to ‘get the band back together' one last time to perform before a hall of fame induction. But first, he will need to settle the major differences that broke up the band so many years ago. THE STORY (behind the movie): Billy Franks had been in the states since June and we had been spending the Summer working on a number of different projects when we saw that the timing of the Richmond 48-Hour Film project was looking to be perfect for our whole team. This was going to be a nice change for all of us because even though Billy had participated in a fair few of these 48 film projects over the years, he was always in London and we were over in the USA. This would be the first one where we would all be in the same place together. Fun stuff! We rented an Airbnb in Richmond and headed to the kick-off to get our genre and find out the required elements. We drew ‘Buddy Film’ for a genre and along with the required character of ‘Nat Uplifter - Therapist’ we pretty quickly settled on our idea and got down to writing. Other than the early scenes where we shot in various spots around town everything was pretty much shot in our Airbnb. As I’ve noted in many of these essays - any time you can keep your locations small for these 48-hour movies it’s a good thing! I do remember a funny/crazy moment when we had to move all of the furniture from the living room into the kitchen/dining area so we could set up our green screen. We also had the crew run out and rent all of that musical gear! TECHNICAL STUFF: I kind of forget what we shot on but I’m guessing the Panasonic GH4. Def 4K as I remember doing quite a few digital zooms in the flick. Our ‘show costumes’ were bought at a local goodwill and one thing that we did take advantage of with green screen shooting, was Gary, Mike, and I wanted to wear matching vests - as we only had one of that particular vest but with green screen and layering, we all got to match. REFLECTION: As I am writing this in October of 2022 it’s impossible not to reflect on this ultimately ending up being the last project we got to work on with Billy Franks. And as much as I enjoy this little movie, that will always be the thing that I most think about. From music videos to shorts to features, we had collaborated on so many projects over the years… and this, sadly, is the final one. Some rewarding extra bits, Billy got the award for 'Best Music Score' (he wrote and recorded it all during that every weekend) and the 'Best Use of the required Line of Dialogue, which is understandable as we used both versions of it and in a song! We also won the 'Audience Choice Award' for our screening group, which I have to say isn't the easiest task when you are a team from out of town as you don't generally have your friend groups there to add their support - so I will take an audience choice award in a distant town any day. m mccleery (10/19/22)