Twice Upon A Time In Burnley

It's a bit like the Peasant's Revolt, only with a northern accent... In a small town just outside Burnley, award-winning filmmakers, Alastair Lee and David Halsted are planning a small revolution in mountain film making.

Alastair left, Daviud right and their numerous awards -sadly not baby proof...

They've already started - their first joint effort, Twice Upon A Time In Bolivia won the People's Favourite Award at the last Kendal Mountain Film Festival and since then has landed the 'Rock Award' at Bratislava and the Jury's Award at the 'Vancouver Mountain Film Festival'.

When we reviewed it, we said it was 'one of the best and most original climbing videos we've seen'. The thing about 'Twice' is that it's a wet snowball in the face of all those interminable traditional mountaineering films. You know, the ones narrated in a deadpan BBC accent and featuring inarticulate professional mountaineers chewing lumps off death and spitting them back in his face as if it's all part of a normal day in the office.

Real People, Real Mountains...

Twice works, essentially, by being by real people, about real people, climbing real mountains, having a laugh and messing around, just like you or I do. And I should know, I've actually climbed both the peaks in the film myself. Of course that's not quite all there is to it. As David says drily, 'The thing about mountaineering films is that every c*** thinks he can make one.'

It ain't that easy - sit down with the pair and you get an insight into what it really took to produce the rolling, manic stream of climbing footage, animation and sheer daftness that makes the film so entertaining. The first step is simply to film the raw footage. That might sound easy, but when you feel like death at 6,000 metres, dragging out a heavy professional quality camera is the last thing you feel like doing.

But it's not, says Alastair, till they get back, that the real work starts. First, and most boring, they view every second of footage. It's like seeing what ingredients are in the kitchen cupboard. Then it's a question of trimming and adjusting, and bouncing ideas back and forth.

If there's one thing Al and Dave are good at, it's bouncing ideas. Many of them ridiculous. I actually taped an hour's interview with them, but to be honest, the sheer rambling diversity of the whole thing was like raw footage itself and it's easier to just step back and paint a bigger picture.

The actual expedition footage is just the start. It may be disillusioning, but many of the close-up action shots - the crevasse jump for example and crampon close-up, were shot laboriously in the French Alps. There simply isn't the time to do them on location in the Andes.

Then there are those snappy, loopy computer effects the guys are so fond of. They break up the climbing footage and give the film a neat contemporary feel. Those effects, the little bus or 'collectivo' for example, are the result of weeks of work combining three different software programmes.

And the footage from Bolivia is relentlessly pared down. The scenes of Al feeling sick in a tent on Huayna Potosi are cut together from several hours of footage, but make just 30 seconds or so of actual film.

Scouse Wookie...

That's the technical side of things, but what really shines through in the film is a glowing, frantic sense of fun, from the Scouse Wookie - really - through to the insane spaghettis western sequence, inspired by a run-down hotel in a town at the foot of the Cordillera Real in Bolivia. And it doesn't take long to see where it comes from either. Hang on, I'll turn that bloody tape off.

Yep, an afternoon with Al and Dave explains a lot... The conversation bounces around like one of those old rubber superballs and it's hard to pin anything down for longer than 30 seconds. It's pretty clear though, that neither has much time for the establishment of mountaineering films. They admire Touching The Void for its sheer quality, but get onto the rest of climbing films and you sense a barely hidden frustration with the mundanity of it all.

So what's next? Al's eyes light up. 'We're making something that's basically a collection of comedy sketches about climbing. There's no narrative, just disjointed scenes.' They show me some raw rushes of a sequence based on the opening scenes of Saving Private Ryan. Dubbed 'Saving Private Land', it's set in a future world where landowners have taken over Widdop Rocks and the only way to recover it is by armed attack. The unfinished footage is already dripping with computerised special effect explosions and frankly ludicrous moments of death and it's hard to really judge what it all means, but it's unlike anything the climbing film world has ever seen, and that's got to be a good thing.

What else? Rather improbably, Dave's brother is a champion break dancer and the pair are working on a specialist break dancing film. It's for the money first and foremost, but again they're trying to bring a new angle to the thing and filming the dancing the way the participants want rather than as some sort of self-indulgent cinematography fest.

They Scare Me...

I don't know what other mountain film makers think or the pair, but they scare me, ... just joking, sort of. Actually, it was genuinely enjoyable to meet two enthusiastic and original guys doing something that theyplainly and obviously believe in and are entranced by.

If you haven't seen Twice Upon A Time In Bolivia, pop over to posingproductions.com and watch the online promo. Then, if you like it, buy the film. And watch this space to see what comes next. It's going to be interesting...

ps: to the relief of many OUTDOORSmagic readers, Alastair has given up writing :-)