In this month's issue of Microfilmmaker Magazine, we interview John Moylan the director of "The Mark", the winning spec trailer from our Microfilmmaker Magazine/Adobe Spec Trailer contest. In winning this contest, his prize pack consists of the brand new Adobe CS3: Production Premium--loaded with Premiere Pro CS3, After Effects CS3 Professional, Flash CS3, Encore CS3, Photoshop CS3 Extended, Illustrator CS3, Soundbooth CS3, Ultra CS3, and OnLocation CS3--and the soon to be released Red Giant Magic Bullet Suite 3--loaded with Magic Bullet Looks, Magic Bullet Frames, Magic Bullet Colorista, Opticals, and InstantHD. (To read our review of CS3: Production Premium, check it out here.)
JH: First off, John, allow me to congratulate you on your win. You were the unanimous winner by some pretty impressive judges, with Alex Ferrari (Broken, Cyn), Mike Flanagan (Oculus, Ghosts of Hamilton Street), and John Badham (Saturday Night Fever, WarGames, Point of No Return, NBC's Heroes) all giving you the thumbs up.
JM: Thanks very much to you and them, I am thrilled with the win and very flattered considering the calibre of the judging panel. It certainly goes a long way to recharge our enthusiasm for our projects.
JH: To begin, with how about you tell me a little bit about yourself as a filmmaker and where you're from.
JM: I’m from County Laois in Ireland, James Cameron, Ridley Scott and Quentin Tarantino would be my favourite directors, and I always have been a huge film fanatic. In fact my brothers and I talk about little else, we often go to the movies and debate afterwards about what we would have done for a particular scene or what the director should have done. But when my wife gave me a gift of a camcorder, and I started making short nature films put to music, I was hooked. Along with the valuable education from doing the course in the Hollywood Camerawork dvd, I was hooked. [Editor's Note: Readers interested in this course receive a 30% discount on it in our Microfilmmaker Discounts section.]
I had taken a writing course some years before and won third prize in The Irish Science Fiction Writers competition, I always had an idea in my head about a hitman whose assignment goes terribly wrong. In a movie the iconic image of a figure assembling a high-powered rifle with telescopic sights is instantly recognisable and an audience immediately knows what this character is about. So I decided I had spent enough time talking about films, it was time to make one. So I wrote the script for “The Mark”, showed it to the rest of the family, and we starting the planning for the shoot.
JH: We've seen the trailer, but tell our readers a little more about the overall premise of the film.
JM: The Mark is a story of a sniper hiding in the woods with a hit to carry out. Using a dummy drop off he lures out the mark and his bodyguard. But the sniper's attention is taken off target, when he gets distracted by a girl's abduction nearby. With the girl lost to the woods, in his haste, he misses, hits the mark's bodyguard.
Fully armed, the mark seeks retribution and gives chase. Running for cover, the sniper has more than his own life to worry about. An important feature of the story is about how a small moment of weakness can have dramatic consequences. Essentially it is a silent movie, as there is no dialogue spoken through the entire film. It relies entirely on the action to tell the story. Along with direction to help carry the story, location, props, equipment and planning will have to work hard to suspend disbelief.
JH: So, how did you find out about the Spec Trailer contest and what made you decide to try and enter?
JM: Actually my brother Martin (playing the sniper) had been looking for tips on the net about how to make video appear more like film to help our movie project and that’s how he discovered Microfilmmaker Magazine, and the competition. So we thought making a trailer might be possible with the footage we had started on. Although there were alot more shots still to put in the can, even if we didn’t win, at least we knew that we had a chance of having three professional directors review our work.
