Raw Nerve Productions launch Tumbleturns

Raw Nerve Productions is delighted to announce the short film Tumbleturns, written and directed by Dave Duggan and produced by Jim Curran, which had its premier screening on Saturday 22 November at the Strand Multiplex Cinema as part of the Foyle Film Festival.

This is the latest in a hugely successful body of short film work by Raw Nerve Productions, in both animation and live action, including the Oscar nominated Dance Lexie Dance, written by Dave Duggan.

Tumbleturns is a drama of two young men and a fateful day in their lives. Joined together by their love of swimming, they make life and death decisions on the day their beloved swimming baths are closed. The paradoxes of their decisions are shown in the only way they can be: by living them.

Writer and director Dave Duggan said "I'm delighted we've made Tumbleturns. Though it has been very much a personal project of mine for the past 8 years - I've wanted to make this anti-suicide film since then - with out the talents and hard work of the complete cast and crew brought together by Raw Nerve Productions, it would never have been made."

Producer Jim Curran added the film would not have been realised without the wonderful support of so many local organisations, businesses and individuals too numerous to mention here and indeed the dedicated cast and crew. Once again Raw Nerve Productions were delighted to be working with writer/director Dave Duggan and we now plan to send it onto various film festivals and seek to place it with broadcasters.

The History and Making of Tumbleturns - by the films' writer and director

Dave Duggan

"Completing Tumbleturns marks the end of almost 8 years of off/on efforts to get this short film made. It grew out of my responses to the suicide of a friend of mine. What do you do in the face of such a tragedy? I was struck at the time by the wilfulness of the act. I wanted to respond to that in a wilful way and a film came to me.

I wrote the original screenplay and took it to a number of different companies. BBC Bristol, as part of their 10*10 series, produced by Jeremy Howe, had a good look at it in 1999, before eventually declining. In the version before them I had animated dolphins morphing into humans and while they liked it they reckoned they couldn't bring it off with the resources and the time they had. Orphan Films in Dublin, with Bridget Fitzgerald, optioned the screenplay for a year and did some good work on it but could not get production money. The option on the screenplay returned to me and the screenplay sat in a file again for a while. It didn't go away. Depressingly and tragically, young men keep killing themselves all across the country. I was doing a lot of writing and directing of theatre through this time, mainly with Sole Purpose Productions. I was also writing and directing training and corporate video productions for Raw Nerve. One particular success of that time was an educational video drama for the University of Ulster I wrote and directed, starring Bronagh Gallagher (The Commitments, Pulp Fiction, Star Wars), and produced by Jim Curran. Afterwards Jim asked me if I had any dramas of the my own I wanted to make and I showed him Tumbleturns. He liked it and said he would take it on as producer. We agreed that I would direct it.

Jim went as far as setting up meetings and developing trials with animators who might take on the task of morphing dolphins into humans. But the biggest thing he did at that stage was he interested the Northern Ireland Film and Television Commission in it and eventually secured a small production grant from the Arts Council Lottery Funds. This meant that a production could be mounted. The discussions with the animators signalled that with the time and resources we had morphing dolphins into humans was out of our reach, so I decided to drop them and did a rewrite of the screenplay. I wanted to make sure a sub textual element of life-affirmation and hope, even with the dolphins gone, something that presented a wilful 'choose life' motif, remained in the film.

The revised screenplay went into production with cinematographer Vinny Cunningham and sound recordist Billy Gallagher contracted at an early stage. This was important to me because I had worked with them before and because I'd seen the successful documentary they'd made on The Undertones, using an approach we were taking for Tumbleturns i.e. shooting on video and doing a transfer to 35mm film at the end. The rest of the crew were drawn from people who had worked on Nerve Centre and Raw Nerve projects in recent years, many of whom I knew >from previous work.

We held auditions in the key location, the local swimming baths. We were extremely well supported by Derry City Council and the baths staff, especially John Doherty, all through the production. Actors had to 'work' on camera and had to be able to swim 2 lengths of the pool. They were required to turn up with swimming gear. Two local actors, Barry Mullan and Michael Poole, were cast and the featured extras were drawn from established local actors.

At all stages in the production we took advice from suicide prevention people, especially Barry McGale. This had a positive impact on decisions I made in regard to actually realising the script.

The shoot ran smoothly and to schedule. I remember it as a period of intense and highly productive work, when the images on my storyboard were gathered and decisions about the final film started to emerge >from the raw material. The editing process undertaken by Kevin Murray was creative and precise. It was the time when the 'real' film Tumbleturns was made, the process whereby versions of the images in my head gathered during the shoot were edited together to make a watchable film. Sound is essential to Tumbleturns and I had comprehensive conversations with composer John O'Neill (guitarist with The Undertones) who created a soundtrack without melody, one that gave us alienation and disassociation, threat and grief. The ghost sequence needed strong audio underlining and John got that spot on. I wanted to make a back-story present without using narrative so I asked John to provide a sound, a sort of industrial hum, that would run before the images started and then stay under them all the way through. The finished film was really enhanced by the closing credits designed by Justine Scoltock.

Now with the premiere screening on the 22nd November, I have a good feeling about the work. I don't have any sense of it taking a huge long time. It took the time it took. Lots of elements had to develop and get into place. I never got fed up with it. I wanted to make it and that's the bottom line."

Copyright      Dave Duggan     November 2003

For further details contact: jim@nerve-centre.org.uk