Exposure

It's the story of a break-up. The two women Jo (Geerteke van Lierop) and Rachel (Erica Anderson) were in a loving relationship and they broke up. This happened before our film starts. Our film is about their process in dealing with the break up. They each set off on a journey of self-reflection and contemplation. 

After finding a folder full of portraits of Rachel, Jo heads to Wisconsin to revisit the scenes in the photographs. Finding the same locations, Jo takes a series of self portraits trying to give the project and her life meaning and artistic merit. 

Rachel stays in the Algarve where the two women lived. She visits her favourite, beautiful, hauntingly empty beach, again and again, searching for peace. 

These two journeys happen in parallel, and form the spine of the forward progression of the film. Two separate but synchronous journeys, intertwined. 

But there is a third story line. Their memory of the relationship: how they met, their first kiss, their love, their pain, the breakup. We see the collapse of the relationship in their mind. Each blaming the other (or each blaming themselves). We see fights, we see tender moments, we see their relationship through their memories that form a narrative, but disjointed and fragmented. Leading to a conclusion in which they might, or might not, get back together.

The film is an exploration of memory and perception based on a simple, relateable event - a break-up.

The Longship Method

Longship Films produces highly engaging and consumable feature films through a process we call ‘Seat of the Pants Filmmaking’.

This approach is based on a the combination of our experience with indie filmmaking and lean start-ups. Independent filmmaking is all about the story and the experience. We bring human stories to the screen. Lean start-up is a methodology which allows teams to focus on value producing activities, and not waste time and effort. Longship Films uses lean filmmaking tactics to create and market wonderful human stories.

Typical industry film making is based on forcing the Universe into a script, a shooting schedule and a marketing plan. Seat of the Pants filmmaking puts the Universe in the lead and the rest follows. The Universe plays a direct part in writing the script while the shooting is underway.

The creative process is essentially a small team of highly adaptable and capable film professionals embarking on a week long journey to shoot the story. Of course we set off with a plan, however there are only story concepts, structure outlines and character ideas ready before the boat sets sail. We do not have a full script when we start shooting. Flexibility and responsiveness are key, and the writer is on the team to adapt the concepts and characters based on whatever the Universe puts in the teams path.

Each of the team members is a volunteer and covers their own costs. However, should the film be sold, each team member will receive a higher percentage of profits than they would on a typical industry production. There are a set of rules which each team member must comply to in order to join. These rules are designed to achieve the objective in the most creative and efficient way possible.

The marketing process is based on a rapid testing approach with the market and waterfalls quickly to next concepts. We will pitch the finished film to a select group of distributors and agents while submitting to a few select festivals. If this first round does not respond, we will quickly pivot and release online via pay-per-view platforms. Sometime after that, we will release it for free viewing.

This approach allows us to create high quality movies on a micro-budget. This is the sharing economy applied to filmmaking. There are no assistants. We all do our part and come up with a viable story on film, and give it a chance to reach various audiences.