Case Study: The making of Ashley Tabatabai & Stefan Fairlamb’s Falsified

Date: March 8th 2018
Case Study: The Making of ‘Falsified’
Filmmaker: Ashley Tabatabai & Stefan Fairlamb

indieactivity: What is your film about?
Ashley: Falsified is about a man whose son was stolen at birth is convinced that he has found his long lost child. It is inspired by Spain’s stolen babies scandal, Los Niños Robados

indieactivity: Tell us about the festival run, marketing and sales?
Ashley: We’ve had a great festival run with the potential of a few more selections to come as 2018 rolls on. I’m so grateful for the combination of top festivals our short has played at. To have our film shown at LA International Short Film Festival as its premiere was a huge honor and DC Shorts followed right after. That’s like the perfect one two punch!

Those two big screenings opened up the floodgates a little, and we then took our film to Brisbane, Australia at the Simply Shorts festival and London for the London Lift off Festival. We won countless awards in that time for Best short at the LA Shorts Awards, amongst others as well as best actor awards for myself and Mitchell Mullen at the Actors Awards and Top Shorts Awards, to name a few. And that’s not even finished, as of writing (March 8th) we are set to screen at the March Hollyshorts event at The Chinese Theatres in LA and at the Sacramento International Film Festival at the end of April. California has definitely taken to Falsified. Beyond the festival push and self promotion Twitter and Instagram, we made a conscious choice to hire a publicist.

London Flair PR have worked with the Oscars Best Live Action short winner for the last 3 years, they are the best short film publicist in the business. I spoke with them back in 2016 before anything had even begun on our festival run and they loved the film. We kept in touch over the year until our global premier in LA in August 2017. Once that dropped we pushed the PR out over a 2 1/2 month period, getting 20+ press pieces on some huge online outlets like Film Threat and Vulture Underground as well as in person interviews at Raindance. All the helped fuel the films momentum and led to ShortsTV picking us up for distribution after reaching out to them.

indieactivity: Dramatic Feature
Director: The film was directed and edited by Stefan Fairlamb
Producers: Falsified was produced by Ashley Tabatabai
Budget: The total budget came in at around $28k (including all marketing costs)
Financing: It was entirely self-funded by Ashley Tabatabai, aside from a £500 grant from Genera during our marketing push. Produced in the United Kingdom
Production: Produced in the United Kingdom
Shooting Format: Blackmagic 4k
Screening Format: DCP, Quicktime, Pro-Res 422HQ
World Premiere: Los Angeles International Short Film Festival 2017
Awards: Winner of Best Short at the LA Shorts Awards, NYC Indie Film Awards and Gold Movie Awards. Best Actor awards for Ashley Tabatabai at the Actors Awards, Top Shorts Film Festival and Oniros Awards. Best Supporting Actor awards for Mitchell Mullen at the Actors Awards, Top Shorts Film Festival and Oniros Awards and Best Actor at the LA Shorts Awards. Best Cinematography for Adam Lyons at the LA Shorts Awards and Top Shorts Film Festival. Best Score for Howard Carter at the Top Shorts Film Festival.
Website: falsifiedfilm.com

indieactivity: Give the full official synopsis for your film?
Ashley: After over 30 years of searching, Henry finally believes he has found the son who was stolen from him at birth. Whilst stationed at the American Airbase in Spain during the early 70’s he fell in love with his wife Maria. Little did they know that they would be affected by one of Spain’s best kept secrets, the stolen babies scandal, also known as ‘Los Niños Robados’ or ‘The Lost Children of Francoism’. He has now made his way to London to try and find Javier; the man he is adamant is his long lost child. The persistence of this ‘stranger’ is off-putting to Javier and his wife, who simply want to be left alone. In their first encounter, Javier is focused on getting Henry to stop pestering him. Henry seizes the chance to explain who he really is and looks to back it up with all of the evidence he has gathered during his search. He claims to be Javier’s true father, forcing him to decide whether it is worth it to reopen a painful chapter of his life that might be easier left closed.

indieactivity: Development & Financing?
Ashley: I had just finished creating a TV pilot with my friend and collaborator Adam Lyons, who was the cinematographer on Falsified. We were preparing to take it to the AFM to pitch for funding and I knew there was a need to have some more projects and ideas on our slate. I started working on some concepts and loglines and a story around the Stolen Babies came back into the forefront of my mind. Having grown up in Spain I was familiar with the case and had seen a lot in the Spanish press. I never realized that so few people out of the country were aware of it.

I spoke with Stefan Fairlamb, who became the director on the piece and we bounced ideas around to help translate this huge scandal into a short film. The idea being to focus on a snapshot of the journey of the father, with it being about the human side of what happened rather than the logistics. From there I spent around 6 months writing the piece and ensuring that we honored the realities of the events, whilst developing these fictional characters. As for funding, I made a very conscious choice to self fund the project. I wanted to be able to do it on our terms and to fully lead the vision and pace of the development and execution. I costed out what I could realistically afford and did solicit the help of a 0% interest credit card, to help with the pre-production and filming expenditures.

Javier Baena (Ashley Tabatabai) on the set of “Falsified” with Stefan Fairlamb (Dir.)

indieactivity: Production?
Ashley: We filmed the short over 3 1/2 days. Our first day was actually the end scene between myself and the doctor played by Julia Leyland. We had around 8 hours to get the one scene done and it was a nice way to ease in to the shoot. The following week was a little more intense as we prepared for the heavier scenes. We had half a day to capture some VO from Mitchell Mullen and to also film his characters pivotal scene towards the end. We were then back on set the next day with a full crew, filming the scene where Henry meets my character for the first time. This one required a lot of set up to work with the natural light we had coming in to the bar/lounge we were using. It took a few hours to get into the rhythm of the shoot and we did worry about whether we’d keep to schedule. But Stefan, Adam and our AD Olivia made some quick choices to bring us on track. That was helped by the time Adam and Stefan had spent in pre-production on their shot list and on the location scouts I’d done with both of them.

Our final day was filmed in a church and we started by filming the opening scene of the film, captured by some great low angle camera movement from Adam. We were also slightly pushed for time on this one, with a finite period to have access to the venue. We got to a stage where it had turned dark outside, yet all our footage was supposed to be day time. Again, Adam did some lighting magic and you can’t tell any difference between what we shot at night and during the day. Once we had the footage in the bag and had recovered from the shoot we went into an edit that took around 2 months. That’s because people were juggling other projects and commitments. Adam did an assembly of the edit which Stefan then took away to refine and to add in the pauses, moments and beats that helped add the right pace to the piece. From there, Adam added in the color grade and Howard Carter finished it off with his sound design and amazing original score.

Julia Leyland in Falsified (2017)

indieactivity: Festival Preparation & Strategy?
Ashley: MThe whole process was a first time for me. I had a few chats with some directors and filmmakers I know who had done the festival route with much success and they all said similar things; there’s no definite logic to the circuit. What I knew was that I wanted to give it as big of a push as possible. I knew our film had a lot of important themes to it and was about something I feel more people should be aware of. The plan from day one was to always go as hard as we could towards getting it to the Oscars. And with that goal, was the growth as an artist and as a person that came with it.

The strategy was quite simple, to pinpoint the festivals that were Oscar and BAFTA qualifying first. Then, to research all the past Oscar winning and nominated films and to see where they had screened. Beyond that I should have gone deeper and reviewed similar themed shorts and where they were shown. That’s something I’ll definitely do on my upcoming projects. Our global premiere at the LA International Short Film Festival was huge. It was the perfect premiere for us and so well received by the audience and the amazing programming team there. Having that experience was a great boost to the project and the festivals rolled on from there. At that stage I had been getting press myself from reaching out to blogs and radio stations. However I had always planned a full PR campaign, with the Oscars push in mind. We had done an industry screening of our film in London at the end of 2016.

I invited a publicist to the event and she loved the film from day one. Her enthusiasm and belief meant everything, because it was at a point when the film was not released to the world and had no hype around it. She believed in the story and we kept in touch over the subsequent year. Until September 2017, right after our LA Shorts Premiere. We then ran a 2 1/2 month press campaign which was self-funded. That experience gave me a great springboard to continue to promote the film from.

Javier Baena (Ashley Tabatabai) and Henry Mercer (Mitchell Mullen) on the set of “Falsified” discussing a scene with Stefan Fairlamb (Dir.)

indieactivity: The Release?
filmmaker: MWe had interest from a few different sales agents and distributors, and ultimately have had the short picked up for TV release by ShortsTV. That’s covering North America and EMEA. From an online perspective, we were left with the option of just putting out there ourselves or trying an approach like distribber. I personally preferred to get the film out there and have people see it, over paying solely for the chance of being on a larger VOD platform. There’s merits to the VOD approach. But, the aim for the short was exposure over commerce. So we put it up on Vimeo for free, which you can check out here:  with the aim of building an audience and having that support us when it comes to pitching for the feature. Once it was online we did the usual promotion on our social channels, mainly Twitter and Facebook. And I am also in the process of running some targeted Facebook Ads at capped CPC’s to increase awareness of the film.

indieactivity: Advice from the Filmmaker?
Ashley: Just do it. Nike should pay me royalties! It’s cliché as anything, but true. We all have stories to tell, so tell them. No one is going to just show up and offer us the chance to. I believe we should all live and die by our own swords. Keep creating and expressing and be patient. All things take time, despite what external sources and the media want to make us believe. And if you haven’t already done so, really figure out why you want to make films. And I mean beyond the surface level stuff. What do you want your voice and your creations to represent and contribute? Because once we have that, everything else flows more naturally.