Narrative | Dramatic Features
Film Name: W.
Genre: Detective, Thriller, Drama with a hint of humor.
Date: November 2019
Director: Frédéric Zeimet
Producer: Frédéric Zeimet
Writer: Frédéric Zeimet
Cinematographer: Rae Lyn Lee
Music composer: Daniel Balthasar
Production Company: “W.” is a first from Six Letters, the Luxembourgish Production Company was built to develop Screenwriters. Now, we are moving toward production and W. has proved a great learning experience to build on for future productions. Budget: a bit over 30,000 euros
Financing: Luxembourgish Filmfund and their wild card – support (Aide Carte Blanche in French)
Shooting Format: Digital
Screening Format: 16:9
Awards:
– Best Short Form Drama (Stareable Fest)
– Gold Award for Best Series (DC Webfest)
– Best Screenplay (Die Seriale, Germany)
– Best Thriller Series (Minnesota Webfest)
– Best Screenplay (TO Webfest, Canada)
– Board of Governors Honourable Mention (TO Webfest, Canada)
Website
indieactivity: What is your series about?
Frédéric Zeimet (FZ): A woman is found in the middle of the forest by the Luxembourgish police. She doesn’t know who she is, where she comes from or what she was doing there… but strangely, she knows everything, just like a walking Wikipedia. Who is this woman? Is she a main suspect in an ongoing investigation about the disappearance of three children in Luxembourg? Until she knows more about her identity, this Jane Doe wants to be called “W.” for “wisdom”.
That’s the premise of our web series of 6-episodes of 5-10 minutes. The idea was always to tell an entertaining story while being able to tackle other subjects, more difficult to bring to a larger audience’s attention. While trying to help the police, W. tries to assemble the pieces of the puzzle of her identity and why she has this tremendous memory. W. is on the autistic spectrum and through the series, I try to put the situation of autistic people in Luxembourg and around the world in focus. What does it mean to be autistic? Who is concerned? Why? The two policemen who are handling her have these clichés we all share but she deconstructs all these stereotypes little by little.
With W., I wanted to put the audience into the shoes of someone seeing and feeling the world differently and helping them to have a better understanding of what it means to be autistic.
Tell us about the festival run, marketing and sales?
Frédéric Zeimet (FZ): To be quite honest, first we did the series for Luxembourg without really having a clue of how to market the series abroad.
We have never imagined that our series, the first of its kind in Luxembourg, in a language nearly nobody in the world speaks, would get any attention elsewhere than Luxembourg… but we still had the feeling that we should send the series out, submit it to festivals, to share it one way or another with other and new audiences. Surely, the positive feedback from the Luxembourgish audience helped us into gaining some confidence.
With no knowledge of how and where to send the series, we started naïvely by googling it. We quickly came across Stareable’s Forums and Blogs. That’s where we first find some support and help. Then we came across organisation like Web series World Cup and so on. Step by step, we made a list of festivals and forums we wished to be part of and started sending W. to the world… and we must admit, it has been a marvelous and amazing ride. W. has been selected all over the world winning the Best Short Drama Award at Stareable Festival, winning the Golden Award for best series at the DC Webfest, winning in Toronto, Germany, Bilbao and so on. The feedback from audiences has been so positive. We are completely overwhelmed and happy.
The official trailer for W. written and directed by Frédéric Zeimet and starring Catherine Elsen, Jérôme Burelbach, Fränk Grotz and Claude Faber.
Development & Financing?
Frédéric Zeimet (FZ): The first time the concept popped into my mind, it was just a concept of someone being find knowing everything but not who she/he is. The irony in the situation was strong enough for me to hold on to it and I came back to it when a new idea came along. So, this whole process is not really quantifiable in time because it was more about letting a concept maturing rather that actually sitting down and trying to write something on paper.
The first time I sat down to start putting my ideas on a piece of paper was the summer after my son was born, so 2017. I had the first few minutes in my mind and wrote a screenplay of about 8 pages. The 8 pages ended with W. confronting the police for the first time and I had the feeling that this could be a first act of a longer episode or rather the first episode of something else. This “something else” would later be the idea to do a web series rather than a traditional 40 minutes TV series. The final dialogue of the first episode brought me to the idea of a main character with the Asperger syndrome. As soon as I was certain to talk about this handicap, I rewrote the pilot and started a whole new work, namely research. I contacted a lot of different association in Luxembourg to talk to them and trying to have a better knowledge about the autistic spectrum. This took about a year. I am still a stay-at-home dad and I had to find the time to do this research properly.
Summer 2018, I gathered the first team members, to know if they would be willing to work on a small-scale project for the web, knowing that most of them came from movies or TV productions. And as soon as I had their blessing, I wrote the other 5 episodes of the series’ first season, knowing that I can have maximum 3 to 4 setting/décor and not more than 4 characters.
With these 6 episodes, a small bible with characters’ description, I got out and tried to secure funding with sponsoring. I was not fond of trying crowdfunding as I had the feeling it was basically asking my friends and family to pay for my series. So, the sponsoring path was an absolute dead end. Nobody was able here in Luxembourg to understand what I wanted to do and how they could get a benefice out of it. So, the last possibility was to go and try to get some funding from the Luxembourgish Filmfund through their wild card support… that we finally got.
From that moment on, everything moved quickly. We shot the six episodes in four days in May 2019. Then came the edit process that went quite smoothly. The final phase where we put a lot of effort was the sound. Our sound designer, editor and mixer, Luca Theis, spent hours and days to develop the sound world of our main protagonist. It needed to feel familiar yet different. It was a difficult task but he managed it perfectly. The VFX came last and the series was ready to be shown to the cast and team in
November 2019. It came out in January 2020 on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. We mainly focused our efforts into bringing the series to the Luxembourgish audience but after being selected to our first festivals, we gained some attention from abroad and our audience widened.
Production?
Frédéric Zeimet (FZ): It was my first time as a producer, screenwriter, director. I knew with the small money we had, we needed to be able to focus on the important things while being able to adapt as much as we can. When you have a strong team ready to confront any kind of issue or situation with you, you know that you are ready to go into preparation and then shooting. Because with this small amount of money, we were not allowed to have anything go wrong or the whole project would collapse. So, I am glad to have been able to have the support of my amazing team and their countless effort.
The writing and development took about 2 years on and off. The preparation was two months or so. Because we knew we would be shooting on location for the exteriors, our main focus was to find the location for the “police office”.
At first, we wanted to shoot the whole in 5 days. We had about 50 pages of script, which would mean ten pages per day. But that was financially not viable. We needed to shorten the shooting to 4 days, meaning we had to figure out with the first AD and DOP ways to shoot faster and more efficient. It meant also that the actors would be under a lot of pressure to perform about 12 pages of script per day. Stress was high but it was the only way to do the series.
Except some minor issues, the shooting went smoothly. There was a lot of running involved but thankfully the overall atmosphere was good. We spent about two weeks in the edit but over a two months period. Editing is a moment I, as a director, deeply hate. You come out of the shooting with this nice feeling of accomplishment and when you watch the first edit, I always fall in this strange depression… all of this effort for that? But then, slowly, the projects takes its shape and I find pleasure in watching the series unfolds differently. I must say that my editor Loic Tanson has a lot of patience and let me try things…
When I came to the sound design and edit, I was happy with what we had and this part of the process brought the project to a whole new level. It was here that what I had envisioned came to life.
The VFX came very late in the overall process as we had already spent our whole budget. First, I imagined these lines going through the images in more or less 40 shots. But we had to shorten our ambitions to about 25 shots and I think this decision was a good one. To much of these effects could have been a gimmick in a pejorative way. Having to chose when and where to put them let us find a nice balance.
Advice from the Filmmaker?
FZ: When I started to send the scripts, there was this question that came up: in what language will the series be? Luxembourgish actors are all able to act in four to five languages. That’s because Luxembourg is so tiny, we have to be able to speak fluently the languages of our neighbouring countries. So strategically speaking, in what language should the series be? I mostly watch English speaking series, my friends too, my family also… Should we do the series in English then? Even if it’s not our mother tongue? Would I automatically put aside a large audience if I chose to do the series in Luxembourgish, a language nobody understands?
I must say, even if I completely understood people’s concerns, for me it was out of question to do it in another language then Luxembourgish. W. was an opportunity to try and tell a story in a different way, in a new way. Of course, the writing and the filmmaking are a huge part of this different approach, but the language also. Isn’t it nice or interesting to watch people behave, talk in a language that you absolutely don’t understand but still feel empathic or related to them? Isn’t the role of fiction to be able to bring people together and entertain them or make them conscious about some issues despite their differences? Despite the language barrier? If we don’t embrace our differences, we will never try to think outside the box, to propose a new world vision… For me that’s what creating, writing, directing and producing a web series was all about: sharing with the world something they haven’t seen yet in an entertaining way.
So, my advice is, always try to work with your difference rather than against it. It’s in your difference that your universality lies and that will be compelling for others.
Ah and, never give up. Doing a movie, tv series, web series is an emotional rollercoaster and even if you are down, don’t let it get the best out of you, there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Good luck and all the best to you dear reader.
Tell us what you think of “W.” What do you think of it? Genre? More genre? Let’s have your comments below and/or on Facebook or Instagram! Or join me on Twitter
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