Oil Paint is a short student film written by Sophie Tucker and directed by Thomas Vallely. Gillian Konko and Bronte Sherborne play two sisters, Clara and Niamh, who are trying to navigate complex emotions following their dad’s death. The film was featured in the second set of the Oxford University Film Foundation’s (OUFF) Short Film Festival.
Joining me over a video call, Thomas Vallely talked to me about Oil Paint, OUFF, and the craft of filmmaking. I asked Thomas how he got started with this project and he pre-empted his answer by telling me that his background is actually theatre: “I was in OULES, the [Oxford University] Light Entertainment Society for about three years. And I wanted to try something different. I just started my Master’s program, so I thought ‘Oh! New course, new me.’”
As such, Oil Paint was made as part of an OUFF program for new filmmakers called Projects. “It was a good way to break into something by doing something new,” Thomas said. As part of the program, directors get access to OUFF kit, are matched with a producer and connected to the OUFF network for crew. Thomas described this process: “I got paired up with Hannah Williams, who’s my fantastic producer, who has helped keep me on the straight and narrow. We were put together by Emma Earnshaw [the OUFF President]. And then we had to put together the rest of the crew.”
Directors on the Projects program also get to choose a script from OUFF’s bank: “There was a big Google Drive folder of all the different scripts you could choose from. I think there were about 40, which is terrifying. So, I got through them all. And they said, ‘Which ones do you particularly like?’ and I put down Oil Paint.”
I was curious about what made Sophie Tucker’s script stand out from the others. Thomas answered: “The characters were very human-like. They didn’t necessarily say what they wanted or how they felt. They’d say something kind of adjacent to it, which I think is very realistic. Also, I think that the kind of sibling/sisterly relationship was very true to life…I don’t have any siblings, but my mom and my auntie are close sisters and I saw a lot of them in Clara and Niamh.
“I actually modelled how I want to portray them on my own family. And I wanted to get that kind of closeness and that level of understanding that no one else in the world can get. It’s just these two people have this special kind of connection. Even if they really kind of annoyed each other or exasperated, they still have this kind of fundamental bond that can overcome difficult times. And that’s something that to me, that was the kind of main theme of the script…That’s what I really liked about it.”
The intimate focus on the sisters also meant that Oil Paint would be made or broken by the strength of its cast. After putting out a call-out and reviewing self-tapes, Thomas chose Gillian and Bronte to play Clara and Niamh, respectively: “Bronte sent the eulogy speech from right at the end, which is Niamh’s big moment. And it looked like she had recorded it on her phone, about a foot away from her face, but it was really good. …I think there’s a difference between doing something well and having emotional authenticity. I knew that genuine emotionality is what I was looking for, and that’s what I got from Bronte and Gillian.”
Beyond their individual performances, the relationship between the sisters needed to be done well. It was essential that the actors have the right kind of chemistry to portray the sibling dynamic. For Thomas, it was hard to judge how well they would work with each other through self-tapes alone: “I got them in the room for the first rehearsal. I was thinking, I hope this works. They both seem like professionals, so I’m sure it won’t be terrible, but I’m hoping that it’s good. And they came in and they just got on like a house on fire, it was great.”
The two things that substantially separated this from Thomas’ theatre experience were the cameras and the post-production. One of the unexpected parts of making the film was how strange the process of getting good shots could be: “We’ve had a couple of times…where Calin, our cameraman, was on [top of] a table or crouching on the floor or something to get these really good angles. They look really nice, but you have this absolute madness surrounding it.”
While watching the film in preparation for the interview, I was surprised by a short funny directorial cameo which I brought up during the interview. Thomas laughed: “I want to stress, I did not mean for this to happen…Basically, we had a scene where there’s a wake and we needed lots of different people. So we got some friends together, bribed them with biscuits and other things…But then I realised that there’s a line about a divorced guy called Joe…this was begging for a cutaway [to Joe]. And I was like, ‘We don’t have enough men in this room to be able to do that’. And then Hannah just turned around, ‘We have one.’ I was like, ‘Right, okay, there we go.’”
Working with his editor, Jacek Podlaski, Thomas only recently finished editing the film. While the process had started earlier, they found working online frustrating and ended up doing the bulk of the work in the early weeks of this term; just in time for the OUFF Short Film Festival where they are slated to screen the movie.
Talking about the Festival itself, Thomas said that he was most excited to see the other films because of the quality as well as the potential to discuss new ideas with other filmmakers. In a larger sense, he had started thinking in the language of the screen: “I think I’ve got the film brain. I was in a cafe the other day and they were a bunch of people on a coffee table with a mirror behind them. And I thought, ‘Oh, that could be a really good shot’, and so I’m making a note of it, and then I am sketching it down. I was like, what am I doing? What’s happening to me? So clearly I’ve got the bug.”
I ended the interview with a question about what Thomas was hoping audiences would feel while watching his short: “What I’m hoping is that audiences watch Oil Paint and find it authentic and real…I think that showing complexity around grief is a story worth telling. I’m hoping to move people.”
Then, he paused for a second before adding: “And also, hopefully, they will enjoy it and not throw things at me and leave halfway through it.”
Oil Paint was screened on the 31st of January (Tuesday) as part of Screening Set 2 at the OUFF Film Festival.