Starting Afresh

Hokay!

A few changes. Obviously this blog is no longer the account of making a short film because its done and dusted and out there doin some festival rounds. So I guess it will become a (somewhat restricted) journal of my work.

And for those of you who were asking there are now links to videos of stuff I've done.

My driving ambition has led me to the twisted idea that I should try and make a feature film.

So I spent the summer gathering together fragmented ideas and constructing a story.

I managed to get together a treatment of the simple romantic tale and sent it into the Irish Film Board with the hope that they might lend me some money to write a screenplay. The day it arrived the film board called, asking me for more sample script pages (I only sent one). I was busy doing things for the DEAF festival so I didn't get the time. So I might have to resubmit next month. Or I might find out I've got a development grant in 4 to 6 weeks.

I'm very excited about it. At the moment it's called 'Nettle Soup'. I sent in some sketches with the proposal, here's one- it's of one of the main characters- an 82 year old new age hippy called 'Jacob'.


I've also spent my time making a short micro-tv series with a bunch of non-actor no-experience kids as part of The Ark's outreach program. They say never work with kids or animals... so to write and shoot 5x1min episodes of a sci-fi robot story in ONE WEEK was a bit of a challenge. . It was screened on RTE's The Den in October and went down well.

It was fun to let the kids write dialogue and design the costumes.

Shoots are tough. With 8 nine year olds running around not doing anything you ask them to they're tougher. People say never work with children or animals. These kids were crazy hyperactive (they drink energy drinks for breakfast and lunch, no kidding). It makes the prospect of going out on a shoot a little easier knowing that it will be with well trained highly skilled ADULT actors.


Stills: