Flawless - a film

So here it is, our short film Flawless. I hope you enjoy it.

2015 - What a year!

2015 was an extremely busy and productive year, and so before I lose the memories forever (no doubt due to one too many whiskys at the bar), I thought I'd better chronicle them here.

Flawless success
So, my short film Flawless. Remember that? Well, it had a pretty good run last year. It's been shown at 23 film festivals across the world, including in New York, Lanzarote, Serbia, West Bengal, Puerto Rico, at Cannes in one of their screening tents, and at Aesthetica in York.

CERN
It was also selected for CERN's film festival Cineglobe, which meant I got to travel to Geneva and not only treat my lungs to the freshest air there ever was but also check out the facilities. The festival is dedicated to the connection between creativity and science and it was inspiring to learn more about the research that is taking place, as well as being introduced to the Borscht Corp, a film collective in Miami with some amazing films such as this one.

14/48 Leicester
I was also exposed for the first time to Leicester premier dramatic community, via 14/48 Festival - based on an idea from a bunch of cool people in Seattle, this is a festival where 14 plays in total are created, produced and performed in front of an audience all within 48 hours (7 plays per night). I took part as a writer, writing a new play through the early hours of the morning based on a theme drawn from a hat that evening, which was then assigned to a director and cast the following morning and performed later that evening. It was an amazing experience; it made me realise completely that fantastic things can be created with little time and no sleep, and also realise how lucky I am to live in such a great city that has this kind of arts community.

Circle of Two
This was a short film written in a night (albeit Jim Worrad did most of the hard work) and then filmed over 2 days as part of Colchester Film Festival's 60 hour Challenge. We were assigned a title "Circle of Two", a line of dialogue and an action that had to be included. Here is the finished product.

New films in development
I've been working on a new full length film script with Keith, Jim (aka the Flawless team) and Alison, which will hopefully be produced in 2016. Watch this space...

Novel updates
I've shelved the Banshee idea, and now am concentrating on the novel based on two sisters who are no longer witches but instead superheroes (earlier drafts are tagged "Matti"). Draft 1 is done, so as I move into 2016 it's editing time. Joy!

So that was 2015, in a nutshell. There's probably something I've left off the list, but all in all 2015 was pretty good. My plan is to keep up the momentum for 2016. Wish me luck, and good luck with your own writing projects!

Films (plural)

Flawless, the short film I co-wrote and mentioned in my previous post is still doing the rounds for various national and international festival submissions so isn't on general release yet. However, if you are based in Puerto Rico, you may have seen it at the end of July at CineFiesta festival. If you are based in the UK, Flawless has been accepted at the Worcestershire Film Festival (16-19 November) and at The Short Cinema Festival in Leicester on 27 August. SO FAR. I think it has been submitted into around 60 festivals worldwide. I will keep you posted.

In the meantime, I've been keeping busy. My second film (or more correctly mine and James Worrad's second film) is called Atonia, and it's a bit out of my comfort zone. It's a horror film about a girl's struggles between dream and reality. That's about as much as I can say at this point. I wasn't able to go and watch the filming for this one (aside from the last scene), and so rather than deprive you of the excitement of it, I'm going to redirect you to Jim's blog where he's written a fab summary about the filming process. Plus: pictures!

Really excited about this one, simply because it involves special effects and that's always cool. The young lead actress Jess O'Brien is amazing, and so I am really looking forward to seeing it once it is all pieced together.

My First Film

So you're probably wondering what I've been up to lately. "Long time no see" and all that. Well, I've been working on a few things, not to mention trying to liaise with my day job to actually try to reclaim something resembling a "work-life balance" in the hope of being able to have time to write something half decent.
Anyway, the project that I'm most excited about, the one that is almost completed, is my first short film Flawless, co-written by the wonderful Jim Worrad and produced by Badshoes Films.
Jim approached me back in January I think it was to see if I'd collaborate with him on a film project pitched by his amazingly brilliant director friend Keith Allott. The project, after much discussion and refining, was to be about a woman genius who tries to prevent her father's death when she was a young girl. It was to be a modern sci-fi fairytale. The script went through a couple of edits, with Jim building on my initial structure and adding his script for the "woman genius" sections to my script for the "young girl" sections and generally doing a bloody good job of blending the two together. And that was our part done really. Just like that.
And then the magic happened.
Keith gathered together a band of nomads and renegades and artists in the form of the production team and actors, and they created something so beautiful and touching it has reduced pretty much everyone who has seen the rough cuts to tears.
I think the current plan is to send the film off to some festivals once it is finally finished, but here is a photo from when I visited the crew on location to whet your appetite.

Keith with the actors on the soon to be famous bench on New Walk

The Hunger Games and E-Books

*Contains minor spoilers for The Hunger Games trilogy*


I've just finished reading The Hunger Games trilogy and must say I really enjoyed it. I became completely immersed in this dystopian society, and as the traumatic events continued, I too became slightly traumatised. This is why I liked the ending, and was very pleased with how it was written. I felt that Katniss had the happiest ending she could have hoped for, given everything she experienced and that showed great skill (and restraint) on the part of the writer. 


I read the series on my Kindle, and whilst it was convenient and has helped me overcome my problem with storing paper books, the one negative I can identify with ebooks is that I am unable to share it with my friends or pass these stories on to my own children one day. So yes, "sentiment" and "community". Ebooks just can't compete.

York

I've been in York for the past 3 days, at a conference for work. If you haven't been, it's very pretty, even when it is peeing it down with rain, but I swear there are more drunks wandering the street than pretty much anywhere else I've been.

The hotel was nice, and I basically got to stay in a room the size of my old one-bedroom flat, so that was nice. The conference signed us up to go on a ghost walk, which was fun and fine until our guide told us our hotel was haunted by a ghost AND a poltergeist, which meant I couldn't sleep for fear of being prodded by some supernatural being.

I find ghosts interesting. I'd love to say I don't believe in them, and say what a load of tosh it all is, but the irrational side of my brain is absolutely petrified that the world is really like it is in Sixth Sense, where there are dead people literally everywhere, and that I might one day be made aware of this fact. *shudder*.

(above: can you spot a ghost in this picture? If so, please don't tell me!)

"Nooooooo!"

I know the film has been out now since 2009, but last week they were showing X Men Origins: Wolverine on Film 4. I quite enjoyed the other X Men films, so thought I'd give it a go, but was very disappointed. None of it made a whole lot of sense, and it was so cliché it was ridiculous. How many times did Wolverine hug a dead person to his manly chest, turn to the sky and scream "Nooooooooo!": 2. How many minutes of the film were dedicated to long shots of someone driving through Canada in a truck?: several. And the plot was all over the place. Why was the man baby Wolverine thought was his father played by Hugh Jackman, if he wasn't in fact his father? Who was he then? Why did Wolverine and Victor have to fight in all the wars of the twentieth century? Why would an adamantium bullet kill Wolverine, when he survived his skeleton being fused with the stuff? Similarly, why would a bullet make him lose his memory? I have to admit, they did a pretty good job on Gambit, given that I never saw the appeal in the past after watching the cartoons (his mutant power is that he can shuffle playing cards? Lame). Just a pity we'll probably never see him again. I found myself more moved by poor Ryan Reynold's character than Wolverine/Victor's sibling rivalry. The poor man got his mouth sewed together, injected with mutant powers, and then manually controlled like a toy car by that Striker bloke. Poor sod. And his only crime was that he talked too much.

I'm on a bit of a Superhero bent at the moment, having dressed as Batgirl at Butlins a few weeks ago (How come most of the famous female superheroes are DC?). I'm currently reading Demo, a brilliant comic by Brian Wood and Becky Cloonan about disenfranchised youths with certain superhuman abilities. I'd like to say it's all research for Matti, but really it's just for fun. I'm still having problems with Matti; I'm still not sure how to write it. I mean, I have a plot, I have characters, but how to stylistically do it justice, I can't figure it out. At least I know not to make my heroine scream "Noooo!" anytime she finds someone dead. That's just plain annoying.

Rut Be Gone!

I had a lovely birthday (thanks for the phone message, Mekon!) and am now feeling pretty chipper. I guess I was just depressed two days ago when I wrote that post, but a day off yesterday + sushi means that I'm feeling better today. Saw Men Who Stare At Goats last night, which was actually good (I thought I mightn't like it, after hearing it was a "military satire"). The cast were really strong, and the story simple and strangely optimistic, and it was amusing (not 'wet your pants' funny, but good).
I have just under 6,000 words to write before I reach 50,000 for NaNoWriMo, and my novel is almost finished. The banshees have bansheed, and my cast is one character lighter, but it feel good. I still don't think the middle is that exciting - I think if I were to write a second draft, I'd have to add an interesting and adrenaline-fuelled sub-plot to raise the stakes slightly.

So once again the cup is half full.

As soon as this is over, I'm going straight back to Inter Vivos. I have started reading it through, and am half-way through chapter two at the moment. It's really difficult to read it without wanting to take notes and mark it up, but I promised myself I'd read until the end without getting my pen out once before going back and dissecting it to pieces.
I have to admit, the beginning so far isn't very good. There are some good bits, but like the flowers in my really messy garden, they are being smothered by crap.
I got a rejection from Weird Tales about one of the stories I had sent off, so have sent it back out to another magazine, and hoping I'll be second time lucky for a sale.
I'm really hoping that this new year will be when it all takes off for me, so for now I have to keep slogging away.

Good Female Roles in Stories

My life is completely boring right now. At the weekend I did nothing but watch series 4 of How I Met Your Mother and play The Sims 2. Hardly worth telling the internet about, but I feel like I must update regularly or else what's the point?

Tonight I'm off to the library to try to finish Inter Vivos. I just want to write something where the plot of the story isn't "girl trying to get boy to like her". I do enjoy romantic comedy, but I've been getting a little bit annoyed that most films with a female protagonist tend to be about relationships. Now, Alien is an obvious example of a film with a strong heroine who doesn't spend the entire film wondering whether her crush will ask her out, but that part was famously written for a man before Sigourney Weaver was cast. Is that telling? Can anyone suggest some good non-horror movies that aren't about women bitching about men (or their lesbian crushes)?

Anyway, my heroine Nox is more concerned with the fact that she's murdered folk, rather than trying to win the heart of some handsome prince, so that's alright then.

Top Bum

Over the weekend, I watched Top Gun. Isn't it the most homoerotic film of all time? And Tom Cruise stabbing that woman with his tongue ("kissing"??!!) whilst backlight by blue light - how icky does that look? Don't think I had watched it all the way through since the early nineties, so had never noticed those things before.

Busy time at work coming up, not really looking forward to, but perhaps I can use it to become more focused with my time again. I know I keep saying it, but I really really want to get IV finished.

Finally - urgh, too hot and raining. My hair is now a ball of frizz.

Film Geekdom

Interesting Film and TV news:

1) New Ghostbusters. I'm glad it's not going to be a remake of the original starring Paul Rudd and Seth Rogan, et al, so I'm glad it's going to be a ghostbusters film with the originals in it, and hope they're getting back together to fight a new baddie. The "passing the torch" thing, well, I just don't want them to continue the franchise if the originals don't have anything to do with it. Especially as it'll probably be Zac Efron playing the grown-up Oscar. And I'm a little bit anti the 'all girl' ghostbusters idea Dan Akyroyd mentions, simply because Hollywood seems to believe that if a film has several female leads, then it has to a) be a love story b) involve a cat fight and c) involve said girls in their underwear/some pervy costume at some point during the film. Not really want I'd want from a Ghostbusters movie.

2) They are remaking Footloose starring a guy from Gossip Girl and possibly Hannah Montana. Eek.

I just don't think they can get away with doing a straight remake any more. Star Trek was great, and what they did was create an alternative dimension to set it in, therefore not shitting over the former TV show and films. I think Footloose 2009 will be a standard remake, but why? Is there any need to remake the classic that was pretty much perfect?

I have another pet peeve, and that's when sequels are basically remakes of the original, but with a different (less attractive/talented) lead and sometimes different location (Poison Ivy II, S Darko, The Rage) - especially when the events in the first film were so extraordinary that no way would that happen again.

I watched Dollhouse last night, and it was really intriguing. It doesn't have the same pizzazz that Buffy had - it's more grown-up, less wit and more action (well the first episode anyway), but I enjoyed it and will be watching it again. It posed more questions than it answered, which is a pretty good start to a series, so we'll see how it progresses. I've just got to remember that it's on, as the Sci Fi Channel isn't in my "On Demand" services I don't think.

I don't normally watch TV, so it's gonna be an experience having to tune into something every week and waiting patiently for the next episode. I used to watch The Big Bang Theory, but I think the schedulers moved its time at some point, and then I had no idea when it was on, so subsequently missed it. Am waiting for the second series to come out on DVD, and will watch it all that way instead. The future is "TV On Demand", definitely. Not sure what that will mean with regards to TV writing, etc. It'll be a nightmare, no doubt.