Herding words again...

It's four months since I finished my 'Bourne' style short, and I've found myself mired in devlopment on my next projects.  Partly because I have too many several different ideas on the go right now.

I'm keen to crack on and shoot something longer, with the goal being feature length, and I have two different ideas for genre films that would be suitable for the niche-channels like syfy or horror.  Provided they don't go out of business with the recession of course!  I have two different scripts I am developing towards that goal, but they still require a great deal of work to get beyond the first-draft stage.

Jumping straight into a feature length would be a big risk, especially as I also need to develop my interior lighting skills, so it makes sense to try a smaller project that uses lights.

I also need to prove my pipeline for audio recording.  I wasn't happy with the results from my DAT walkman on the 'bourne' short, and I have upgraded to a digital recorder which I need to test properly.

So, I intend to make at least another two short films this year, and I have been working on the script and planning for the first of these, for which I will be concentrating on interior lighting and shooting multi-camera dialogue.


Project Tacoma

This will be a slightly longer film than my last one, the script for Tacoma is running to ten pages, with a lot of talking, and at least one simple vfx sequence to add a bit of intertest.

The goal is to shoot within the next two months, so I need to get my skates on, otherwise spring will arrive and I will lose the dark and overcast weather that I want.


Project Lotide

The second short film for this year will have a different purpose.

If I were to set one goal for myself with a short film, it would certainly be to try and win best short in at least one competition.

I feel like I can achieve the visual quality I need, but the missing piece is the content.  Festival winners seem to fall into a very different catagory from the kind of films I usually make, winning festival films generally get by with less ninjas, hitmen and zombies that my projects.

So I've also been putting some thought into what kind of short would be best suited to festivals, I tend towards the more commercial end of things when I come up with an idea, but clearly a more arthouse sensibility would be better for the film festival market.

I think I have a good idea for this project and Lotide will be quite different from the kind of films I have made before, not least of all because it will feature only a single line of dialogue.



I will update on both of these projects as they develop.

Living in the future!

2010 is here and still no flying cars, although plenty of areas in the city look grim enough to stand in for the citadels of almost any cinematic dystopia of the last fifty years.

One of this years projects will be an update of a student project I made almost twenty years ago (doesn't seem that long, but it is). I plan to try and reference some of the locations used in films like 'Clockwork Orange' which was shot in several local landmarks and public buildings.

Right now I am working on my next project. Final submission for the local film festival is at the end of February, so I'm working towards having at least one submission ready for that. The theme of the festival is 'Passion' and I've come up with an idea that should fit nicely with that. I always find it difficult to get ideas, and having a theme actually made it a lot easier for me to come up with an idea. The only question is whether my idea fits wholly into the 'Passion' theme and doesn't overlap too much into 'Love' or 'Lust' which are closely linked. Time will tell if I have chosen well!

The other project would be entered in the mobile-phones category, where all the entries have to be short (1min or less) films and they need to be filmed on mobile. I loved the old Pixel-Vision film 'Another Girl, Another Planet' and this could be an opportunity to do something similar, deliberately using a really bad quality video camera to shoot a film. I would plan to shoot it as if on a high quality camera, lights, tripods, tracks and all the rest, just with a tiny and deliberately poor quality mobile phone as the camera.

Should be an interesting few weeks ahead as I get the shoot organised.