Archive > September 2007

An American Haunting (USA, 2006)

Avoid this film at all costs.
Actually, that’s a bit harsh. It’s not terrible but it’s just not very good. An American Haunting is a film version of the allegedly true events that took place in the early 19th century, apparently witnessed by President Andrew Jackson himself (although that doesn’t feature in the film). [...]

Continue reading

Madness and paranoia

I’m half way through writing a pitch document and it’s doing my head in. The pitch is for a scheme called Metlab which is a scriptwriting training course I recently found out about via Lucy’s blog. I wasn’t going to submit anything at first because I was working on material for short films [...]

Continue reading

Character Information

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it but I recently got the wife started on watching 24. We watched the first series at the start of last month and she’s just started on the second series this week. (From memory, I think series 2 is the weakest of the lot so far but [...]

Continue reading

Creep (UK, 2004)

Well, I said I wanted to watch it and now I have. Unfortunately, it wasn’t that good.
To be honest, I felt that what let it down mostly was the writing. The direction was perfectly sound but the writing felt a bit laboured and forced. Having said that, the film did get a [...]

Continue reading

Anatomy of a microshort Pt 2 – The Shoot

Most of this post is likely to be a rehash of this one from August. That pretty much outlines most of the lessons I learnt while filming Fairy Tale. But I thought I’d add a little more.
There were two maxims I kept in mind when planning the shoot:-
1. It’s only 60 seconds long [...]

Continue reading

Anatomy of a microshort Pt 1 – The Script

I was down the pub on Friday night and got asked why I bothered doing a minute long film. It’s a very good question and one I asked myself at the outset of doing “Fairy Tale”. I thought I’d discuss it here for reference.
Let’s start with the feature I’m working on. [...]

Continue reading

Marathon Training (Week 4/14)

Another awful week of training.
It started out well enough – a fast 5 miler on Monday, hampered only by my inability to go up the last hill because of tight calf muscles. Fortunately, the first 4.5 miles felt fast, flowing and free. I don’t know how there’s been such a turnaround [...]

Continue reading

Afraid of the dark

I’m still working on this pitch document for a feature screenplay.
I wasn’t going to – I was going to concentrate on shorts for a while and then revisit the script I wrote a while back. But things happen and my mind changes as frequently sa the wind. An opportunity has presented itself which [...]

Continue reading

Riesendummheit

There are days.
There are bad days.
There are fucking awful days.
There are fucking awful and expensive days.
Guess which type today was?

Continue reading

Priorities

Disappointingly, I’ve had to pull out of the Rat Race next weekend. I am gutted but I have other priorities which, um, take priority. There is always next year.
However, I will be putting what little free time I might have to good use by working on a pitch document for a feature film [...]

Continue reading

prev posts