Wormwood is the title of the horror short that I wrote the first draft of back in, um, September or something. Back then it was called “In the dark of the night” which is actually the title I use for most things that don’t have a title - my feature draft was called that at first too. It’s now time to go back and revisit the first draft, make copious notes and amendments and thrash out a second draft.

Making the film is likely to be tricky. For a start, I have no money (all donations gratefully accepted!). For a second, the script so far is quite ambitious: it so far contains crowd scenes, multiple locations and special effects. Fortunately I wrote the locations as being places I know around where I live which is a good thing but because there are quite a lot, there’s going to be a considerable amount of travelling and the schedule is going to be quite hectic. However, that’s a problem I’ll deal with later on. My main concern is the technology. I’d like this to be fairly good quality but I will obviously be restricted to digital because of cost. I could use my own mini-DV camera but I’d prefer to hire something like a Canon XL-1S (used to shoot 28 Days Later) or even the HD equivalent but there’s that money issue. I’m not that good at blagging to be able to get to use one for free.

The main challenge, however, is the timeline. I want to submit this film to a festival - primarily Frightfest in August, the submission deadline for which is June 1st. That sounds like plenty of time but not when you consider that from middle of April onwards I’m going to be on hatchling duty so my own personal deadline is somewhere around the 13th of that month which means I need to shoot and edit it in March and get the pre-production done in February. Considering I originally planned this for the 2 Days Later “Make a film in 48 hours” competition, this should surely be more than enough time.

Think I’ll be working on the script tonight!