Some thoughts about the 6 films we saw during the Gone Fishing seminar last week, starting with the obvious.
Gone Fishing
Gone Fishing is, in all honesty, a very good film and I really am not just saying that because it was the focus of the seminar or because Chris Jones is a nice guy. I hadn’t [...]
Category > Filmmaking
Gone Fishing Seminar: The Short Films
God-Emperor of City 17
I’ve been holding back from writing this post for a couple of weeks.
If you pick through the fetid archives of this blog, you’ll find circumstantial evidence that I am a big fan of the Half-Life series of games produced by Valve Software. Recently a short film got released onto the intertubes called “Escape From City [...]
The Future (Onwards and Upwards)
An extremely exhausting, unexpectedly film related weekend.
After going to the IMAX to see a midnight screening of Blade Runner and subsequenly getting about four hours sleep, I spent Saturday at Ealing Studios attending the second Gone Fishing Masterclass seminar given by Chris Jones (author of “Guerilla Filmmaker’s Handbook”). Chris was the writer, director and creative [...]
Twitter 2009
A couple of years ago I started a Twitter account. I didn’t really want to (as documented here) but I did (as documented here). In July ‘07, I used Twitter to track my progress over 100km during the Oxfam Trailwalker. That can be seen here. Note that there are only 8 tweets. I didn’t even [...]
Atomic Comedy: Whatever happened to AtomFilms?
I had a bit of a falling out with AtomFilms last year (maybe the year before) because they refused to display a video of “A Very English Fairy Tale” because of license infringement on the soundtrack. In fact I was using the music under a Creative Commons license and I also emailed the composer for [...]
Of plots and mindmaps
A new feature project appears to be starting out well. This maybe in part because it’s pretty much an adaptation and that means it’s fully formed. It’s by no means a strict adaptation because the original material is a) set nearly 100 years ago and I want to bring it up to date and [...]
30 Days And Nights
Is it possible to write, direct and edit a short film in 30 days?
The answer is, quite obviously, yes. Easily. I mean, you can do it in 48 hours as is evidenced from the plethora of “Make a film in 48 hour” type challenges that some festivals hold. The last time I planned to [...]
Memoirs of a former short film producer (Pt. 3)
I’ve vaguely committed to trying to get these three articles out (part 1 and part 2 being here) about my first experience as a producer so rather than leaving it standing, here’s the last part which is really the bit where I actually talk about how it all went. I don’t know if there’s [...]
…he said, wryly.
Have you ever read a screenplay where, at the beginning of a piece of dialogue, just under the characters name, there’s a bracketed phrase like, for example, “(under his breath)” or “(fear-induced autopilot)”¹? These parantheticals are often known as “wrylys” (or wrylies – not sure what the plural is) because, apparently, it’s very common [...]
A Novel Idea
I woke up this morning¹ with a thought rampaging around my head. Being quite alone, it made quite a lot of noise in there and try as I might, I couldn’t get it to shut up and I really really did need it to both shut up and get the fuck out of my [...]
