Archives: Work

This is the first week in a while that I’ve not had things scheduled in my diary for every day of the week. It was a nice change to look in the diary and see some blank spaces.

Somehow, though, it doesn’t feel like I’ve got much of a break – I’ve been so busy that I’ve left a lot of things neglected and so I’ve been on an enforced desk-bound catch-up mission all week.

That said, I did manage to get to the cinema last night to catch Gran Torino, Clint Eastwood’s new film, which I completely loved. I don’t know quite what it is about Eastwood that hits me, but all of his recent stuff since Million Dollar Baby has really grabbed me and totally absorbed me. He’s a truly masterful filmmaker and Gran Torino is his best for a while. Changeling was good, but felt a little bloated and over-long to my tastes. GT on the other hand is perfectly weighted, plays out along an arc that’s at once predictable and surprising – not an easy thing to manage in today’s world of more and more savvy film-goers.

Speaking of filmmaking, things may be starting to look interesting from a freelance standpoint. I’ve got a meeting today to discuss a project in Northampton which stems from a networking session last week, plus I’m in talks to shoot a “making-of” doc for a low-budget British movie that’s gearing up for pre-production at the moment, which is very exciting.

I’ve also just started work on a new screenplay which is, I think, my most commercial spec script that I’ve written so far. I’ve set myself a deadline of 1 April to have a finished first draft, after which I’m going to do a polish on an old script and the new one and start to shop them around companies and agents to see if there’s any interest.

And in between all of that, I’ve got my last 2 talks of my marathon session of 4 in 3 weeks coming up this Saturday and next. I promise I’ll try to blog about them to let you know how they go, since the previous talks I seem to have managed to gloss over entirely on here. If I get half a minute I’ll try to pop back on and at least update the entries for last week’s talks so you know to whom and about what I was speaking.

Although I’ve been doing lots of, frankly, really cool stuff, I’ve actually not enjoyed being as busy as I have been. It’s been non-stop for almost a month and I haven’t had chance to do the things I want to do – I’ve always felt like I’m constantly moving from one thing to the next without pausing for breath, which is something I don’t really want to turn into a habit as this new life should be all about enjoying it all.

So here’s hoping I can be more disciplined about saying “yes” and “no” to things and focus more on what I see as the things I most want to pursue. Sooner or later I’m going to have to make a decision on what I most want to do with myself, and the sooner I do that, the better for everyone, I think.

Hugest apologies for the lack of blogging – last week was completely manic, trying to squeeze in as much of my over-flowing inbox of work as I could before spending the weekend away in Bath with K’s ‘rents for their joint birthdays.

It was a totally fantastic time, but I was unable to fore-warn of a lack of blogging as it would have given the game away. The weekend, which was spent in a rented cottage just outside Bath in a lovely little village near Westbury along with three very good friends of the family, was a total surprise.

We took K’s ‘rents off to Longleat house for a tour, which her Mum believed was all that was happening, before she received instructions to pack for 3 days away. Arranging to travel in separate cars, we arrived with her best friend from the village back home in ours to surprise her. With the other friends traveling up from Devon stuck in roadworks, we frantically tried to delay the house tour for half-an-hour. Expecting to be told that it couldn’t be done, instead we were offered a private tour of the house for no extra charge – remarkable people at Longleat.

Despite the delay, we were still un-accompanied at 12.30 when our private showing of the great house began. It was a fascinating and mesmerising tour and I’d recommend it to anyone with an interest in history or historical houses – it’s gobsmacking. Half-way round, the staff were so unbelievably kind enough to bring the missing pair of our party up to join us when they arrived. Much surprise (although Mama D had guessed who the sixth and seventh of the party might turn out to be) and hugs/handshakes ensued before the very accommodating host could continue her tour.

Once we were done we all repaired to a local pub for a late lunch, after which we all waved goodbye to the each other before heading, in convoy, to Woodside Cottage to surprise them once again with their accommodation and the fact that all of us were, in fact, staying with them.

The evening was spent in a bit of a haze of trying to work out who was where (K and I being in the annex across the way), whether anyone wanted to eat anything (verdict: no, but cake will do nicely) and what we were up to the next day (eventual decision, whatever we wanted) before we all engaged in a frankly hilarious round of card games before taking ourselves to an early bed.

The next morning, to my surprise, I was awake before the house opposite, heading out on a paper run before breakfast. After a chilled out morning, K and I headed into Bath itself to catch up with a an old friend over lunch and a personalised tour of Bath, which included some very strange people reading poetry in a taxi and more gorgeous architecture than you could shake a stick at.

In the evening, after a brief afternoon nap, we all enjoyed dinner together before a dynamite game of Scattagories before crashing out.

Weirdly, I woke up on Sunday morning feeling absolutely awful. I’m not sure if I was over-heating and dehydrated or had eaten something disagreeable the previous day, but my head was pounding and I felt incredibly sick.

As the others all headed off to Lacock Village and Manor, I stayed in bed with K watching over me and ended up sleeping until gone 3pm, at which point I woke up feeling almost right-as-rain, save for a lack of energy from lack of food.

Another evening of fun-and-frolics was met with an early(ish) morning this morning, getting up to breakfast, pack and leave by 10 am. As the others began their trek home, K and I decided to take a more leisurely turn back to MK, stopping to catch up on Lacock (where I discovered they’d used the Abbey to shoot portions of the Hogwarts cloisters in the first two Harry Potter films), taking pics and enjoying tea in the oh-so-English tea-shops that abound in pretty little villages around the country.

On the road home from Lacock we got minorly lost around Cirencester before coming through the most beautiful village/town we’ve been through on all of our travels. The name escapes me, but I want to live there.

Coming through Bicester on the way home, we stopped at Bicester Village, which K had never seen. After wandering the stores deciding that we can’t afford anything there (sorry, we didn’t like the look of anything there), we jumped in the car and headed home, only stopping for the briefest of traditional post-tour stops at Borders and then a quick meal at a fantastically-valued but chronically unfriendly pub before getting home around 7pm, unpacking our things, changing the bed, showering, blogging and – now – going to bed.

It’s been a great weekend and it’s been really nice to totally remove myself from work for a few days. Now it’s back to the grindstone and on with the first of my 3 talks in 10 days.

This is about the first time I’ve had to sit and blog for over a week now (well, in fact, since I last updated). What with my bro jetting off to scarier climbs, K going back to Uni after a fitful snow-induced break right after getting back to Uni after an enormous Christmas break and my attempts to get not one but two new companies off the ground, it’s been a pretty busy time.

It’s been a great time, though – although I’ve been busy I’ve also had time to enjoy myself and have a lot of fun. Last weekend, for example, I took my more local Godson to Wendover Woods to do the high-ropes course which will remain nameless for my lack of desire to see them get any random, free, Google-based publicity.

After booking well in advance for one of the only days they’re open during winter, especially as a b’day pressie for li’l R, we hiked a mile up the hill into the woods only to discover that not only were they not open, they’d not even finished putting the course back together after the winter.

Not wanting to be deterred from the idea of a day of fun, we half-walked, half-skated around the woods for a while before drowning our sorrows in a big pile of chocolate at Rumsey’s, the awesome little Chocolaterie in Wendover village itself. In the evening, we carried on the frivolities at the Old Green Man in one of the Brickhills (I never know which one I’m in apart from Bow, but that’s just because a had a friend who lived there).

I’ve also been hard at work preparing a website for the new companies. LLTGL‘s resident IT-guru and website ubermeister Tom (of nowhereland fame) has been full of expertly-helpful ubertips to make it look shiny and cool, although now I have the problem of writing the copy to sell myself to people, which presents more of a challenge.

We also had a hugely successful tranche of Valentine’s Cake Bakes for LLTGL, which has been a great way to see all our supporters get truly energised about helping us out. Plus, let’s face it, everyone loves a bit of cake.

I’m now so tired from the early-starts and busy days that I’m struggling to recall all the things that I’ve done, but suffice it to say it’s been manic. And fun.

Oooh, and I finally – after over a decade of dreaming, hoping and wishing – got hold of my Equity card. I’m now a fully paid-up member of the only union that’s ever appealed to me. Somehow I don’t think it’s going to be the pass-card to fame and fortune on the world stage like I used to believe it was, but hey – it’s a life goal realised.

Not like that.

After a fun night of snowballing on Monday, Tuesday started slowing me down a little with a scary kind of feeling that I had something brewing. As it turns out, I did, but it was only a cold.

It feels quite good to sit here at a keyboard and type “only” a cold – as one of my friends put it in a text on Thursday, a simple cold used to be a serious issue to me. It would have me worried, K worried, my parents worried. And we’d ride it out and get in touch with my team at Oxford and sort out some antibiotics to treat the inevitable chest-infection that would have followed.

Now, having a cold means I feel a bit rubbish for a couple of days. I love colds like that.

Still, it does have its drawbacks. Since developing my cold on Tuesday night, I appear to have returned to a previous life as a hardcore insomniac. Since Tuesday night into Wednesday, I’ve been sleeping appallingly. Indeed, I sit in the lounge writing this now at nearly 4am and I’m still not feeling anywhere near tired enough for sleep. But during the day I’m becoming Zombie-fied.

This week has been a fortuitous week to be stuck with insomnia, however, since the snow has meant any work I did have lined up has been cancelled and, as of Thursday, we’ve been properly snowed in. I say “properly” but that’s not 100% accurate. What I mean is that we can’t drive anywhere, which, in Milton Keynes, the city modelled on American-style grid-road systems, is a bit of an obstacle.

Yesterday I did manage a wander down to the shops at the bottom of the road, which is somewhere in the region of a mile’s walk, and discovered that traipsing through snow is incredibly hard work. Coupled with the cold, it left me exhausted. I was certain that it was going to help me sleep better in the evening, but no dice. Another hour of lying in bed tossing and turning lead to me getting up and staying up until I finally all-but-passed-out in the late-early morning hours.

So now I’m sat back in the lounge watching 4am tick ever closer, ploughing through more of the extras on the new Lord of the Rings Extended Edition Box Set I picked up from the now-defunct Zavvi in CMK and charging myself up with the drive and passion to go out and make at least one of the short film scripts I have lying on my desk just waiting to be tackled.

I just need to find a cast…

LOVED the snow today. Kati was off Uni as there was no transport whatsoever in London, which was pretty cool. I shot over to the ‘rents very gingerly this morning, trying to catch Gramps before he left for home, but failed as he wanted to get going in case the weather got worse.

Stayed and had breakfast (I left in a hurry) and coffee, then played a little Wii with my bro before dropping him at the station.

Worked all afternoon on various bits and pieces, but since most people work in London it limited an amount of what I could get done.

K and I ventured out to Tesco to grab some dinner stuff since our cupboards were Old Mother Hubbard’s and while we were there we had a little too much fun with snowballs and decided rather than going home we’d go play. We phoned K’s bro nearby, but the kids were showered and changed and not allowed out again, so we phoned S&S instead and decided that we could still play because we’re grown-ups, which means we can do what we like.

So after swinging by KFC for a snow-bound dinner, we headed to the S&S house, wolfed our food down and headed for the play-park, where the game of Snowball Chicken was promptly invented while K built a snowman.

I ran around a lot and felt a little bit sick from bending down constantly to gather snow up, but that’s OK because I’m a grown-up. I also broke the back of the snowman’s head off by mistake when I was trying to make him a better eye socket. That wasn’t quite so OK as K had spent a long time on him and it was bad. I did repair him, though.

We meandred back to the house and tried to make a smiley face from snowballs on the wall, but it looked more like the wall had a nasty case of albino chicken pox. Oh, well.

We got back home, showered and changed and settled on the sofa to catch up with a ton of stuff we’ve got recorded on Sky+, watching A Short Stay In Switzerland, the BBC film about assisted suicide based on a true story. It’s a cracking film with great performances but an unfotunately clunky script.

Suitably teared-up, we head to bed around 11pm and I sack out pretty quickly.

After over a week of editing, re-cutting, designing and burning DVDs I finally finish the Creative Partnerships project I’ve been working on for the best part of 4 months now (not constantly, you understand…), spending almost all of Monday printing and sticking DVD labels onto the discs. Note to self: must get DVD-printer.

I’m immensely proud of the DVD, even if it’s not what the original intention was at the start of the project. Due to the nature of drama projects and the unpredictability of working with 5- and 6-year-old children, the whole project changed and shape-shifted into something entirely different. I’d love to put it up here to show people but since, technically, it’s not mine to show and also – more importantly – given the fact that it’s got minors in whose parents haven’t consented to internet exploitation, I can’t. You’ll just have to imagine it being brilliant or come over to my place and watch it.

It’s been an interesting test for me to make my first own-steam short documentary that I’d have to piece together into a coherent whole for other people to see and take home. Up to now all my filmmaking has been for Live Life then Give Life which is great and brilliant experience, but it’s a very simple, single-camera interview set-up which doesn’t take a huge amount of skill. So to be responsible for something from opening image to final cut is really something special.

What made it all the more worth it was the reaction of the kids when we screened it for them in their classroom. They all loved it and were even air-guitaring along to the montage soundtrack and pointing each other out all the way through it, which was lovely to see. From what I gathered the staff liked it, too, which is always nice.

After the school meet and an evaluation Mocha with Suze, I got back to the office to discover a message from a media-man from a very well known film company looking to partner with LLTGL on a DVD campaign coming up shortly. I can’t go into too much detail as it’s still being discussed, but it is potentially a very exciting development for LLTGL.

In what’s turning out to be a great week for LLTGL, we have also had an offer of a major advertising deal which we need to address but could see us putting the word out to over 700,000 at one time if all the pieces fall into place. We’ll see.

To top it all off, it would be remiss of me not to plug the LLTGL Valentine’s Day Cake Bake, which we’re holding to raise some funds to continue all the work we’ve been doing and expand our operations in line with our current business plan. I won’t bore you with the details, but if you want to help us out and you’re a fan of cake (and let’s face it, who isn’t?) then head straight here to find out about it. Or you can find us on Facebook, too.

I apologise for the lack of updates after my not-too-rubbish start to the year with regular updates etc. I have, however, been somewhat preoccupied over the last couple of weeks with various mentally-busy work-related things, including producing a DVD of a project I worked on last year and completing a First aid course for work at the Grove.

Most excitingly of all, though, is the fact that I’ve been settling in to my new role as Chairman of Live Life Then Give Life, something of which I’m very proud. Our former Chairman, Emma, has felt it necessary to stand down, although she will, thankfully, be staying on as a much-valued trustee. At a meeting two weeks ago, the rest of the board of trustees saw fit to elect me into post as Chairman and I’ve been pretty much rushed off my feet ever since.

I clearly chose precisely the wrong two weeks to step up into the new role, having spent my first week in post working 10-4 on First Aid every day and my second week locked in my home editing suite to cut, design and finalise the DVD for the schools project I worked on with Suze last term. There’s a showing of the vid at the school on Tuesday morning, so it’s the usual deadline-getting-your-butt-into-gear deal as I rush to make sure it all looks tip-top.

Despite the fact that it’s taken me a lot longer than I expected, I’m really proud of the result – it’s going to be a great representation of the project and a great show real for both my work and for Suze’s Catalyst Theatre Arts, the company she runs with her sister, who throw a lot of work my way so it’s nice to be able to give them some marketing material out of it, too.

So it’s not been the best of weeks to try to get to grips with all the extra bits and bobs that go with being a Chairman as opposed to a trustee, but I’ve already seen a whole new side to the charity and what we do. I’m also delighted to see the way our two new trustees have slotted in to the team. The problem with having a team that’s as close-knit as the Live Life Then Give Life team are is that when you introduce new people to the equation it can be difficult for them to find their place and not feel out-of-the-loop or left out. But the current board of trustees have really taken to the new guys and have been working brilliantly with them from Day One, which is such a great feeling not just for me but for eveyone.

Hopefully now things are on a slightly more even keel, I’ll be keeping the updates coming through on a more regular basis. Unless work gets manic again, I guess…

I tried my hardest to get up early today, but instead succeeded only in rolling out of bed at 8, which gave me enough time to sort myself out and have breakfast before heading over to the Grove for a bit of new term training ahead of the re-jigged Youth Theatre turn.

I have to say I was somewhat surprised to find that there was a new Youth Theatre leader their, who will be taking the Tuesday night sessions that I’m also working from now on, in addition to my Sunday sessions from last term. I was disappointed to find out at a meeting of the leaders, although I suppose Christmas is a hard time to contact people about things.

We nevertheless had a really productive day, going over all the do’s and don’ts and whys and wherefores of leading Youth Theatre sessions, as well as a little role-play (natch) and then some hard-core term-planning in the afternoon.

We didn’t get as much done in the afternoon as I think The Boss wanted us to, but it was important for us to take the time to feel each other out and put ideas forward. It was hard, though, because having never worked with two of the people there, you don’t really know where your boundaries are in discussing ideas and having disagreements, so it was a little “eggshells” for most of the session, although we did manage to hammer out a general direction for it all.

While I’m at the Theatre, K’s having a terrible day back home, due to some careless editing in the local rag which leaves her incredibly upset. I head home as soon as I can to pick her up from her ‘rents, where she’s escaped to in order to hide from the world (her avoidance method of choice).

I pick her up and we head home, where I rustle up some grub and we eat before veg’ing out on the sofa in front of some Sky+ TV before heading to bed around 10ish.

My alarm wakes me just after 7am, so I tell it to go away for a while and eventually rouse myself around 7.30ish, where upon I take my Monday morning tablet (the weekly not-so-nice one) and head into work.

The great thing about being a freelancer and working for yourself is that “going back to work” entails turning the computer on and checking emails. It’s a hard life.

I sit at my desk and I rapidly fly through 6 pages of my new script and, today’s quota reached, I put it away for now – silly as it sounds, it’s important not to over-stretch yourself when writing. Meet your quota, whatever you set for yourself, but if it’s not flowing, don’t force it just to get more pages done.

With that out the way, I get on with catching up on the world outside by checking my usual list of industry websites to get the skinny on all the Christmas/New Year deals and rumours.

Once I’m all caught up, I hit my Live Life Then Give Life email account and immediately log in to sad news. Luckily, no one has died (as this is the kind of sad news we get all too often at LLTGL), but I can’t really go into detail about it at the moment as it’s still being resolved.

Once I’m caught up on the not-as-many emails as I’d expected, I set about the rest of my day, although it’s now so long ago, I’m struggling to remember what I did, so suffice it to say I was busy for nearly all of the day on various bits and pieces of work-related gumf.

Ok, so I know I’m WAY behind on this at the moment, but I will endeavour to update a few of the days from last week sometime tomorrow or maybe today when I get back from my final shift at the Theatre – yes, I’m leaving.

It’s been a great week and I’ve got through a lot of cool stuff, but right now I’m in a mini-actress crisis for the short I’m shooting over the weekend.  I’ve now had two actresses attach themselves then bow out, through no fault of their own, but it’s left me a little high-and-dry with a shoot scheduled for this Saturday and Sunday.

Did some camera tests on Monday, which was great and I’ll try to blog about later.

The most significant thing is, ironically, something I can’t talk about at the moment, but I have the potential opportunity to produce one of the most exciting projects – no, scratch that, THE most exciting project – that has ever wandered through my vision.

I honestly can’t say anything about it now as I’m in really early negotiations and it could easily (too easily for my liking) all fall apart and not happen, so all I’ll say is that it’s a major documentary on an event of next year.

I promise I’ll be back to fill you in on the last week or so soon.