Archives: Work

There was I hotly anticipating my return to work this week and getting really rolling on Remembrance when I was flattened again. This time not by small children, but by some kind of a stomach bug. It’s left me totally wiped out and exhausted for the last 3 days and I’m only just getting back up to speed. Sucks quite a bit.

I have to confess I’ve been a little worried about things. If you’ll remember, last year’s CMV infection started out with weird pains in my chest and stomach, so a recurrence of similar and apparently inexplicable symptoms has rattled my nerve a little bit. I’m sure it’ll be fine, but I think after so long of being well my mind is maybe a little pre-programmed into expecting something bad to be due me. A stupid thought process, to be sure, but one that’s hard to avoid after spending 25 of my 27 years as a seriously ill person.

Anyway, the upshot of all this is that I’ve achieved nothing at all this week, which is obviously sub-optimal. Added to which, since I’ve been doing nothing but lay in bed all day, I’ve got into a horrible sleeping pattern and am up until past 3 in the mornings at the moment – never a great thing for aiding recovery.

I’m due in to my GP surgery tomorrow morning for some blood tests and I have a scheduled appointment at Harefield on Monday so hopefully this will all either have cleared up by then or we’ll be able to tell exactly what it is.

In the meantime, the one thing I have managed to do is to draw up a shortlist of DP candidates, who I’ll be meeting next week to have a chat with and go from there. It’s exciting stuff, I just wish I had more energy for it right now.

As you may have seen from my Twitter feed I spent a large chunk of yesterday afternoon in a Costa drink cappuccino and shot-listing the flick. It’s always an exciting time when you first sit down to work out what pieces of the jigsaw you need in order to make it as great as you want it to be. It’s been on my “To Do” list for ages, but the enforced side-line in the coffee-house yesterday was the perfect time.

What I’ve come away with looks fairly ambitious, but do-able. It’s also likely to change dramatically as I see what we’re likely to be able to do in locations, get to know the cast and what they’re capable of and take notes from my crew on what they think we need.

And speaking of the crew, yesterday the first crew call for Remembrance went out on Mandy.com looking for a Director of Photography. It was due to go out on Shooting People, too, but annoyingly it got “vetted” as their sub-editor clearly didn’t read it properly, which was frustrating as I was hoping to get some responses in before the weekend, when I’m likely to be pretty tied-up.

In addition to the DP, we’re also looking for a Producer to come on board and handle logistics while I focus on the creative and I’m looking to work with a Storyboard Artist as soon as possible to start getting my visual ideas down on paper, since I can’t draw for toffee. If you think you might suit any of these posts, go to the website for more information and get in touch.

Don’t forget, you can still come on board as a Co-Producer or Associate Producer without having to do any work at all – to claim your credit, click here.

After all the to-ing and fro-ing, the waiting, the build-up, the Big Secret Project is finally here.

Oscar

BAFTA

As many of you will know, a good friend of mine set out to make a short film when I was waiting for my transplant. Gone Fishing eventually reached the final 7 in the shortlist for the Oscars, some going for a little film made with the help of friends, colleagues and people he didn’t even know at the start of the project. Shot on 35mm film and finished to the highest of professional standards, Chris’ film has won far too many international festivals for me to count. If you visit his blog, you’ll be able to find out all about it and the festivals.

By far the biggest thing to come out of Gone Fishing for Chris, though, is the launch-pad it has given him into the film industry. From taking meetings in LA to signing with an agency and manager, Chris is living the life he (and I) has always dreamed of.

When I sat at home an mulled over my options for how to get where I want to go when I don’t know how long I have to achieve my goals, Gone Fishing and Chris’ experience thrust themselves into my consciousness. I’ve always wanted to be a filmmaker, I’ve always wanted to make films. It’s that simple. So why sit around thinking about it when you can actually go out and do it?

And given the blessing I’ve been given – the most wonderful gift any person or family can give to anyone else – it seems even more important to push myself to achieve the very best that I can. No middle ground, no soft-peddalling. If I’m going to do this, I’m reaching as high as I can. As a wise man once said, “Reach for the stars and you may just reach the ceiling, reach for the ceiling and you will barely get off the ground.”

Every journey, as they say, starts with a single step. And this is it, “Remembrance”.

Remembrance is a 15 minute short film about war, family and memory through the eyes of three generations of a single British family. It’s chock full of action, carefully-crafted dialogue and packs a real emotional punch. It’s designed to showcase all of the things I can do as a director and writer, working with big names (if things go to plan), working with children and young actors, directing action scenes and working with stuntmen and stunt arrangers as well as working on a smaller scale with intimate dialogue scenes.

As I said when I first sat down to write about it: this one’s good. It’s really good. And I believe it can go all the way. I intend to fully document the process on here for everyone to read and for filmmakers to learn from and I will shortly be enlisting you all for your help in creating this piece of historic cinema. It may not rock the entire world of film, but it will turn my world upside down and become a launching point not just for my career, but hopefully for everyone involved.

Keep checking back for progress reports and on Friday I’ll tell you all how you can help.

Apologies for the lack of formal announcement of the new project – this week has been a whirlwind of catching-up after getting put back and slowed down by the weekend in Manchester. I’m sure as I push forward with TinyButMighty I’ll get more used to fitting turn-around time into the schedule (and my diary), but as you can see from the completed Team Ethan doc below, I’m perfectly OK with being behind if it means I get to do something to honour this little fighter and his truly remarkable family.

[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/4774355 w=500&h=375]

I spent the weekend with Live Life Then Give Life Advocate Holly Shaw (also star of Channel 4’s Battlefront programme
last Thursday) and Vice-Chair Emily Thackray in Warrington. We were there to shoot an interview with Holly and also to cover the Team Ethan participation in the BUPA Great Manchester 10k on Sunday morning.

The family of Baby Ethan, who sadly lost his fight just a few weeks post-transplant earlier this month, are truly amazing people. Despite burying his son just last week, dad Stu lead the team around the centre of Manchester, registering a time of 65 minutes for the 6-mile-plus run.

Even more inspirational was the enormous turn out of family and friends at their LLTGL fundraiser in the evening to bring the events of the day and the recent weeks to an emotional but uplifting close.

In the end they raised a phenomenal £5,900 for LLTGL between the online fundraising on their justgiving page and including over £3000 raised on the night in the room. We were all humbled and privileged to be there and experience such an amazing display of mutual support.

The video from the weekend will be up on the LLTGL website this week and if you want to donate to Team Ethan, you can do so here.

It’s interesting how you end up perceiving time when your wake up calls move all over the place. I was up at 7am again today, which feels like an early start. When K is in the middle of a uni semester, though, it’s actually an hour-and-a-quarter’s lie in if we get to wake up at 7am. Strange.

Anyway, it was another early start this morning to get to the Grove for a short follow up to the first aid course in January to learn the specifics of paediatric first aid. We all expected the course to be a full day, but it turned out to be only a half-day, which was a nice surprise, although equally frustrating as I’d just paid £4 to park when I could have spent £1.50.

Still, post-course I headed straight home and settled down to my Arts Bursary application. MK Community Foundation offers an annual grant of £10,000 to an artist to help them develop their practice and create opportunities to earn their income from their art forms. The application calls for examples of your work, so while I had finished DVDs of my film work and some really nice photography to give them, I realised hastily that I needed to do a re-draft of one of my screenplays for my writing submission, as well as a polish on two others.

This afternoon, then, was dedicated to pushing on with the redrafting of the script. It has to be said there weren’t a huge number of wholesale changes to the script, but there was a lot of re-jigging and dialogue revision to be done. I worked on it solidly from 2pm to around 7pm with a couple of breaks, then settled on the sofa with K to chill and watch some TV.

When K called it a night I was back at the computer, getting to around halfway through the screenplay by the time I called it a night around 2am. Late night writing suits me, but it’s a pain in the proverbial if you’ve got things to do the next day. Luckily, I don’t have a heap of stuff on tomorrow, other than forging on through the redraft and application.

Crazy-busy day today. After the late finish last night, I was up at 7am this morning with just about enough wakefulness to throw myself in the shower, down some breakfast and jump in the car to get to the Royal for 8.30.

Once there I ran through the video cues with the DSM and made sure they all worked, inserting a few extra elements as we came across things that didn’t quite follow. Then the cast arrived and we set to work on a full technical run through, where I found myself doing my usual tech work of running around like a madman sorting all the extra little bits and bobs to make things work nicely and seamlessly.

Come 1pm we broke for lunch and I left the Theatre, heading back home with enough time to grab a sarnie before jumping back in the car and heading to the Grove for the first Youth Theatre session of the new term.

With the two Grove workshops dispatched and a couple of minor incidents dealt with, I was back at the wheel and headed North as quickly as legally possible (and possibly a little quicker) to get back to the Royal for the 8pm curtain-up on the first performance of Vikings and Darwin.

It went fantastically well, especially considering I’d not been there for the dress and the immediate audience reaction was brilliant, as was the feedback from the party of suits from the National. They came to see the show a few weeks ago in a scratch performance to judge whether it could go to play the festival at the National (sadly deciding “no” the following week), but commented on just how far the show had come.

I escaped the Royal around 9.30pm and was back home within the hour, with about enough time to chill out with K for a while in front of Hell’s Kitchen, to which she’s become addicted and I’ve found myself being drawn into as well. After that, it was an early(ish) bed for another early start in the morning.

Spent the vast majority of the day/evening today back in the auditorium of the Royal Theatre in Northampton where we were running the technical rehearsal of Vikings and Darwin, the Youth Theatre show for the RNT’s New Connections festival.

I can’t describe how great it felt to be back in the Theatre and working on something.

I had the morning off, which I spent catching up on piles of work which were still demanding my attention, then had a huge drama with the file I was delivering to the Royal. Somehow the PowerPoint presentation that was being used to facilitate the projection had stopped recognising and playing the video. Cue two hours of mad scrambling to-and-fro between computers, re-encoding video to try to get it to be accepted by stupid, stupid, stupid PPT. I profoundly hate PPT. but what can you do? It’s by far the easiest way to control projection when it’s not running as a full movie, but need prodding for each new element.

Crisis averted, I arrived at the Theatre about 4pm and settled in to a seat to watch the lighting plotting session that was in full-flow whilst we waited for the projection screen to arrive and be hung.

As soon as it was up, we got to work making everything fit, then the cast arrived in the early evening and we began running through it, making the necessary adjustments and changes as we were going.

The cast departed around 9.30pm and we carried on plotting and working through the cues until 10.45, at which point I escaped back home, getting back at about 11.30 and taking myself almost directly to bed for a 7am start the next day.

I am now officially in recovery following my first full week’s work for, well, ages.

Although I’m frequently busying myself with many different things, most of the are done from home in the study and involve writing, planning or other such creative-type endeavours. This week has been all about graft. If you count workshopping as graft – it’s not building a house or anything, but it’s chuffing tiring.

Over the course of four days I’ve been working alongside my usual Youth Theatre co-conspirator with a group of 6-11 year-olds to teach them a little about the theatre, some performances skills and putting together a short performance with which to entertain their parents this afternoon at the en of thei week’s work.

I have to confess to having been mildly trepitdatious of the project before it began, having had such a hard 10-week term with this age group in my Tuesday sessions, but the week’s been a dream. The group are all fantastic, all keen and eager and willing to learn and absorb things.

We’ve got through so much stuff in the last four days – more, in fact than we got through in an entire term with their contemporaries up to now. They’ve been brilliant fun and really entertained us while we’ve worked with them. Being able to have a laugh with your groups is so important to creating a good working atmosphere in any theatrical workshop setting, whether it be Youth Theatre, short projects or professional rehearsals.

It’s been pretty tiring and a real test of my stamina, but I’ve impressed myself with my ability to stick with it all day. Most of the week, it’s really hit me on the way home and I’ve been a bit of a vegetable when I’ve got in, but I’ve absolutely loved being able to stay the course all day.

This was driven home to me more than ever at Holly’s Donor Drinks on Tuesday (read more about them here) I was chatting to Emily’s mum and pointing out the fact that I’d just done a full day’s work then steamed home to jump on a crappy train to bring myself down to London to spend all evening at a drinks reception, followed by a late train home that got me in just before 11pm for bed and up for work the next morning. That’s something I’d never have dreamed of being able to do.

It’s strange working with a group of young people and looking at them with their whole lives ahead of them thinking that I’m so amazingly blessed just to be in the same room as them. And all thanks to the generosity of my donor and their family for taking the time to talk about their wishes and sign the Organ Donor Register.

Up again around 8am – second lie-in in a row! – and ran K down to nursery before popping in to see a friend who’s right at the end of her pregnancy and trying desperately not to let Baby come along yet. She was feeling awful today and really struggling, but she’s almost full term and there shouldn’t be any issues, which is something I tried to reassure her of.

I ran home quickly before popping down to the nursery to film an interview with K and the nursery manager for her course, which she then has to come home and edit into something coherent for her tutor to observe her clinical practice. Or something.

Had a look around the nursery, too, which is absolutely lovely. It’s a private nursery just down the road from where we live and it’s so beautifully set out with so many stimuli for the children. I dropped in on the babies (3-18 months) who were all unbelievably cute and gorgeous. The nursery itself is a large private house that’s been converted for use and the back garden is jam-packed with awesome play equipment which really let’s the kids throw themselves around and have fun.

Popped home again (lots of popping today, clearly) for half-an-hour before going back to collect K and coming home to polish up the multi-media stuff for the Royal’s scratch performance tonight, when I’ll finally get chance to see the whole piece as one and work a little on the timing of the various elements.

The majority of the afternoon was spent between Photoshop and Final Cut Pro, making logos and composites in the former and editing together a montage of war footage in the latter, all of which went pretty quickly and easily, to my surprise. I wasn’t sure I’d get it all done for the rehearsal/performance tonight, but in the end I did it fairly comfortably, which I was really chuffed with.

Headed to Northampton and dropped K at her appointment, then went on to catch up with a couple of friends I’ve not seen in ages. Suze, who I’ve worked with extensively for nearly 8 years, gave me some really good ideas of how to try to engage the Youth Theatre groups we’ve been struggling with recently, which I’m hoping I’ll be able to put into practice over the next term to try to pull the young people into the sessions and get them to engage.

After a quick coffee and catch-up, I moved on to the scratch performance, which started a little late but was hugely useful in working out how and when my pieces can slot in most unobtrusively, in order to best support the work that the group are doing on the stage.

Late start meant late finish again, getting away from the Royal around 9pm, which was quite a bit later than I’d wanted to get out, then picked K up from her bro’s house where she was babysitting while our niece was out with them for her birthday meal. I did get to see J, though, to wish her a happy birthday, which was really nice because I wasn’t expecting to see her.

Dinner, then, was incredibly late, getting home as we did around 11pm, which then meant I wasn’t getting to sleep until well after midnight as I was wide awake from the food. Ho hum. At least I get a proper lie-in, veg-out session tomorrow morning. Bliss.