I am terrible at reading at the best of times so when this book arrived from amazon and I saw the tiny font size and thickness of the book I never thought I'd ever finish it, however to my surprise I could not put it down. By the end of it I felt I had gone on a spiritual journey of enlightenment. Not only had it educated me in the many important works of storytelling throughout the ages but it also showed me how fundementally important storytelling is to the human race and that without it we would not survive. I insist that anyone that is serious about telling stories in whatever form MUST read this book!
"An enormous piece of work, not really one book at all but at least three... nothing less than the story of all stories." Ian Hislop, editor of Private Eye
"This is a truly important book, an accolade often bestowed and rarely deserved in our modern age." Dame Beryl Bainbridge
"This is literally an incomparable book, because there is nothing to compare it with. It goes to the heart of man's cultural evolution through the stories we have told since storytelling began. It illuminates our nature, our beliefs and our collective emotions by shining a bright light on them from a completely new angle. Original, profound, fascinating - and on top of it all, a really good read." Sir Antony Jay, co-author of Yes, Minister
The Infectious Imagination Of Henry Bramble is a new short film idea that I came up with off the back of a filmmaking summer school workshop I ran last year. It was inspired by my impending fatherhood having suddenly realised that although we wanted a girl, we could quite easily have a boy. I wrote the character of Henry Bramble based on the kind of boy I imagined we would have. As it turned out we had a baby girl, so I guess this story is now dedicated to the son I never had.
I developed the script over four weeks while working as an usher at The Maidstone Crown Court. There is so much waiting around in court due to legal arguments that I could get at least a couple of hours writing in a day. When I finished I let a few film people read it and by their feedback I quickly realised I had come up with another brilliant short film idea (the other being The Happiness Thief), that could potentially put me back on the map in terms of my directing career. However I was a little stumped as to how to get it made in a recession, especially as it was so ambitious and required a completely CGI character.
I knew pretty much all the shorts funding had stopped due to the the closure of The UK Film Council, but I sent the script to Screen South anyway, in the hope they may know of a shorts scheme I was unaware of. To my utter surprise they told me they had plans for a new Innovative Shorts scheme that would be much bigger than their largest Digital Shorts award. The scheme sounded perfect for an ambitious 3D short and so I applied as soon as the applications appeared online.
To my relief The Infectious Imagination Of Henry Bramble was one of four projects chosen to be awarded £20,000. Filming will take place over the Summer with VERL in Dundee undertaking the visual effects.
Well what can I say, I've been away from this blog for a long time having only just figured out how to set up an account on Blogger. Now it is so much easier! Anyway a lot has happened in the two and a bit years since my last blog entry, so I better fill you all in.
Progress with Blackout seemed to take a step backwards after my announcement that Jessica Hynes was coming on board. What was supposed to be the final draft in June 2009 proved to be problematic as I struggled to please Ipso Facto Films while still trying to hold on to the original concept I had for the film. In the end we over-developed having a far too complicated backstory with two main stories that nobody knew which to favour. The project was eventually shelved halfway through a new treatment back in September 2009.
Blackout was originally supposed to be a simple three character story and so I wanting to go back to writing a much simpler story. Using the original 1970 suspense thriller And Soon The Darkness as a template, I built a new mystery thriller called Missing set within the same world I had created for Blackout (the bleak remote wind swept Island of Sheppey). Things started to feel like they were moving forward again when Ipso Facto hired a top design company to work on a new poster and marketing pack but by now the recession was at its peak and we had little interest.
I wrote a second draft with Ipso but began to have difficulties with conflicting notes and ideas that made a third draft impossible. With the option ending in April 2010, Ipso kindly agreed to return the rights to me so that I could look for a new home for Missing. My producer Bex Hopkins also stood down as she is having a baby this Summer and naturally wanted to have some time off from work. Since then I have developed a new draft with the help of a brilliant script editor Ludo Smolski and I am hopeful that a new producer will identify with the project and finally push it forward into production.
As for Blackout, I am keen to go back and re-write the version set in the Ardennes in Belgium and re-launch it sometime in the future.
