This will sadly be my last post on Blogger. With so many Social Media platforms available out there, the competition is fierce. Blogger was once the number one platform for blogging, but unlike Wordpress, it never really evolved. So I have decided it is time to reduce the number of platforms I use, in order to effectively manage my postings.

You can find all these and future posts on my Tumblr page: http://delfilm.tumblr.com/

Thank you Blogger for helping me express myself for all these years!

Time is running out to save Henry Bramble's Imagination!

Don't take my word for it, listen to Downton Abbey's Mr Mason himself - Now come and join the adventure before it's too late at :http://igg.me/at/infectious-imagination/x/3449576

Join the Adventure and save Henry Bramble!

Help us to finish the vfx for our enchanting short film and in return we'll let you loose yourself in Henry's infectious imagination as you slip away to Minoitaniga on an incredible family adventure!

Find out why Henry's mother abandoned him with his estranged Uncle, Where Raygo Rattlegum comes from and why his Chumnink tribe need Henry's help. Uncover the truth about the terrifying Voydarkatrons and come face-to-face with Maliglut, the mysterious demon intent on destroying Henry's imagination!

Choose from a selection of exclusive perks that include the opportunity to read the latest draft of the expanded feature-length version of our heart-warming family fantasy short!

Alternatively attend a live reading of the feature-length screenplay on the London stage with professional actors AND then give us YOUR feedback.

Join the adventure and support our #‎Indiegogo Campaign to help save #‎HenryBramble at: http://igg.me/at/infectious-imagination

Why you should use SLIME in your films!

Get a sneak peek behind the scenes of Derek Boyes' long awaited spellbinding fantasy short film - The Infectious Imagination Of Henry Bramble.

This is the first of many EPK videos documenting the making of this enchanting little film, designed to entertain and inform, building curiosity and awareness before it hits film festivals early next year.

So if you like what you see, then please share it with anyone you know in the film and television industry who may be looking for fresh new directing talent!

Derek's first ever 16mm film finally restored and remastered for it's 20th anniversary.

This is the Indiegogo financed 20th anniversary digitally remastered version of Derek Boyes' legendary 1993 fantasy epic DRAKKON, an ambitious short film shot on location in West Burton and Harrogate, North Yorkshire over six days in July by a rebel crew of 16 students and one crazy Media Production tutor. It was Derek Boyes' first 16mm film.

The original negative has been digitally scanned at 2K to produce a cropped 16:9 1080p HD image. To find out more about the film's history and its near fatal production, visit our Facebook page where you will find an array of behind the scenes anecdotes, stills and video content, including 20th anniversary content: www.facebook.com/drakkon20th

Derek Boyes' #IceBucketChallenge

As Steven Spielberg and J.J. Abrams has done it for ALS, I'm doing it for Macmillan cancer support. Here as promised is my #IceBucketChallenge. I was nominated by Eric Moore and I am now nominating Tom Bill and Ritchie Wilkinson! Good luck boys! Text ICE to 70550 to give £3 to Macmillan (Wimp out and text FINE to 70550 to give £10 instead).

Official 20th Anniversary Drakkon Movie Poster

The remastering of Drakkon (my first 16mm film) for it's 20th anniversary was funded with the generous support of the Indiegogo community. Having raised 182% of the required funds, I decided to use some of the additional funds towards commissioning a 20th anniversary movie poster. Here is the final poster featuring artwork from the incredibly talented Chicago based illustrator Juan Hugo Martinez.

For more insights into the making of the film feel free to delve into the Drakkon archives at: www.facebook.com/drakkon20th

Drakkon - The Making Of A Fantasy

Well here it is, the definitive behind-the-scenes making of Drakkon, the ambitious epic fantasy short film shot on location at West Burtom falls in North Yorkshire way back in 1993. Having been through the video 8 footage several times to make this new version, 20 year old memories now seem like yesterday. I can literally smell the 1990's.

A big thank you to Shirley Hopkinson, Mike Joslin, Ritchie Wilkinson, Katherine Franks, Simon Franks, Philip Slocombe, Nicola Goss, Oliver Kneesbeck, Vicky Bywater, Gareth Unwin, Chris Eldridge, James Gibson, Isobel Thomas, Laura Anderson, Jim Loomis and Susan Hopkinson for some wonderful memories!

Epic Fantasy Adventure Resolution for 2014

At the beginning of the year I pondered on doing something to celebrate Drakkon's 20th anniversary. This led to a reunion at the falls in October, a growing Facebook page and a successful Indiegogo campaign to remaster the film in HD.

In doing all this I was reminded of my passion, ambition and fearless drive, at a time in my early career when anything seemed possible. My passion was infectious and somehow seemed to make the impossible happen. This made me reflect on my subsequent career and how over time I had slowly stopped externalising that self-belief. I realised that if I still wanted that illusive directing career, I had to externalise it again. So what better way to do this than by making the most ambitious and emotionally engaging modern fantasy adventure short that I can on a modest budget, financed and marketed through crowd-funding.

I am looking to Game Of Thrones and The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo for inspiration, re-working an idea I have had in my head for the last twenty years. The story will centre around an anti-heroine with a dark and horrific past - a cross between an older Arya Stark and Lisabeth Salander. It will be dark, gritty, graphic and emotionally engaging, aimed at delighting GOT fans and general fantasy fans alike.

The ultimate aim is to attract the attention of Hollywood, encouraging them to exploit my undiscovered talents as a director, using a strategic online marketing campaign that will run alongside the project. Sounds unrealistic? Maybe it is, but that's what I like about it!

Drakkon's 2k HD scanned rushes are back!

I am excited to tell you that the scanned 2k HD rushes of Drakkon arrived back today and I quickly did a test to compare the difference in quality. Hopefully this should give you a pretty good idea below:

Raw 2k HD scan

Graded 2k HD scan

Graded 2k HD scan cropped to 16:9 1080p

Original U-matic video master upscaled to 480p and cropped to hide tracking bleed

Drakkon's Indiegogo Campaign is 182% funded with 13 hours to go!

We have exceeded our minimum target by a whopping 182% - well done everyone who has supported this campaign! 

This is the final call for the`Drakkon Express train to Remasterdome! If you were intending to contribute to this campaign, but kept putting it off, then you now only have 13 hours left. This really is your last chance, so climb on board and join the team! Wooo Woooooo! 

http://igg.me/at/Drakkon/x/3449576

Support the Indiegogo Campaign to restore Drakkon for it's 20th Anniversary

Well finally it's here, my first crowd-funding campaign! I thought I'd start small, see how it all works first before I launch anything too ambitious, so what better way than to raise £500 to remaster my very first 16mm film Drakkon for its 20th anniversary.

Please take a moment to check it out on Indiegogo and also share it with your friends. All the tools are there. Get perks, make a contribution, or simply follow updates. If enough of us get behind it, we can make the remastering of 'DRAKKON' happen!

http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/424230/emal/3449576

Texturing of the Voydarkatron almost complete!

It is with a sigh of relief and a tingle of excitement that I can finally say the Voydarkatron texturing and painting has almost been signed off. Once I approve the eyes, we'll be ready to plough through the next stage of the process and Henry Bramble will finally see light at the end of a very long and dark tunnel.

Here's a sneak peak at the beast himself in all his fully rendered coloured and textured glory. Unfortunately you'll have to wait to see his gruesome face!

The team has also been working on the inner trunk. I think this is going to be the most disgusting thing you've ever seen get close to someone's face - period!

Henry Bramble On The Move Again - Finally!

Here's a beautiful re-sculpture of the Voydarkatron's trunk just sent to me by Jan Daube and his team at Wham Bam Productions. Previous versions by the other vfx teams were not nearly as detailed and defined. This really does look like the flesh of an elephant! - Very happy right now!

Wham Bam! - Henry Bramble vfx get a boost!

So having lost all hope of getting the vfx completed, DiRoom, by the skin of their teeth, seem to have found a suitable replacement vfx team - Wham Bam Productions.

Although their showreel leans more towards drinks commercials and certainly does not include seven foot monsters, their test demo's they've sent me are very promising and after a productive Skype call I feel confident they know what I'm looking for. They have been briefed before I go on holiday for two weeks and I have to confess I feel a small surge of excitement by the progress they should have made by the time I get back. Fingers crossed this is third time lucky!

Here's their showreel below.

Henry Bramble suffers another VFX nightmare

If you haven't already heard, we didn't get into Cannes. There were just 8 films selected out of a whopping 3,500 shorts from across the globe. It was a relief to be honest, because if we had been selected, our film would not have been finished in time. It is now June and has taken the vfx team six months to deliver just one completed and approved vfx shot out of forty four?! - I can't tell you how frustrated and angry this makes me feel, but in these instances, you have to just set your emotions aside and find a way to move forward.

Currently DiRoom (who were responsible for outsourcing the vfx work) have found three UK based vfx compainies who are willing to do the work for the remainder of our budget. However, despite their impressive vfx reels I have not yet been convinced that they are capable of delivering such specific work - i.e. a life-like Hollywood level cgi Voydarkatron. having had such a bad experience with the last team, I am being more than a little cautious as I try not to let paranoia cloud my judgement.

I was never convinced that the previous vfx team were qualified for the job, but my concerns fell on deaf ears. After all the delays and additional funding, the temptation to want to believe that they could deliver what we wanted within such a short timeframe was just too great. Our judgements were clouded by the desire to resolve the problem as quickly as possible, but in doing so the problem just got bigger.

The lesson that should be learnt here is simple - you pay for what you get. In reality we hugely underestimated the budget required for the vfx. The actual cost of the work to be delivered in such a short timeframe (a month), through a professional hollywood level outfit like Framestore, The Mill or the MPC is closer to £30,000. But rather than facing that fact we seem to be still looking for a way to get them done for less than a third of that estimate still within a similar short timeframe. With vfx artists expressing their anger at hollywood for not paying them an honest fee, I find this situation very uncomfortable.

Please can everyone wake up and smell the mocha choca. I really don't want to watch us make the same mistake a third time! In my mind, the only logical solution is to either be prepared to wait for as long as it takes for a smaller outfit to complete it for the money we have or raise £30,000. However the only way we can realistically raise this in a relatively short space of time, is through a carefully planned crowd-funding campaign like Indiegogo or Kickstarter. So for now I wait in hope for the Henry Bramble team to follow my lead.

J. J. Abrams: on Filmmaking

Could The 'BitTorrent Bundle' Eradicate Film Piracy?

I hate going to the cinema, paying £10 for a ticket, only to find out that the film I was looking forward to was just in fact a clever piece of marketing and that the film itself was a complete waste of my time - I genuinely consider this to be daylight robbery. You should be able to get your money back if you are genuinely dissatisfied with the product. I also hate missing a film I really want to watch at the cinema. This is either because by the time you get round to it, the film has already been and gone (having kids is a killer for this), or the film had a limited release and is not playing at any of your local cinemas. The fact that you then have to wait a minimum of three months before you can watch it on the small screen just adds to the frustration.

I refuse to subscribe to Sky Movies, LoveFilm or worse Netflix as none of these providers have access to all the film titles I want to see. In addition to paying for each film you download, you also have to pay a monthly subscription, but why? I want to be able to search for any film and pay £3 - £4 to stream it in HD to a device of my choice. If after watching it I really like it, I should then be able to purchase a download copy to keep (minus the £3-£4 I have already paid) or be able to access it through the cloud for free at any time.

I worked out fairly recently that owning a video collection today is rather materialistic, a waste of money and environmentally unfriendly. Out of maybe 200 carefully selected DVD's that I have purchased over the last fifteen years, I have only watched about twenty percent of them a second time. I bought these films for the comfort of knowing I could watch them when I wanted to, but you can now probably download any of these films off the internet whenever you want, making a physical private collection completely unnecessary.

So for all these reasons above, I have recently found myself illegally downloading more and more films off the internet. This may seem rather contradictory from someone who is passionate about filmmaking (I do genuinely feel guilty at times), but as an audience member I am sick of paying to see rubbish, and as a filmmaker I am reluctant to pay to watch a film for research purposes (especially if you just need to see one or two specific scenes). To be fair, the films I do genuinely like, I often purchase on DVD anyway (Drive, Dragon Tattoo and Super 8 to name a few). The ones that I enjoyed, but don't want to purchase (Another Earth), I'd happily pay £3 - £4 for. Unfortunately downloading illegally doesn't offer that option and that's when I start to feel guilty.

However, I was delighted to read a fascinating article on nofilmschool about the new developments of technology company BitTorrent. It is launching the 'BitTorent Bundle' designed to empower those in the content creation business. I am not going to say anymore except that if you really want to get ahead of the game, as a viewer and as a filmmaker, you should read this article. Have we finally found a way to watch and distribute films online, legally, fairly and efficiently!

Final Design for Henry Bramble poster by Richard Davies

I'm very excited to reveal the latest and final poster design for The Infectious Imagination Of Henry Bramble, created by the amazing Richard Davies (TurksWorks).

20 years since the making of Drakkon

We are now well into 2013 and in a few months it will have been a whopping 20 years since I made my first 16mm film on location at West Burton Falls in North Yorkshire. Drakkon was an incredibly ambitious first film filled with stunts, explosions and special effects puppetry.

The final results may not have been up to Hollywood standards, but they were certainly no worse than Peter Jackson's Bad Taste. For a crew that were mostly made up of national diploma media graduates from Harrogate College, who had never made a film before, it was an impressive feat in 1993.

On the surface the short is now construed as a rather embarrassing and somewhat amateur attempt of filmmaking, but for myself and many of the filmmakers involved, it holds a much deeper sentiment.

Peasant (played by Derek Boyes) being confronted by Drakkon (notice the Alien 3 homage).

We were very inexperienced at the time, attempting something far more ambitious than most other beginner filmmakers. To our Media Production course leader, we were seen as egotistical mavericks who were heading for failure, yet through naivety, passion and sheer stubbornness we proved him wrong.

The experience bonded many of us at a pivotal moment in our young adult lives. It symbolised our hopes and dreams for the future. It was a time of innocence and optimism, when anything seemed possible. I look back on the whole experience with great fondness and despite all its faults, I am still very proud of the short film we made.

Twenty years later, it seems Drakkon has made a lasting impression on our middle-aged lives, so much so that on Saturday August 10th 2013, nine (maybe eleven) out of seventeen original cast a crew members, will be heading back to the enchanting waterfall in West Burton for a 20th anniversary reunion - can't wait!