We have our location for Henry Bramble!

After a week of searching the Internet for local country houses I am very excited to announce we have found the perfect location just minutes from my home (very convenient I know). It is a privately owned property that is used a lot for fashion shoots and is filled with beautiful antique furniture and pictures fitting for a retired judge. What's more unbelievable is that it is actually owned by a QC! Filming will commence from the 21st-23rd October. Fingers crossed the weather will be dry!

KILL LIST - Directed by Ben Wheatley

Having heard good but disgustingly dark violent things about the new British feature film KILL LIST and getting excited by the Wicker Man style poster, I started researching the filmmaker Ben Wheatley and discovered the UK director has had an interesting career. Watch the trailer below and then hear some words of advice from Ben Wheatley, the 39 year old viral filmmaker turned feature film director.

Henry Bramble Back On Track

So it has been a while since I have spoken about my new short film, The Infectious Imagination Of Henry Bramble. Well that's basically because until now I wasn't really sure if it was going to actually happen. We went from a £20,000 budget shooting in Kent to a £55,000 budget shooting in Denmark and then back down to an £18,000 budget shooting in Kent. Why? Well it was all about getting the production value the film deserved.

£20,000 was not enough to shoot in 3D so we managed to raise another £35,000 on the condition we shoot in Denmark, but when we budgeted the film it was becoming clear that living costs and film equipment was more expensive in Denmark, there were no known dwarf actors out there or many experienced crew in the region and most importantly there were no twee English Georgian houses with pretty gated, landscaped gardened entrances. Not only that, but planning a film in another country is so much more difficult and frustrating as you have to rely on other people out there to act as an extension of your imagination, using Skype, e-mail and dropbox to share information.

Shooting in my home country of Kent is so much easier. I can walk out the door and be on location in less then half an hour to plan storyboards or pre-dress the set, I can source local crews that I have already worked with, who will not need accomodation and will work that extra mile for me. Because we have such a thriving film industry here we can also make great deals with rental and post houses. The fact we don't have to shoot in 3D now due to the brilliant deal my producer Charlotte struck with Prime Focus (a company with cutting edge technology that can convert 2D to 3D and who have been chosen by Lucasfilm to do the 2D to 3D conversions of the two Star Wars trilogies) we now don't have the added pressure of technicalities on set so we can shoot faster and cheaper and still deliver a fantastic 3D short.

So the reality at present is that we have £18,000 to make TIIOHB. I have trimmed the script to its very limits without, I hope, loosing the emotional and imaginative impact of the story. We are now aiming to shoot over a three day weekend on location in Kent at the end of Septemeber or beginning of October, so keep checking back for more updates!

Words of Wisdom & Inspiration

Final Cut Pro X

Just in case you weren't aware, you can now purchase the latest version Final Cut Pro X on the Aps Store for a measly £199! Not only that, Color and Soundtrack are now built-in. You can also buy Compressor and Motion separately for £30 each. All in, it'll cost you less than £260!

Considering only a few years ago Final Cut Studio was £1,500, I'd say Apple are onto something very very good here. I just hope Adobe will do the same with their creative suite range of design, web and video applications.

I know there's been a bit of controversy over this latest version (nicknamed i-movie pro) as it has inherited many of the innovative layout and working patterns of i-movie, but Apple have obviously used i-movie as a platform to experiment with more intuitive editing techniques and have decided it is now the right time to make that change. Nobody likes change even though it is usually for the better and as all new software built from scratch, there will be much to improve and tweak. You only have to go back to the mid 1990's to remember film editors moaning about Avid and Media Composer (the latter of which even gave them a Steenbeck controller to make them feel safer). Give it a year or two and everybody will be wondering what all the fuss was about!

Love Does Grow On Trees - Award winning short now available on Vimeo!

Here's a wonderful short by my friend Bevan Walsh, the man who discovered Andrew Garfield before he was famous. He had huge success at festivals across the globe with this 2008 short.

I am personally very fond of this film as there was a lot of Derek Boyes influence. The very first scene was based on a true account of an early porn memory I had on the school football field, but thankfully I did not get a football in my face.

I think the magical porn man (Tom Brooke aka The Happiness Thief) was inspired by the day Bevan walked with me into a park in Newcastle where I left a plastic carrier bag full of my old porn magazine's on a shed door. I decided to be rid of them having recently met a girl and suddenly felt dirty owning them. I considered it as a generous donation to the first teenage Geordie who came along. 

Finally the third link to my life is that Bevan shot part of the film in Maidstone and used my Dad's house for the boy's parents house. Unbeknown to my parents we converted my Dad's music/study room into a teenage boys bedroom.

Are you aware of Scrivener?

Scrivener is a powerful content-generation tool for writers that allows you to concentrate on composing and structuring long and difficult documents. While it gives you complete control of the formatting, its focus is on helping you get to the end of that awkward first draft. I discovered this amazing application while researching Neil Cross the writer of BBC 1's excellent crime drama Luther on the BBC's writersroom website. Luther is currently in it's second series and well worth a watch (Tuesdays at 9pm - or catch up on the i-player). Unfortunately as I have had to do most of my writing for the last year on an ancient PC at work, I have not had the proper chance to utilise this well thought out program, but that doesn't stop you from using it! It just makes your workflow so much easier and keeps all your notes, drafts, treatments, outlines, clippings and reference material together in one intuitive file. Don't take my word for it watch the demo below!

Want to know what it's like to be a successful screenwriter in Hollywood?

I stumbled upon this incredible website a few years ago when I was trying to find the definition of a film treatment (which by the way there are many variations). It's called Wordplay and is run by two very talented Hollywood Academy Award ®-nominated writers  Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio. Amoung other things you can read or download over 100 useful and insightful essays on writing from a Hollwood point of view including how to write a proper treatment . If you are ever thinking of writing for Hollywood then I seriously recommend you read all of these essays first - They will be invaluable!

Introducing producer Charlotte Wontner

I am very excited to announce that The Infectious Imagination Of Henry Bramble is being produced by Charlotte Wontner of Hopscotch Films who has worked extensively across documentary and drama as a producer and a production manager for the last 15 years.

Her vast knowledge and hands-on experience of running a budget and organising large productions is invaluable for such an ambitious short and I am very grateful she has come on board. It is rare you find a producer who fights your corner to provide you with the professional and financial support you need to achieve your vision.

Charlotte has produced various shorts and feature films including the short film A Fairy Story (2002), a £2.2 million feature The Sick House (2008) sold by Arclight Films and more recently Island (2011) starring Natalie Press which is still playing at the following cinemas:

Riverside Studios Hammersmith    13th June
Light House Wolverhampton    13-16th June
Dundee Contemporary Arts    17th & 19th June
Eden Court Inverness    16-21st June
Hippodrome Bo’ness    20th & 23rd June
Cornerhouse Manchester    23rd June
Greenwich Picturehouse    6th July
Hyde Park Picturehouse Leeds    9-12th & 14th July
City Screen Picturehouse York    12th July
Tyneside Cinema Newcastle    13th July
Picturehouse at FACT Liverpool    18th July

Development Hell

BBC radio 2 has an interesting program on right now called Development Hell about the difficulty of getting a film made in Hollywood. Has some insightful stuff, in particular the account of the infamous Smoke and Mirrors screenplay about Houdini that nearly everyone in Hollywood was attached to at some time or another. Listen to it on the i-player here!