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!

J J Abrams talks about his mystery box.

Watched this a while back and got very excited as I loved magic as a kid and for a short while was a junior member of the Medway Magical Society. I connected with a lot what he was saying and found it very inspirational depite not being that familiar with his TV work. Then he directed Star Trek and quickly became my top new favourite director. Now he has teamed up with Steven Spielberg with Super 8, a film that pays homage to Spielberg's classic work of the late seventies and early eighties. I just hope I won't be disappointed. Watch his talk below and see what you think.

J.J. Abrams traces his love for the unseen mystery –- a passion that’s evident in his films and TV shows, including Cloverfield, Lost and Alias -- back to its magical beginnings.

The best book about storytelling I have ever read - FACT!

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

3-D family/fantasy short gets £20,000 Screen South funding

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.

A new beginning

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.