A Trip to the Fishing Museum and Other Stories...

Too busy to do a proper blog but here is some stuff what has happened with some soon to be relevant music (click play below)...

Following on from my last post Julia totally smashed her target on Kickstarter! I'm really happy for her and excited about the film - it's going to be awesome. Also I think the fact that she set her sights so high and still made it gives the rest of us creative-types a bit of hope for the future.

And she got an extra boost when Mr. Amanda Palmer (aka Neil Gaiman) tweeted a link to her page, which is awesome and makes their domination of the crowd-funding universe seem a little more acceptable.

Jenny Ringo and the Cabaret from Hell is still keeping me busy, hence I haven't really had time to write a proper blog about it recently. Last weekend Ross and I polished up the edit and cut two and a half minutes out which has improved it no end (mostly thanks to some awesome notes from Dr. Geraint D'Arcy, which is further proof that if in doubt you should always refer back to the writer). There's one more change to put in but we can't really do that until we're further along with the sound so for now we have an almost final cut and I'm really happy with it.

A couple of weekends ago I met with a sound designer, Ben Brockett, who also happens to be in an awesome band The Galleons (whom you should now have been listening to). You should definitely buy their album because it's awesome. I also have a composer and mixer ready to go and my next plan is to actually sort out recording the additional dialogue. So despite the lack of updates, it's going really well.

Speaking of bands, Hollywood Assassins are playing at the Prince Albert in Brighton on June 22nd. They are also awesome and feature heavily in Jenny Ringo and the Cabaret from Hell.

MovieBar, the short film night I run in Brighton, is still going really well and don't forget that even if you're not based anywhere near enough to come along you can still see some of the short films we've screened on our website.

In other news my love affair with my Xbox may be over after my Assassin's Creed: Revelations save file got somehow corrupted meaning I would have to start from the beginning again. I was 93% into the game. As my wife pointed out, that doesn't happen with books.

Or films, so I watched some stuff...

I saw Prometheus which I thought was ace apart from a dodgy pacing issue between the 2nd and 3rd Act. I actually would have preferred it to have been twenty minutes longer - how often do you find yourself saying that about a two hour film? I thought it had good monsters, the performances were uniformly awesome and it was a bit arthouse - kind of like Solaris only a hundred times more expensive and with monsters. Philip French liked it too.

Then I saw Kill List which was similar in that it too had some pacing issues, was mostly an arthouse horror film (if I had to choose a favourite genre it would definitely be arthouse-horror) and had one of the best shock endings ever.

I've also started work on a new project with Brother Pete which involved visiting Brighton Fishing Museum on our lunchbreak for research. It doesn't have anything to do with fishing (I mean our project doesn't have anything to do with fishing, not the Fishing Museum which has quite a lot to do with fishing as you would expect).

Also, I should probably say something about Ray Bradbury dying. He was definitely up there with my favourites, as I'm sure he was for most people. A Sound of Thunder is the best time travel story ever written (you can read it here) but my favourite Bradbury story was always The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl in which a murderer goes on an obsessive cleaning spree. It's like The Tell-Tale Heart, but with dusting. I'm probably not selling it very well - it's just really good and you should definitely check it out.

Why you should give my friend money to make a film...

!!!CROWD FUNDING EMERGENCY!!!

My friend Julia has less than 2 days left to raise the rest of the $75,000 she needs to make her documentary about the New Beverly Cinema. Yes, I could have (and really should have) written something about this earlier but maybe the sense of urgency will actually convince some of you to donate.

You can find all the details HERE and listen to Julia explain her reasons for wanting to make the film and why it's important. 

Here are my reasons:

1) The New Beverly is quite possibly the best cinema I've ever been to and I genuinely want to know more about it. It's hard to relate to a love of old cinemas these days as multiplexes are ugly and made of evil, but there was a time when cinemas just used to show films. That was all they were there for. They weren't about selling you overpriced food, they weren't about providing some kind of heightened 'experience', they weren't about anything other than showing you the film you've chosen to watch in the best possible way they could. That's the kind of cinema the New Beverly is, and I'm all in favour of celebrating that. Plus I know there are some awesome stories to be told about that place, which leads me onto my next point...

2) It's going to be a really great film. Julia already has some awesome interviews lined up and there are bound to be some interesting contributions from the cinema's regulars. At the same time it's not just a film about a building in LA that shows films, it's about the end of something important; something we may not realise we're going to miss until it's too late.

3) If you are a filmmaker or if you have any creative aspirations and you are even vaguely interested in this then you have no excuse, because one day you'll be crowd funding a project too and you'll be writing a blog like this asking for people with a vague interest in what you're doing to give you money. Crowd-funding is only going to work if genuinely interesting projects like this one are successful.

4) It may seem like the target is a little high, but take a look at Amanda Palmer's latest project. I love Amanda Palmer, but $800,000? I'm not sure what my point was going to be (probably that generating $800,000 through crowd funding seems to take the piss a bit) but it does make Julia's target seem a little less over-ambitious. Plus she's well over halfway - she can totally do this if enough people get on board.

Okay, there are only like 44 hours left now, go give her money!

Jenny Ringo 3...

This is a post about something I don't normally like talking about. Recently I've started entering a few more writing schemes and competitions. I didn't used to bother because I was too busy working on projects that I thought were heading into imminent production. It turns out most of those projects were not heading into imminent production at all and I've been left with a folder full of spec scripts that I can't do much with because they have lots of other peoples' names on them. 

(except for the one I wrote with Brother Pete - that one may yet actually go somewhere)

So I've started entering more competitions like what most aspiring writers do with the primary goal of building up a body of original work. But because they're competitions I also want to win and don't like talking about it when I don't. Except this time I am going to talk about it.

When I finished production on Jenny Ringo and the Cabaret from Hell I knew it was probably the last time I'd be able to make a film on that scale without any funding. The reality is that making a twenty-five minute film with 10-20 people on set every day is expensive. And trying to get people to do stuff when you can't pay them is really hard work. And a bunch of other reasons I won't go into here. 

The point is, it became pretty clear by the end of the shoot that I wasn't going to be able to do this the same way again. And as it's really difficult to get money to make short films this left my future plans up in the air. 

Well, to be honest I didn't have any future plans at that point because I was still working on the short I just filmed. But then a number of filmmakers I know mentioned that they were entering the BFI Shorts scheme. I was a bit reluctant at first, but on reading further it started to look like exactly the kind of thing I needed to fund a third Jenny Ringo film. Plus the guidelines hinted that they were looking for projects that would lend themselves to being developed into features, and I've been working on a new Jenny Ringo feature script for a while now. It was one of those opportunities I couldn't really afford to pass up.

The problem was I didn't have an idea for the third film, plus I was busy on the post production of the second film. With only 6 weeks until the submission deadline developing and writing a whole new short film didn't seem possible. So I sought help.

Back when I was looking for ideas for episodes in case I ever wanted to pitch Jenny Ringo as a TV series I asked a number of friends for help. Geraint D'Arcy provided the story that became Jenny Ringo and the Cabaret from Hell, and another friend, Rich Badley, came up with an episode called Jenny Ringo and the West Pier Thing. In this story Jenny's useless flatmate Gavin accidentally knocks over the remains of the West Pier in Brighton. 

Little does he realise the real reason the West Pier has been left standing is that it was protecting the world from the malevolent Hell monster that was trapped beneath. 

It was kind of like The Host, but set in Brighton.

Now you may already be thinking that this idea is too ridiculously over-ambitious to be made on the kind of money offered on the BFI scheme, but there wasn't a single thing in that story that I didn't know how to achieve using the same people who had helped me on the previous two films. I know someone who can do monsters and I know someone who can do animation. If I were to put those people together and give them a bit of money we would have a truly horrific monstrosity terrorising the streets of Brighton in no time. And as for knocking down the West Pier I know someone who could do that too.

Unconcerned that going with the most expensive idea would put us at a disadvantage we went ahead and wrote the script. Actually Rich wrote the script. We met to discuss ideas and swap notes a few times and I did a quick pass on it at the end but mostly it was his work. We spent two weeks outlining and four weeks on the script. Between us we wrote five drafts.

Now I can't say that I'm completely objective but as far as I'm concerned we turned in a really good script. I'm not saying that because I think we should have done better than we did, I just want to use the opportunity to point out that Rich is a really fantastic writer and we produced something super-awesome. It had the aforementioned monster, it had a team of supernatural troubleshooters with their own theme song, it had awesome set-pieces in iconic Brighton locations - it had everything you would expect from a Jenny Ringo film (if you had seen the second film as well as the first and realised that I like doing the same things only better). Most importantly it really developed the relationship between Jenny and Gavin and gave them some nice moments individually as well as together. It was the perfect third episode.

Well, as you might have guessed from my non-celebratory tone, we didn't make it onto the scheme. This made me sad for a bit, because I couldn't really work out what I was supposed to do next. I'd become so caught up in the daydream of making this next short and then developing the feature that suddenly thinking about anything else seemed absurd. Which is in itself absurd because a few months ago I was working on the short film I just finished shooting and my only plan was to finish making that and to get more people to see it than saw the first film. 

That plan hasn't changed, but now I have a really awesome script for a third film. Plus I had a good time; I spent a month imagining monsters tearing Brighton apart whilst hanging out with a good friend and making some art. It may be art that only exists for two people right now, but I will do something with that script. I'm not sure entirely what that will be and it may not be a film but I guarantee it will definitely exist in some form or other one day. 

 

For the time being there's a lot of work to be done on the post production of Jenny Ringo and the Cabaret from Hell so I have loads to be getting on with. And I think that has a lot to do with why I haven't gone with my usual response of 'fine, see if I care, I'm going to go off and make something super-awesome and show everyone' ...because I'm over halfway through the super-awesome thing and it's all going rather well.

But still, if you would like to make me feel better you could head over to the Jenny Ringo Facebook page or sign up to our mailing list at www.jennyringo.com

First edit on Jenny Ringo and the Cabaret from Hell...

As mentioned in my last post I was mostly editing last month (hence not posting anything for ages) and as of last Monday we now have a complete cut of Jenny Ringo and the Cabaret From Hell. It's not perfect and still needs some polishing (and probably some cutting) but it has given me a really good idea of what the film looks like as a whole. There is still a lot of work to do before it's properly finished, mostly on the sound, but it feels good to have made some progress!

I also completely forgot to post something about the Edge of the City Film Festival that took place a couple of weeks ago...because I spent the whole of the following day editing. 

So here's a summary - it was a really great day, I saw LOADS of films, met some really nice people, the festival was very well organised and Jenny Ringo and the Monkey's Paw screened to a fairly large audience who mostly seemed to enjoy it. Also I was given this:

It's like an actual award made of like wood and metal and stuff with my name on it and everything!

Very exciting.

But like I said, still lots to do on the sequel so I'm off to figure out what needs to happen next...

Progress...

I said at one point that if I didn't manage to keep up the production diaries for Jenny Ringo and the Cabaret from Hell it would most likely be because I've been busy working on the edit. I'm pleased to say that this has definitely been the case over the last couple of weeks.


As mentioned before I did have to change editors and at the time I worried that this might delay things even more, but luckily my old friend and frequent collaborator Ross Boyask stepped in to save the day and we've been working on the edit pretty solidly ever since. So far it's coming along really well and we're about a third of the way through. I'm not sure how realistic my end of April deadline is but it feels good to finally be doing something with it and to see it come together.


Also, Jenny Ringo and the Monkey's Paw will be screening as part of the Edge of the City Film Festival on Saturday the 28th of April. The full programme is here.

Friday the 13th...

When I saw Jenny Krueger of Memoirs of a Scream Queen was hosting a Friday the 13th blogfest...

...I thought 'Cool, I can write about how Friday the 13th Part III is my favourite film in the series even though it's not very good.'

I was going to talk about how the first time I saw the film it gave me nightmares because I was far far too young to be watching such things. Then I was going to talk about how the second time I saw it I was watching through the whole series with friends over the course of a few evenings (we only made it to Part 4) and that when watched shortly after seeing Parts 1 and 2, the third one doesn't really hold up. And then I would write about seeing Part 3 as it was meant to be seen, in 3D, and finally realising that it was actually a work of genius (well, not quite, but it remains the best use of 3D I've seen...ever).

So I planned it all out in my head and chuckled to myself as I imagined what an amazing blogging triumph this new post would be. And then I absent-mindedly did a search for Friday the 13th references in my blog just in case I had covered any of this before. 

It turned out I had. Right here.

Exactly the thing I was going to write had already been written, by me, a couple of years ago. I may have been drinking at the time.

Tangent alert - I would put this momentary memory loss down to getting old, but this is not the first time I've completely erased something I've written from memory. In my third year at university as part of a course on early journalism I decided to write about the coverage of Jack the Ripper in the Pall Mall Gazette. Then by chance I came across an essay I had written two years earlier on the same subject. Back then it was definitely down to drinking.

The thing is, I don't have much else to say about Friday the 13th.

I suppose I could talk about how I first became aware of the films through a C64 game my friend owned (much like my first experience of Nightmare on Elm Street). I don't really remember much about the game other than it mostly seemed to involve wandering around until Jason killed you, much like the plot of the films. Occasionally when you died you would be presented with the image of a head with a machete through it so we would spend hours playing the game trying to figure out how to make that happen. Now we are living in the future and I can find this image with a google search.

The internet has ruined everything.

But look! If you have an ten minutes free you can watch someone play through the whole game!

Which I have just done. I'm never getting those ten minutes back.

I suppose I could also talk about my friend Jason. It's not as tenuous as it sounds - the second time I met him my friend Jason was dressed up as Jason Voorhees for a Halloween party. He hadn't made much of an effort - he was just wearing a cheap hockey mask and telling everyone his name was Jason, as if that completed the costume much more than a boiler suit ever could have done.

Like my viewings of Friday the 13th Part III, I met Jason exactly 3 times (see how it all fits together?). The first time was on my very first night at university. I'd arrived a bit later than everyone else and when I went to register they'd run out of complimentary tickets to the freshers' party.

'It's okay' they said 'You'll get in anyway.'

In the afternoon I made friends with the people in my halls of residence (including future best man, monster-maker and writer of Jenny Ringo and the Cabaret from Hell, Geraint D'Arcy) and shared my predicament with them. They all had tickets to the party.

'It's okay' they said 'we'll get you in'.

I didn't get in.

So I went to the student bar instead and made friends with a chap called Jason who had also arrived too late to get a ticket to the party.

The second time we met was the aforementioned Halloween party.

The third time was on the very last night I was at university, in the post-grad bar. 'Remember me?' I said, 'We met on the first night we were here! And now here we are again, only now it's our last night!! How cool is that!?!?'

He said he did remember me, but then we didn't really have much to say to each other after that. We may have hugged. It was a bit awkward. We were both very drunk.

So that wasn't really very relevant to Friday the 13th at all. How about the time my wife Andrea and I discovered what would really happen to us in a real life slasher situation?

We were staying with our friend Julia in LA (check out her blog here) and she took us to Universal Studios sometime around Halloween. In the Texas Chainsaw Massacre maze I abandoned Andrea to Leatherface and ran to the end without her. That was quite bad.

But in the Friday the 13th maze, stalked by several frighteningly authentic Jasons, my cowardice reached new heights. I hid behind my wife. I may also have pushed her towards him a bit too.

Friday the 13th-type situation, I am actually the last person you want on your team. I would be the annoying character that you really hope dies soon and in the most horrible way possible. I would be like the irritating prankster guy in Friday 13th Part III. Only more irritating.

See how it all comes back to Friday 13th Part III in the end?

So what have we learnt from all this? That I'm an alcoholic coward with occasional memory loss and that I spent too much of my youth trying to get a game to show me a picture of a man with a machete in his head.

Next time I decide to write about something I've already written about I think I'll just repost the original.

Actually, there is one more thing! Friday the 13th directly inspired a sequence in the film I'm currently working on, Jenny Ringo and the Cabaret from Hell. I don't want to give a way too much right now, but here is photographic evidence...

Check out the Jenny Ringo website for more info.

And if you enjoyed this nonsense, it might be worth checking out what other bloggers have written about Friday the 13th by clicking the links at the bottom of this page.

I am still here...

...and I'm aware it's been like years since I posted anything. But that's okay! Because my amazing and incredibly intelligent wife has been holding the fort with this rather brilliant post over on her blog.

I haven't had time for blogging, I've been busy doing important stuff like writing! And organising MovieBar!! And playing Mass Effect 3!!!

To be fair I was holding back the diaries in anticipation of some awesome production photos. On this shoot we were lucky enough to have a professional photographer on set most days so in theory there should be awesome production photos. But being a professional, our photographer is too busy with paid work to get the photos finished so I may have to wait a while yet. This seems to be the story of my life when it comes to filmmaking.

In other post-production news I've had to change editors as the editor I was using is too busy. See what I mean?

So, one day I promise there will be awesome photos. And some day after that there will be an actual film. For now I will continue the production diaries without awesome photos and I'll update you on what little news there is about the post-production. 

For now that news is limited to this -

Brother Pete finished the first animated sequence for the film. It is the most amazing animated sequence ever.

If you want to see some other awesome animated sequences, check out Pete's YouTube channel or you could check out his excellent work on Jenny Ringo and the Monkey's Paw, which you can watch right now by going to our website and signing up to our mailing list.