After a two weeks of burning the candle at both ends, House of Donn is ready for sending out to film festivals.

Today, just in the nick of time, I submitted to Palm Springs and Rhode Island. Then in the next week or two it’ll be Raindance, Austin and any other ones that tickle my fancy.

There are two (possibly three) ever so slightly less than perfect lines of dialogue which I’ll get Ben to ADR next week before I send any more out, but as he was in London today, and I needed to get the two submissions in the post by tomorrow, I figured that they weren’t bad enough to really worry about (they just a little too bassy, and I doubt most people will notice).

I was really hoping to submit to Venice, but they want world premieres only and 35mm prints if selected. As there’s no way I can tell if Palm Springs or Rhode Island (which are over the two or so weeks before Venice in August) will select the film and I don’t really have enough spare cash for a 35mm print, I gave up on the idea.

Nonetheless, I’m over the moon with the finished product. I still keep watching it through slightly in awe of it, not quite being able get my head round the fact that it turned around in a little over four months from conception to completion.

Now I’ve got to update the web site and get all the press gumph sorted, but as there’s only two actors, and one is reasonably well known, that shouldn’t be too hard to work through…

All the hard work has taken a toll on my health a little. I now have a glorious chest and throat infection. Perhaps a few early nights wouldn’t go a miss in the next few days.

I’ve been busy webbing it up this week.

We’re planning to host a film festival (of sorts) in Folkestone at the beginning of July. Initially it started as an idea for shameless self promotion, but, as with all good ideas, it’s started to snowball into a real, pukka film festival that we’ll take around Kent (well, East Kent, let’s not be too ambitious…). So I’ve been busy setting up web sites and suchlike, both for the new rolling festival and for the filmmakers club we’ve gotten going.

Thusly, if you are a filmmaker in the Shepway area, check out http://www.kentfilmkollective.co.uk. Not much there yet, but I think it’ll be a really useful place for all us filmy types to hang out when we’re not downing quality real ale (such as the outstanding Old Thumper) at the Chambers in Folkestone.

On top of that, I’ve been tinkering with the music Darren wrote and shamelessly rearranging it. I’m very pleased with it so far. Gawd knows what Daz’ll think.

On an unrelated note, a friend of ours is doing up an old London taxi and driving it out to Le Mans. You can follow his exploits at http://taxi.yellowgrey.com/. Go Orde!

The work on HOD is now entering the final stages (which means I’ll be working right up to my 15th June deadline now I’ve said that).

Chris Knowles and David Motta came round last night to watch through the latest cut and they had some excellent suggestions for improvements. Daz, for his part, has come good with a really nice melody for the film which I’m tinkering with as well.

So now my eyes are looking out to the future, and it’s looking bright:

I got an invite from another screenwriter/filmmaker to collaborate on a project, which I think is an excellent idea and would provide some useful experience, both of adaptation and writing as a team.

I’ve also developed my online film distribution idea a little more, though I think I need to let that lie for a few weeks for the idea to settle. Strangely enough, Bill Cunningham had a similar, less convoluted, idea for writing serials on the web. But as Alex Epstein points out, where’s the money?

My idea is still quite undeveloped, hence my reticence talking too much about it. I think I’ll need to write a serious business proposal to check it’s a viable idea before I invest too much energy into it.

And then there’s the low budget idea for the KFK gang.

It’s going to be a busy few months, I think…

I’ve now finished the first pass through of the sound edit, centring all the dialogue and adding in the wildtracks. There’s just one more thing to do – record more of the clock in the front room ticking – and then I’ll be calling on the services of BAFTA award winning sound man, David Motta (had to get it in there again!) to help with the final mixing.

Darren is, as I write, hopefuly laying down some rough music tracks for me to play with while he swans off on safari next week. So hopefuly House of Donn should be on track for the 15th June deadline.

Now about that brainwave…

I was doing some thinking today about web and stuff (as that’s generally what I’m paid to do). In particular about the way the TV companies are starting to throw extra stuff up on the web, the extra Lost videos and suchlike.

Until this afternoon, I’d been against the TV companies hoodwinking the web as a prime delivery method. I appreciate that IP may be a viable route to serve up TV (in fact isn’t that more or less what I get through my NTL box already?), but the PC is just not the place to enjoy films and shows. It’s too damn uncomfortable for a start.

The Web is about interaction and empowering the user. Not spoon feeding. That’s what TV’s are for. The two should be kept separate.

Or should they?

I think I may have found a way to get the two to work for each other in a very novel way, (albeit a little contrived). The idea is still very much in it’s infancy so I won’t shout too much about it lest I wake up in the morning and realise it’s a pile of poo, but at the moment I’m quite excited about it.

Must think about it a lot more first… I’m wondering if it might be a step towards what Tim Clague is driving at with his Structure 2.0.

As promised, here’s the final version of Secret Thoughts of Angels.

OK, nothing to do with screenwriting or filmmaking, but something I’m just as proud of – here’s a clip of our band playing a charity gig in Dover last Sunday. That’s me on the right of your screen. Here’s a better version of the sound taken from the mixing desk. We’ve only been doing this for about six months (as a band), so I’m rather pleased with how tight we are. And no, the singer and me are not dwarfs, we’re both 6′ – the guitarist is 6′ 5″.

Anyhow, back on subject, over the past week I’ve caught up with everyone who helped film HOD and shown them the rough cut. Everyone has been very complimentary.

The hard part is disseminating the really beneficial comments from the ones that sound like good ideas, but really aren’t. Sometimes people give you great feedback and you start to act on it, only to find that you’re weakening the film. I’m starting to trust my own judgement on this a lot more now, I made several wrong choices with SToA and ended up coming back to where I started after a few weeks, I can’t afford to waste that much time with this one (not with Palm Springs and Venice Film Festival Deadlines only weeks away).

Denis came round last night and we worked through a few things, mainly timing issues. I learnt about the power of slowing things down, it’s amazing what you can get away with. Several clips had the 50% speed filter added, but you’d be hard pushed to spot all of them.

Now I’m starting on the sound. First order of the day is mixing the vocal tracks I have to the centre, which seems something of a laborious task, as not all the clips need it doing, but about 90% of them do, so I can’t do them all at once. It always surprises me how much improvement you can make to the quality of the sound just by panning the tracks properly. Very strange.

I’ve also been toying with an idea for a film that the Kent Film Kollective could make. It’s all very vague and nebulous at the moment. I feel like I did when I went through the first stages of writing HOD. I know there’s a film out there somewhere swirling round my head, I just have to focus hard enough and try to catch it before it floats away.

Chris Knowles also suggested a good idea that he thought could be done on a reasonably low budget, so I’m hoping I might get my teeth into that as well as he’s struggling to get it into shape.