Ken rang today to inform me that the Odeon Cinema in Canterbury will be screening Greetings on their shiny new digital projector this Friday morning (January 4th 2008) at 11am. They will also be showing it next week as well at the same time on Monday 7th, Tuesday 8th and Thursday 10th.

The interesting thing is they’ll be showing the version I graded, rather than the grade done in the SoHo studios, as it looks better through this projector. Why they felt the need to question my abilities and go to London, I don’t know…

On a completely random note, I’ve just shelled out for a super duper new server. I’ll be moving this blog and Scribomatic across to there in the next few days, so if the widget or the sites weird out on you, you know why.

And lastly, Happy New Year to you all! I hope 2008 brings you much joy and happiness.

2007 was a great year for me, with pretty much single-handedly post-producing an indie feature film and writing a novel and a spec screenplay as my major achievements.

2008 promises to be even better. There’s ‘Baby Cogs II’ due in March to spice things up, but beyond that, I’m hoping to publish the novel (once it’s rewritten substantially!) and get at least one more spec written. Progress towards making a feature of my own would be nice too, and Ken has another feature in the wings waiting to be shot. It’s gonna be busy.

I’ve added a little forum doodad to the Scribomatic site so we scribobloggers can chew the cud about techy things along with other screenwriters about more screenwriterly things.

I held off for a while doing this to see what the guys at Scribosphere.org would do. I didn’t want to tread on their toes in any way, but their web site is obviously still under development, so I thought I’d take the plunge, if for no better reason than to try out the new version of phpbb.

It would be great for you guys to stop by and say Hi some time.

It’s at http://www.scribomatic.com/community/

When I was a kid I used to go up to my parents TV set to see if I could peer round the corner and see what was happening off screen. I was alway very disappointed when I couldn’t.

But now things could be different…

All round genius Jonny Lee, who brought us the $14 steadicam, has found a novel use for his Nintendo Wii.

I wonder if you could use it for 3D films (animated/mo-cap ones anyway)? It wouldn’t work in a cinema, but on a TV or PC it could be very interesting…

If you’re clever enough, you can even download the software from Jonny’s web site.

(Kudos to FreshHDV for sharing this).

Whilst catching up with the very large backlog of posts that have built up in my RSS Aggregatoraliser over the past week or so, I stumbled across Jason Arnopp’s humorous post rounding up the year in the UK Scribosphere.

I chuckled as I read it as I recalled the various posts he alludes to. But as I got to the end, my heart sank a little. There is one glaring oversight. That’s right, neither your’s truly, nor my little piece of handiwork, Scribomatic, is mentioned. At all. Not a sausage.

A very depressing thought struck home (well, two actually); despite the not insignificant take up of Scribomatic around the web, apart from one or two people (well, four, no five, now I count), no-one in the UK Scribosphere scene seems to have the faintest idea who I am or appears to have heard of Scribomatic.

Of all the, ohh, tens of blogs now using Scribomatic, only three (that I can tell) are from the UK (me, Danny and Tim. We’re hardly spreading the love here are we?

I wept for a short while until my wife slapped me, and then I set about wondering how I could at least change the second of those two depressing thoughts.

So here’s what I propose. If you know a UK based screenwriting blogger who doesn’t have the glory and wonder of the Scribomatic Widget ticking away on their blog, make it your new years resolution to camp on their doorstep and harangue them every time they step forth from the threshold until they wend their merry way to www.scribomatic.com and cut and paste that code into their blog sidebar.

Alternatively, if you, like me, are a big ‘southern softie’ you could just leave a comment or send them a polite e-mail. Either way is good. In fact the second is probably better.

Scribomatic : Made in England.

Hope you all have a great time…

I did a few tweaks to the Scribomatic widget last night. You can now change the size of the font (I also changed the default size from 10pt to 11pt so it looks nicer on Firefox). If you want to make your font size bigger or smaller, check out the widget page on scribomatic.com for the extra line of code you’ll need to add.

Thanks to Patti Sorge for the suggestion. Patti also pointed out that the widget won’t work on MySpace. I hadn’t thought to check it on there and when I investigated I found very few widgets now work on MySpace.

I can only guess they were getting malicious code being embedded in their pages so they’ve dropped support for any javascript and they disable the iframe tag, so I’m a bit stumped as to how to get it to work there. If anyone had any ideas how to make widgets MySpace friendly, please let me know, as Google, and MySpace for that matter, haven’t been much help on this one.

Once again, thanks to everyone that’s using the widget, it makes the hours of work I put into it worthwhile and it makes me go all goosebumpey when I scroll down some of my favourite blogs and see it there trundling away.

If anyone has any ideas for any other developments on the Scribomatic front, let me know. If I get some more spare time next week I might add the ability to change the font…

I’ve also resolved my what-shall-I-write-next issue by starting on a fresh spec script. It’s the comedy film idea I started developing earlier this year (thanks for the inspiration Danny!)…

It’s shaping up in my head quite nicely, a kinda Dogma meets League of Gentlemen’s Apocalypse meets Bridget Jones.

I have no idea if I can actually write comedy, so it’ll be an interesting exercise. I went to Uni with a Benedictine Monk, (Hi Dunstan!) who once told me that if I developed my style I’d be quite funny by the time I was 30. I’m now 5 years beyond that so I’ve had plenty of time to work on it.

Greetings came back from the BBFC t’other day with a lovely 15 rating, which is cool. No edits required. Splendid.

After finishing NaNoWriMo I felt completely blitzed for a week or so, and had no inclination to write anything at all. Even signing my name in the bank felt like a hardship.

So I’ve buried myself in the various other mainly web based projects that I’d neglected during November (get the old left brain working again, after having to switch it off for a month). One project, a rebuild of a web site, is going to take up a lot of time over the next few months, but I’m hoping that in the long run it will be very much worth it. We shall see.

In the past day or two, though, I’ve started to feel the creative juices begin to flow again, but I’m unsure quite what to do next, writing-wise. There’s the big old Trimes rewrite or there’s the Elementalist rewrite. And with the Elementalist rewrite do I rewrite it as a novel, which is actually tempting, or stick with my original plan and adapt the story as it stands now into a feature script?

Decisions, decisions.