Just thought I’d better do a quick update as life seems to be passing far too speedily at the moment:

Part Two of The Elementalist is up now and, all being well, Part Three will be up next Monday, though I’m travelling that day so I may sneak it up last thing Sunday night (if I don’t get distracted by Sherlock).

I’ve set up a Facebook group for The Elementalist, so feel free to join in (it would be great to get to 100 members by the end of the week).

Things are falling into place with the planned shoot of The Man Who Wished short. I just need to nail some dates, which is proving tricky as the day job is threatening to get in the way. Hopefully I’ll have a clearer idea of my schedule for next month very soon and we can really get things rolling. Locations and props are almost all sorted now, as well as a very nice man with a 20 foot pole, which I’m assured is no bad thing.

The Man Who Wished TV series is developing nicely too, though it’s getting kinda massive, so I’ve had to crack the old Dramatica out to try to to knock it into some kind of shape. It’s slowly wielding.

All in all, what with real work as well, it’s all a bit manic.

A couple of years ago I had a crack at NaNoWriMo, and the outcome was pretty much a complete novel entitled ‘The Elementalist’. I was quite proud of it at the time, but then went through the usual ‘oh, no, it’s rubbish’ paranoia that follows any intense period of work. So I stuck it away and never thought much more of it.

I did tinker with the idea of making it into a screenplay a short while later, but never got very far with it. Then, the other day  I happened to chance upon it, still sat quietly in its folder, so I took a quick ganders. ‘Blow me,’ I thought, ‘perhaps it’s not as bad as I remembered!’

It’s in need of a good tidy up, but the story is fairly solid, apart form the ending which I never really finished to my satisfaction, even though I’d worked out what I wanted to do. ‘It’s a bit of a shame to keep it hidden away like that,’ thought I, ‘someone might enjoy it.’ Then I realised I still had the domain I’d registered for it sitting lying dormant, so why not, thinks I, tidy the damn thing up and publish it online.

You can read the first ‘part’ here (I say part, it’s kind of half of the first chapter). I’ll tidy up a bit each week and publish it as a serial. You can read ‘part one’ here.

I’d welcome any feedback should you be kind enough to read it. I even set up a twitter account for the main character, Barin Elicerio, though I have no idea at this stage what I’ll do with it :-S

I finally managed to get all the principle protagonists involved in The Man Who Wished together for drinks and chats last night down at The Hope Inn in Hythe.

It was a great evening, made somewhat surreal by a rather drunk fan of Mark’s who kept coming over and trying to reenact scenes from Early Doors with him. Mark took it like the pro he is, though everyone grinned when fan’s husband appeared to rescue us and said, ‘Early Doors is magic but,’ and he turned to the hitherto ignored Ken, ‘you, Sir, are the greatest, taking out Regan like you did in The Sweeney. Classic!’.

Random fans aside, good chats were had (Ken was on fine form with some top class Tony Hopkins and Oliver Reed tales) and we even managed to talk about the short for brief moments. The upshot is it looks like we’re heading for a late August, possibly early September, shoot taking into account conventions and other commitments, which suits me just fine.

Most excitingly from my point of view, is that I’ve managed to spin out the whole backstory of The Man Who Wished into a fully fledged TV show concept, of which the short could be the first act. It’s something I’ll be pursuing in the coming weeks.

For the last few months I’ve been plotting and scheming to bring together a short film project. Last night the final key piece of the puzzle fell into place.

Some time in the next few months Mark Benton, Ken Colley, Ben Shockley and myself along with some talented designers and musicians will be getting together to make a short film entitled The Man Who Wished.

But we need your help! Yup, that’s right, it’s the old ‘help us fund out short’ plea.

However, with this project we’re doing things a bit differently. The film will be released under the Attribution Creative Commons license which means that if you invest, along with all the usual things we can offer (copy of DVD, signed piccies etc), you’ll also get a digital copy of the film to use in any way you see fit – sell, distribute, mashup, frame, eat etc. For profit, if you want.

If you’re interested, you can read the screenplay here and if you like what you read, you can clicky on the Indiegogo link just to the right there for more information on helping with a donation. Or there’s Paypal if you prefer to donate as much/little as you like.

There’s something brewing that I’m really quite excited about.  Based on years of grinding against a system that is outdated and regulated to the hilt, Clive Davies-Frayne (aka @filmutopia) has come up with the Lone Gun Manifesto, a way of making films for the 2.0 world:

Pretty exciting stuff huh? Well, I think so. When I first read this the other day it was like a great weight had fallen from my shoulders.

There are several things I find liberating about this. First and foremost is the fact that filmmaking this way makes the whole process so much easier. Obviously this won’t be for everyone, but for a techy geek like me, being in charge of the camera and the sound and the actors (as much as you can or want to control actors) is near heaven.

You’re not waiting on other people to sort things out, you’re not worrying whether the DP is getting the shots you want, you’re not worried about coverage, you’re not worried about lighting.  You’re just making a film, telling a story as simply and honestly as you can. Once you’re comfortable with the technology, it’s all about the story and the actors.

I rewatched Woody Allen’s ‘Manhatten’ last night. Utterly inspiring on all levels. The long master shots with the actors going in and out of frame. The dialogue that is to die for. The genius use of natural lighting. I could go on…

Another thing I like, and this I think is truly genius, is the whole Open Source aspect of it. Not only does it fly in the face of the whole Digital Economy Bill debacle that went on this week in Westminster, but it becomes a flexible way of making films that can share a core belief without being dogmatic.

Someone questioned Clive as to whether there was the need for such a manifesto with the the likes of Dogme 95 around. The beauty of this is that it isn’t a Dogma, it’s a practical mindset, and one that is so open that once you get past the ‘One Man (or Woman), One Camera’ scenario (and let’s face it, if you’re not doing that, you’re not doing Lone Gun), pretty much anything goes.  If you want to play safe, you can, if you want to experiment and make movies that break the mould, go for it. If you want special effects, fill your boots. If you think some bits are just plain silly, forget about them then. Whatever works for you and the project.

As Clive pointed out on his posterous blog this morning, there are different levels of doing this. You can be as hardcore as you like, you don’t need to be bound by anything. Just get the camera, microphone and actors and go (although make sure you have something worthwhile to say first).

For the short film I’m preparing at the moment (expect more news about that this week), I’m going as Lone Gun as is practically possible. However, the script wasn’t written with Lone Gun in mind, so I’ll have to make some concessions, but ultimately it will pretty much be me running the show, which is how I have always wanted it to be. Not because I’m a control freak, but because I love all aspects of filmmaking, and the bits of work I’ve done that I’m most pleased with were the bits I did on my todd.

There’s lots more about the whole manifesto that I could wax lyrical about all night, but I won’t on this occasion. I don’t think I’ve been this fired up to make a film in a very long time.

I’d be fascinated to know what everyone else thinks about it.

So like just about everyone else in the known universe, I went to see Avatar in 3D the other week. While the story was solid enough and the effects were just stunning, I walked out of the theatre feeling a bit empty.

It was the 3D. It just didn’t work for me. Admittedly I’d had this element of the film oversold to me by various parties, but ultimately I found it annoying for the following reasons:

1) Unless an object is in full view, it doesn’t really work. A ball in the centre of the screen works great, but as soon as the camera moves in and the edges of the ball touch the edge of the screen, the 3D effect is lost – sometimes distractingly so. Several times in the movie my eyes were pulled away from the action by a branch or something that was floating in the middle distance, apparently between me and the screen, suddenly snapping back as it hit the side of the screen.

2) Because of the depth element to the image, I found it took me a fraction of a second longer to get into the shot and adjust my brain to what I was seeing after each cut. Towards the end of the film my poor noodle was struggling to keep up with some of the faster cut action sequences, and I often found myself mentally two or three shots behind trying to process what I’d seen (This may just be me getting older and stupider…).

3) One of the key weapons a Director has in his cinematic armoury is depth of field. With the aid of a good focus puller he can draw the eye around a scene and add punctuation and stylistic elements to a shot that greatly aid the storytelling. This means that quite often much of the foreground and background is out of focus (the ‘filmic’ look), so burning embers falling down, apparently just in front of me, are also out of focus. When I try to look at them, they stay out of focus and it makes my eyes go funny.

I think this is possibly the biggest flaw with 3D. A perfect 3D system would be like life, where your eyes can alight on something in the near distance and everything in the background goes out of focus, then, when you shift your gaze to the wide blue yonder, objects near you go out of focus. But this is no good to the Director who is saying, ‘Oi! Over here – look at this wonderful actor, see our story’!

The problem, I suppose, is that 3D is cheating – you’re still looking at a two 2D images and your brain is being tricked into perceiving a depth that’s not really there.

The only solution to this would be to open up and have a wide depth of field, which would destroy every cinematographer living and make all films look crap. Even then it still wouldn’t work as everything would be in focus and it would still seem wrong.

I think for sports events, this is a good thing. You want a wide depth of field to keep the fast moving ball in focus at all times and get a much better sense of where the ball and players are in relation to each other, greatly enhancing the experience. But for cinema, it just doesn’t cut it.

It’s a shame as I went in really believing that 3D was upon us, but now I think it’s just a novelty, a gimmick that really adds no great value to cinematic storytelling. It’ll just take one major 3D film to flop (Alice in Wonderland?) and it’ll all be over (again).

What do yo think? Does 3D have a future for you? Do we just need to rethink or refine how we shoot it? Or is it dead in the water?

Things never quite go the way you expect, do they?

Last month, more on a whim than anything else, I applied for a management position within the company I work for, and ended up getting it. And rightly chuffed I was too.

So for the past two weeks I’ve ended up more or less doing two jobs as I tidy up affairs from my old IT Applications position and start my shiny new Marketing Communications role.

Rao and quite a few other people offline have, in the meantime, been asking about Return to Earth. Well, through all of this, I’ve had my thinking cap on, and thanks for some very good feedback from the previous draft I’ve finally nailed what the actual film is about.

I’ve also been playing with Mariner Software’s Contour, which has also made me realise that even though, after all these years, I thought I was starting to get what all this screenwriting malarkey was about, ultimately, I knew Jack. Quite a humbling experience.

Nonetheless, the fourth draft is starting to take shape now and muchly pleased I am with it too.

On top of that, I’ve been encouraged by various parties to make another short film. So, together with Blogger/Twitter friend @draconianone, we’ve been plotting a new featurette.

More details of this will emerge over the next few weeks as the script is finalised. Most of the actors are already lined up (the usual suspects plus a few surprises, hopefully).

Watch out for now customary Twitter onslaught of begging/pleading for finance to begin!

Trust me, it’ll be pure gold.

A couple of years ago I helped shoot and edit this little ditty by Ken Colley.

Alligator from Andy Coughlan on Vimeo.

In the spirit of all things Spiderman, I thought it was time to make a fresh start with the old blog here and try to do something useful with it.

My new decade resolution is to post more.

Promise.

No, really!

Anyway, best get back to the writing now. Got a nice little screenplay coming together.

If anyone is actually still listening, say ‘Hi’ below…

I wondered if I might ask a bit of a favour of you?

If you have time, and want to feel all warm and squishy, could I trouble you to add either a link to Geeky Gifts on your own site/blog, or, if your feeling uber-generous, perhaps one of these nifty banner ads wot I ‘ave made?

If you’d like reciprocal links back to your site, let me know and I’ll set up links to you from this blog (if there isn’t one already) and the Return to Earth site.

How’s that!? A two for one offer!

I’ve got four banners in two sizes -

1) 120×60 Generic Button:

2) 120×60 Film Funding Oriented Button:

3) 468×94 Generic Banner:

4) 468×94 Film Funding Banner:

5) The Text Link:

As an extra incentive, the owners of the top five sites that refer the most people through to Geeky Gifts get a credit on the film. Can’t say fairer than that.

With Geeky Gifts being primarily a UK thing, if any of you fab people beyond the shores of Blighty want to get involved, let me know and I’ll knock up some Return to Earth banners too. Let me know below…

Let’s make this movie!