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.

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!

Fifty-One people have pointed out that the new concept for the Peugeot 506 looks absolutely amazing. I can’t find a negative thing to say about it, either. However, none of them point out that of the eleven concepts that have been revealed by Peugeot since 91, only 2 have been made and eight had funding scrapped even before the concepts were unveiled.

http://moblog.net/map/blog/findme/

Inspired by Tim Clague’s post about how Marvel write their comics, I’ve been inspired to take hold of an idea that has been bubbling about in my head for some time now; namely that I should write the next draft of Return to Earth initally as a StoryBoard, and then, once I’m happy with the structure, write it back to screenplay format.

I have no idea if it will work, but it seems to make so much sense to work this way, primarily to force myself to think in images and structure the story visually.  

The notion struck me a few years ago while I was reading The Conversations, Michael Ondaatje’s superb book where he discusses the art of editing with Walter Murch.  Walter describes how he likes to take screenshots of takes and line them up to see how they cut together. 

Now I’m straight from the Murch school of editing and think the key to any film is the cut, the juxtaposition of the images has enormous power.  So it got me thinking, why not apply this process to the writing process, it may even free up the right brain a bit more?

We’ll see.  

I still don’t know quite how I’m going to do it.  I have StoryBoard Quick 5, but I suspect this might be a bit limiting.  FrameForge is tempting, purely because I can build the moonbase as a virtual construct and set the characters free in there.  Drawing it freehand also seems like a sensible idea, it would have a quicker turnaround, though I may end up drowning in paper.

Whatever, I’ll post up some of the results on here…

We all want to make films but none of us have any money.  Well, I don’t anyway.

So what to do?

Think like a businessman…

Give poeple something they need. 

What do they need?

They need to know if they are going to have to take their umbrella out with them.

http://brollyornot.co.uk

Tell all your friends (in the UK, anyway).  If we can make it go viral, perhaps we’ll be able to make a film!

Next stop -  the Moon…

Whilst I’m still in the middle of my mad affair with Twitter, I’ve created a Scribomatic account you can now follow to get alerts of all the new blog posts from around the Scribosphere.

Follow @scribomatic.

Not sure of it’s of any use to anyone, but here are the top 20 posts in terms of click-throughs from the widget over the past couple of months:

Bear in mind that these click-throughs are probably only a small percentage of the visits to any of these blogs, but it’s good to know that the Widget is doing it’s job. 

If you think there’s any worth in them, or would like to see them published more regularly, let me know…

Tom tagged me on the seven-songs-that-have-shaped-my-world-recently meme…

1) Radiohead – All I Need:  I cannot stop listening to this song.  When I hear the opening refrain I get this big deep satisfied smile on my face.  I have no idea why.  I just gets me…

2) Mozart – String Quartet No 1 in G: The first movement of this string quartet just blows me away every time.  I’m hoping I can use this in my Sci-Fi film.

3) Ludovico Einaudi – Svanire: Another one that gets me deep down every time I listen to it.  Beautiful and melancholy.

4) R.E.M. – Kinda lost interest in R.E.M. after ‘UP’, but Mr Richards stood out like a sore thumb on their latest album: Catchy, slightly bonkers.  Love it.

5) Muse – Knights of Cydonia:  Been learning this one to play with the band.  Possibly the most complex song I’ve ever tried to learn, I don’t think thay play the same chord progression twice and the riff at the end is just monstrous.  Absolute genius.

6) Moby – Ooh Yeah: The latest Moby album really took me back to the late nineties when Play came out. With that and Gia Milinovich getting me excited about the new X-Files movie, there were times when it felt like 1998 all over again…

7) Robbie Rotten – Lazyscouts: A cracking tune (and my current ringtone).  Although it wasn’t in the show, it reminds me of when I took my son to see the Lazy Town Live back in April.   He had the same expression on his face I probably had when I was his age and watched Star Wars for the first time. Complete Awe (and perhaps it was even better for him as Sportacus was already his hero, and there he was in the flesh on stage in front of him – magic!).

I won’t tag anyone specifically because I’m sure all the people I know have done it.  If you haven’t, consider yourself tagged…

Inspired by the conversation started by Documentally which spread across the Internet over the past few days on being creative (which spanned Phreadz, Seesmic , Qik and Skitch) I thought I’d follow in the footsteps of the Dragon and have a crack at the Waterstones ‘What’s Your Story’ competition before it closed yesterday evening.

The result, ‘The Gap’, came out of musings I had whilst wandering along the seafront yesterday lunchtime, thinking further on my response on the Skitch page:

Clicky to embiggen…

I was quite pleased with it in the end, though it was a little rushed – started it about half nine and had uploaded by half ten in time for the baby’s evening feed.

The only bit, and I’m putting my theologians hat on here for a minute, that I’m not happy with, is ‘self-sustaining’.  I was actually thinking of something else, and really, whilst it sounds OK, if I’m to stick to what I wrote on Dietrich Bonhoeffer for my final degree dissertation, then creation isn’t self-sustaining, but sustained by God speaking, which, at the time completely blew me away and has some very interesting ramifications for the whole debate on creativity and creating…

And, strangely enough, the Dragon’s Den vibe rather forebode Loic’s big announcement today…

Image via Wikipedia

So this is my first blog post with WordPress, and I must say I’m very impressed with it. The plugin support is just awesome.  So far, I’ve got Seesmic, Zemanta, Stats, Akismet and Twitter Tools loaded.  Marvellous.

I really like the way all the tagging and categories works.  Very, very cool.