Just a few days to go now to DigiFest, and the public premiere of House of Donn. I’d normally be getting nervous by now, but with a weekend of gigs to get through (watch out Cliftonville and Broadstairs!) I can’t quite get my head round it all.

Everything seems to be in place now. A gaggle of KFKers went down to Chambers yesterday with the DVDs and found out that the inhouse DVD player would in fact play none of them! I need to double check, but I’m sure my DVD player plays all of them, so well take that along and all should be well.

There was a fantastic piece about it in this weeks Folkestone Herald, a great big picture of Ken and the headline ‘Star Wars Actor to give lessons in Movie Making’. The press release has been sent off to loads of local press and radio, so I’m hoping for more coverage over the weekend. It should be a great evening. Big up to David for doing an amazing job with the publicity.

And the good news is that Clayton and Colin finished their short, Mr Bubbles, in plenty of time, so that will be shown as well.

We’re already thinking ahead to DigiFest II and III, and there seems to be quite a few people in the local area we might be able to call upon to be the ‘guest of honour.’

On the writing front, I managed to realise a techie Dramatica dream this week. For ages I’ve wanted a way of automatically parsing out the information from the Plot Sequence Report and Character Report into the somewhat convoluted structures I’ve developed over the years around which I write my screenplays. I finally managed to write a PHP script that would do it all automatically, saving me hours, if not days, of tedious manual work. Marvellous!

I’ve also been watching Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Three Colours Trilogy over the past couple of weeks. I can see why Chris Knowles recommended I watch them after he saw House of Donn, there’s loads of stylistic shots and tricks I’ve used that Kieslowski also seemed to like to use (reflections, pauses, fades etc). It’s almost as if I was subconsciously channeling the man. It’s a bit freaky, really, but it’s given me huge confidence that some of the ideas that I’d thought might be a bit silly are in fact not silly at all and that I’m heading in the right direction.

They are fantastic movies – proper cinema in the Mamet-mentality almost silent movie type thing. The dialogue is very sparse, it’s all in the visual storytelling. Amazing, magical stuff.