Another hard day at the pub

So I spent the majority of yesterday down the student union bar. Now don’t fuckin’ start, with all your abuse, and time wasting student scum emails!! On first sight, John, Harry and I may not have appeared to be the hive of productivity that we in fact were, but don’t you worry many a production problem has been solved over a pint of the black stuff! Yesterday was spent planning and we did in all fairness address many issues that have been troubling me. We are still in need of a Producer and this worries me, I have been thinking about it a lot and the more I think, the more I know I shouldn’t be doing it all by myself. It’s all very well giving Tim and John Co-Producer credits for their efforts but I cannot Write/Direct/Produce, I’ll die! My problem with this realisation is that nobody at Uni wants to be a producer, for some unknown reason producer isn’t the sort after profession that direction or writing or even director of photography is. I shouldn’t complain really, I have no desire whatsoever to be a Producer, I’m an artist darling! Anyway I have something up my sleeve and will elaborate in due course if anything comes of it.

So during our SU session we discuss everything from location hunting to the use of sets for certain set-ups and how to gain a little more cash for the venture. It has been a valuable session and has put stuff in perspective a great deal. We’re planning to arrange for Harry’s brother Tom, incidentally a former barman at our SU bar, to produce t-shirt designs and have them printed by the new year, for sale to the public and crew exclusives to show off in lol Teaser posters are also on their way and I’ll let you know as soon as I have more news. Well this is enough guff from me, night folks.

Love,

K

An update on our filmic fun

Hi folks,
This is my first blog of a very long time and it's starting to become embarrassing the infrequency of my blogging exploits. I do truly, honestly, plan to blog once a day from now on but that may well be a shallow promise. I have a remarkable amount of shit going on at the moment and although Foreign Bodies is a huge part of that it’s also the Production and Development side of things that get my attention first.

So what can I tell you about that’s been going on recently? Well the script is still under review, we have it in with various trusted parties, who are reading and evaluating it for us and have been providing some wonderful feedback, really constructive, positive stuff that’s enabling us to move forward and make it even better. In fact I have a meeting this afternoon with young Mr. John Taylor where we’re going to thrash out some more changes to the narrative.

Next, I’ve been getting quotes for equipment, some at crazy stupid prices and some at pretty good rates actually. I’ll keep you posted on that because we still don’t 100% know what format we’re going to shoot in. I was encouraged, over the weekend, to plump for 35mm and bite the bullet, however that’s news for another blog.

Thanks to Mark, our illustrious designer, the campaign to get folks interested in working on set of Foreign Bodies has got off to a great start. Tico, my field chair, distributed an email inviting any students that are interested in being involved with the project to check out this webpage for more information. We’ve had a slow, if positive response to that email. It isn’t to be expected to get a deluge of responses from the student community because they’re so bloody apathetic.

Anywho, things are ticking over very nicely, I plan to start Video Blogging in the next couple of weeks which will be a treat for you all(!) and there’s also going to be a meeting of everyone who has expressed an interest in the project at some point in the coming weeks here in Cheltenham. I will keep everyone up-to-date with the specific times and places etc. so that we get maximum turn out. It’ll probably take the form of a little bit of waffle from me, followed by some kinda Q&A with John and I so the folks who are dedicating the precious time to our project can grill us on the ins and outs of our plans.

Okay well that’s enough from me for now.

K

Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the Moulin Rouge!

So I have been far too lax in starting this fine blog, which I suppose isn't a very good start to the production of a film that is going to take every ounce of effort and energy I have, but urgh-idunno *shrug*

So yeah, apologies to anyone reading this but I have actually been too tied up with dealing with events occurring in the real world to put pen to metaphoric paper on this thing.

Anyway that aside I'm here now and here we jolly well are indeed with Clotting Factor (still a working title, John and I are still debating.) The flick, or concept, or project as we'll call it up to the point that any actual film / video is shot, is really coming along. Lots and lots of progress has been made in the summer months since this mentalist journey towards the filmmaking abyss started. But I'm getting ahead of myself, I really think that I should start from the beginning in an attempt to explain a little more of the background of this thing:

So I was studying abroad in a land far far away (America) and land of twenty-four-hour drive thru that feed the obese backsides that ultimately end up in the twenty-four-hour funeral parlors. Like three vermin feed off one another until only the most disgusting remains. *shudders* enough of that... So during my time in the land of freedom (ahem) I not only developed an intimate relationship with a little girl with striped stockings, rosie red hair and pigtails named Wendy (damn her tasty treats) but I also managed to squeeze out the idea behind Clotting Factor.

Whilst sitting in my first play writing class with the ever delectable and entertaining Helen Walker, I realised something that is really what we're taught in screen writing 101 but it never really hit home in this way. Maybe it was the different environment, maybe it was the accent, maybe it was the force with which Helen told us but for some reason it actually made sense to me. "Write what you know" simple. You'd think so wouldn't you? Well one of the problems I've always felt was that "Well my life isn't exciting enough to take from in an imaginative manner." well maybe it is...

So Clotting Factor is the culmination of the sum total of my 24 years as a Haemophiliac coupled with my experience at work, home, living with work colleagues and some personal experience of relationships and what actually matters in life.

The script is now at 2nd draft stage and about a month after returning to the UK in June I enlisted John's help as co-writer to develop the characters, help make the more rounded and facilitate (damn all those bullshit marketing meetings I sat in) the process of developing the script into something more than a "student script." I find working like this and bouncing ideas off one another far more productive than sitting on my own, in a cold, lonely, dark room, hammering away on a keyboard with only a cat named Tabitha for company much more productive.

Anywho... here we are, a couple of months in, 10 grand of funding mainly from personal investment secured and ten months of development ahead of us. Different people are coming on board each day, we have graphic artists to work on storyboarding, poster artists to produce teaser posters as well as sound experts giving us advice on music and we've even already got some quotes from DP's.

So I think that's just about enough crap from me, I'll write some more tomorrow, night folks,

K