Stability & Success - 'Only Doubt Me If You Want Something To Be Sorry About'

News good and bad really… Where to begin? Lets get the bad stuff out of the way. As with all unrecognised (… as of yet) filmmakers, I struggle with the one thing that many of us do – Money!

However, its not as if the job for a writer is advertised as well as adverts for a plumber, electrician, secretary, accountant, or my personal favourite; I.T technician. I have stressed many a time to the younger writers; “Embrace other trades within production – Don’t be JUST a writer” by this I mean, try and learn what you can about producing, directing, cinematography, editing even acting. You know, just try and tick more boxes – MAKE yourself more employable. Add more strings to your bow and add to your IMDB credits and showreel after all, people watch more than they read, employers are just the same.

Do you know what really pisses me off? How we’re always expected to work for free with promises of “maybe” being paid if the film is a success further down the line. Fellow filmmakers, it’s a mutual pain we have probably all experienced. It makes you wonder though, would any of the trades and jobs I named above work for free… Why not? You don’t need a reputation to be a sales clerk, team manager as you’re sure to get paid, even minimum wage – Makes you wonder and just hope that this all changes pretty soon.

... Plus, we're the few expected to pay to get job alerts and our festival submissions, I mean, come on!

I wanted to share my latest experience. As part of an undergraduate course, I finally got to understand exploitation at its worst. Whilst some courses only require students to work four weeks others require them to take an entire year. Let me get this straight – this is a GOOD idea “BUT” lets get another thing straight “WORKING FOR FREE” when you’ve got rent to pay ISN’T!

In Bournemouth, the opportunities, even working for free in film are highly constricted but I worked for ‘FONIX’ for a month, told that I was going to be helping out with shoots for some great events like the ‘Bournemouth Air Festival’, ‘Bristol International Hot Air Balloon Fiesta’ & ‘Notting Hill Carnival’ but working for free. The business sells massive screens like the ones you see plastered around X Factor and stuff but the other part of the business seems to take pleasure in exploiting the shit out of students to make trips to London and back, spend their hours locking down ALL the research behind each and every event, doing VoxPops (the silly-named expression to interviewing random people on the street, regarding a subject matter), orchestrating shoots from the ground up, all the way from contacting the client yourself through to the edit. In addition any client that pays for Fonix’s services, lets say £3,500 for a promotional video is also totally down to you to orchestrate, respond to emails and texts into the night, the client putting all the pressure on you (technically the sub-contracted intern) as your employer hardly ever turns up and is renowned by most as annoying and talks till you're blue in the face as well as ‘always expecting rather than asking.’

To nail it down, you’re given some decent equipment to play with and shoot stuff for your showreel and work with some other awesome students who know their stuff BUT you’re expected to take control of clients (paid and unpaid), make trips and cover several shoots…  Just working entirely for free unless you covered a couple of days away, vision mixing for the cricket.

I covered the awkward month I was expected to and then after another email from him having expressed “I’m disappointed” despite the fact at that point he hadn’t even respected all the time he’d gotten out of me for free nor the work and effort I put in, when I’ve got other things to do, I basically told him to go shove it. Especially, as its interns who end up saving this guys ass every year covering these essential events and projects. He needed them far more than these guys needed the placement, they could've done elsewhere.

I think that most students, being aged 18 – 22 still haven’t developed the awareness to know when they’re being exploited and usually tuck their tail between their legs and the other employees in the office, I made good friends with (THEY were really nice, which is what makes it such a shame), were telling me this is exactly what the guy did and the less they were involved with him the better. Anyway, it doesn’t matter what age you are, I’ve never worked for free, since I was 13 years old unless its on my own or other peoples film projects and there is ALWAYS respect – and manners cost nothing.

Onto the good stuff - Straight after I walked out of that joke of a job, I received an email for ‘The Short Film Cinema’ in Leicester, saying that I had made the shortlist to be screened the following month and recently, I have just been given another at ‘5 Lamps Films’ in Derby, which was great… Marking the latest success in the same place I was born.

I have also decided to embark on a few more projects (big surprise) to take some interesting stuff with me to the London Screenwriters Festival this year.

Fuck me, the technical constraints I had on getting my pilot webisode for my web series was a nightmare, in editing you’ve got two royal sods known as ‘rendering’ and ‘exporting’ that take hours to tell you if you’ve got a film of the right size with no glitches that can be uploaded to your desired internet platforms… I was going out of my mind and after months and several repeated apologies that really fucked with my reputation, I finally got it up and running and it came out pretty well.

There were two MA groups of filmmaking postgraduates that sought me out to write their scripts as well (not bad, seeing as they’re technically supposed to be two years ahead of me), which should be online for all to see in a couple of months.

New TV Series Project - Psychics

Yes, money has really been torturous but with the latest power of TV, there’s been a few things that has caught my eye and got me thinking in time for me to develop some of my own work, involving a new TV series focussed project depicting on our psychic abilities, being oversaw by an international psychic expert, Heidi Sawyer – turns out I’m chiefly a ‘Clairvoyant’ that explains my occasional ability to see how people need to be spoken to, see a goal and seem to have a strong vision of what goes where to get there and my freakish occasional occurrences of being able to see as well as hear stuff before it happens was well explained. More to come on that one.

INSPIRATIONAL COMPARISONS

New Feature Film Project - REALM

Imagine a world where we’re taken in as refugees, after a desperate voyage into outer space, being the last hope for humanities existence by a new civilisation after the death of Earth. New powers dictated by our birthstones are possible here, battles joining ancient and futuristic weaponry together in a completely new landscape and re-imagined societal structure. My protagonist ahs had his past kept secret from him, whilst living in guilt over the death of his mother around a decade ago and when the ball drops… Oh, boy! By far the most ambitious and high-budgeted project I’ve ever attempted but really like the characters and world I’ve got nailed down so far.

New Media Approach - The Augmented Non-Linear Narrative Film Project


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This tough bastard, I wanted to explore after absolutely refusing to write another bullshit essay for university. I am shit at academic writing or at best… Borderline! When you’re approaching 30 years old, you don’t want to be ‘average’ at stuff anymore, its not enough… Not for me anyway, so what the hell is this thing?

Okay, well, I used to love those adventure books when I was a kid and I also love video games with a choice you could make that would affect my next objective and alter the end of the story. Imagine watching a brand new film when at certain points it would freeze frame and you would be confronted with a choice of what you did/used/said next? Not only does this engross the viewer within the narrative in a new way, never done before but to be honest, isn’t this where media is headed anyway… Media seeks to deliver more and more choice and power to the viewer, so… Well, yeah, its early stages but the end result should be interesting.