Wednesday 27 October 2010

Bollywood appearance & London Screenwriters Festival 2010 :-)

Well I entered all the competitions I was going to enter. Didn't win any of the ones announced so far though I did score quite highly in my readers assessment for the London Screenwriters Festival Short Script competition which is reassuring. I'm also getting regular likes and nice comments from the material I have put on Circalit which hosted its own LSWF competition.

I think maybe my "teacher goes berserk and everyone ends up deceased" short script Under Siege may have been a bit too strong for some tastes! Will try and do it myself now free from the constraints of only having 5 characters. Just need to find a secondary school that's willing to let me shoot a blood bath!

The very good news is that I am now going to the London Screenwriters Festival courtesy of Screen West Midlands who are sponsoring 10 West Midlands based writers to attend. The line up looks very comprehensive and fab and its a credit to the team behind it. Apparently all the speakers are giving their time for free to make it happen which is most excellent indeed.

In other competition news I have sent 3 out of the 4 genre entries allowed for The Big Idea competition which deadlines this Friday with just my teens Sci-Fi idea kidZ:The Trident Inheritance still to go. This has to to be whittled down from 5k+ words to just 700 before tomorrow when I head down to London.

November is going to be busy with prepping a trailer short for my feature idea Finders.Keepers. with my fantastic new producer/DoP team and also doing another full treatment for another "hot" project i.e. one with a producer already attached.

The bad news is that due to actor availability becoming something of a kitten herding exercise my 30 minute short Trouble At My Door has been pushed back to the New Year - hopefully February half-term. Congratulations though to precociously talented cast member Kia Pegg who has landed the part of Vicious Vicky in the 3D feature Horrid Henry.

I also need to decide if its worth having a bash at the Terry Pratchett prize for an 80 -150k novel that is set in any time but now and is physics-ly possible i.e. no ray guns etc. That deadlines 31/12 and has a publishing deal attached.

So busy, busy, busy and thats even before I've gone and networked like a mad thing at LSWF 2010. It'll be great to meet some of my Facebook writer friends for the first time.

Finally I had the chance to appear as an extra last weekend in Bollywood film Tezz which is shooting around Birmingham and stars Slumdog Millionaire's Anil Kapoor. Its an Indian version of Speed apparently.

It was really interesting to see a big production shooting on 35mm in operation. There was loads of preparation for lighting and rehearsals but few takes. Think I prefer shooting on HD/DV as you can get as many takes as you want without worrying about the cost of processing etc. It definitely gives you more scope to do a number of takes thus giving more for the editor to play with.

Big ups to Sindy Campbell the Filming Liaison Coordinator from Film Birmingham who was really busy and doing a great job making everything run smoothly for this really big (70 crew!) shoot.

Would like to see more big productions like this coming to Birmingham as its A GREAT PLACE to shoot films.

I'm in a few crowd scenes and am quite close to Anil Kapoor at times so it will be interesting to see if I make it to the big screen.

Anyway onwards and upwards!

TAFN B x

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