MR CLEAN [the short film] – has been nominated for three awards in June’s edition of IndieX Film Fest! Nice. And during the time of writing this post, I found out that we won the award for Best Special Makeup – for Lee Bailes and Mike Strick! Congrats team!
We were nominated in three categories (2 in genre categories and 1 in technical categories):
Mike is an amazing sculpter and made the tentacle and severed arm effect. And I made the intestines, applied the blood etc . So it’s more Mike’s award than mine. And of course, Rinat and Darwin were totally essential for puppeteering the tentacles and helping us get it right on screen. 🙂 – Visit Mike Strick’s website.
This is great news. This is our 4th award and it now brings the other award nominations to 3. According to their context submission figures, we made it in the top 12 %:
And you might notice the use of the special wording: ‘the short film’ above….
That’s right, I am finally working on the feature version of MR CLEAN! I’m still in the planning stage, but work is definitely under way on bringing the feature script to life. I usually pretty much just ‘pants’ my feature scripts (as in write them with very little to no planning). Yes I know, it’s a shocking admission. But having reached various points in past feature scripts, where I need to do a rewrite, I have since recognised the value of trying to properly plan out the task ahead, to make it less of a nightmare to fix, once the inevitable first draft is done. In the past, because the film was in my head, I would just blurt it all out. But as time passes and you need to question details, and long periods of crazy workload get in the way, and you have to pick up the piece and start going back over the plot, to fix things, you realise that having more planning data to hand would make the whole process so much easier rather than relying on memory.
I’ve been waiting until this moment to properly tackle the script. I’ve been in a hell of crazy work load and long work days for the last three months and have been officially put on furlough, due to the effects of Covid on my company’s financials, so this is literally the first moment I’ve had to properly sit, find a quiet space and devote actual thinking time to the project – instead of trying to do that and being constantly interrupted by my lovely partner, the job and life. I’ve got some resting to do first, to build up the energy for this rewrite. The scripts I’ve been writing for work and the pace that I’ve been working at, have really taken it out of me. But this is a perfect time to build up my energy, polish my concept, flesh out my characters and work on the beats / conflicts etc. I have two months before I go back, although at reduced pay. And yes, weirdly, rather than worry about the world, my financial situation or fate of my job, or this virus, I can only think for now of putting the work in, to get MR CLEAN out of my head and down on paper for others to read… because it’s itching to get written already.
Fingers crossed that I get to do that. I mean life has a way of getting in between of me and my creative goals. But let’s hope that I can use this time for good. Because I hope that if I can pull off what’s in my head, you’re going to love it. Who cares if we don’t have the budget for it yet… and no one can really make a film with the virus screwing things up….
SVEN GUNNAR (Directed by Darwin Reina) has picked up its first award – an honourable mention from the GLOBAL SHORTS film festival! Congrats to the entire team!
It’s great! And coming after a few more recent official film festival selections, SVEN GUNNAR is well on its way. Not bad for a film I co-wrote and the first film that I’d shot for someone else.
However, It’s up against a huge amount of other films, so competition is high. But it’s still great and we’re very honoured for MR CLEAN to get selected. And thanks again to Karen Keslen for updating the posters with the new laurels, and to the entire team. Couldn’t have done it without you guys! No really!
And…
We’re also happy to get another selection for SVEN GUNNAR too – our second Official Selection from the “Southeast Regional Film Festival” Jacksonville Florida USA. Awesome!
SVEN GUNNAR fest #2
SVEN GUNNAR fest #2
2nd film festival selection for SVEN GUNNAR
After a tough week of work and stressing about life around the virus, and two festival rejections for MR CLEAN so far, this is good news indeed.
It’s such great news to see that this particular short film, had won yet another award – despite its flaws. I think that there is something in the theme that shines through and speaks for itself.
If you want to read more about the film and what we were trying to achieve – try this.
Btw – people having been asking us when can we see the film? or any of our films? – Please understand that the way this works, usually after producing and then post-production (where you grade and sound mix etc) the work on the film is not yet done – not if you hope to get the film into festivals and eventually find some kind of distribution for the film.
First you usually have to get the film into festivals, so that you can be shortlisted for potential selection / consideration. The whole process can take the better part of a year from the point when you start submitting the film, and easily up to 1.5 years, depending on how wide a spread of the film festivals that you’ve submitted to, to wait for them to announce their selections. Usually the better festivals prefer if they are getting the premiere screening. This is different to the premiere that you arrange for the film yourself. But it means that some festivals prefer to have first dibs on your film, before anyone else can include it in their festival. So you’ve got to be really careful how you plan things.
The reason for the film festivals, is that having your peers tell you your film is worthy, means a lot. It’s partly to reward the cast and crew / team behind the film; to reward them for their hard work, but also have something good on their CVs to help other creatives / agents etc take note and consider them for more future productions. But also, if your film picks up a number of awards, it means that the film might be worthy of being picked up for distribution. Such is the case for DFTB, which I think has been picked up for screening on Latin American TV. I think that this means sadly that we can’t really show the film for up to 3 years. The TV channel have exclusive rights to show the film during that time. But eventually when those rights expire, we want to get that up onto a streaming platform for everyone to see it.
In the case of the recent films we’ve produced / shot, like MR CLEAN and SVEN GUNNAR – those are soon to be entered into festivals. Then we’ve still got to finish editing and post production on LOVELY TO MEET YOU (intended premiere in April in Barcelona) and MAI PIU etc. So I hope you can appreciate that it could be a long time before anyone gets to see them. But again the dream is to get them up onto streaming platforms. We do very much want people to see and enjoy our work. As do the entire team behind each film. Sadly the whole business of filmmaking doesn’t really make sense and takes a long time to usually see any benefit from it and to be able to show the films – unless you aim your sights a lot lower…
This is why I am shooting COMFORT HIM, a film which I am mainly designing to be seen on the internet. It may go into festivals etc. But I just want people to watch it, hopefully like it and share it. We just want to be able for you to see something of ours. It’s why I will also be releasing some older short films for viewing.
However, what we would very much like to do is – we want to see how many people want to see these films and to see if we can arrange a special (limited time period) online premiere for them. If you like the sound of that – please comment / like and share this post to spread the word. Give us an idea of numbers and tell us where you are, so we can work out if the online thing is a good idea.
I posted that last update – the review of 2018, mainly because, no matter how embarrassing some of that baloney is, it throws some interest new light on what’s happened since or rather what was (and is) going on in the background on the filmmaking side and I thought it would be good for me to do a catch up on my creative goals.
Also, this is not an attack. This is a journal of my creative endeavours and I am just needing to explain what is going on and why it has happened. Please do not hold any ill will here. We’re all human, and all fallible and I for one and far from perfect.
And this is a cursed post. I’ve tried around 20 times to get this damn blog to post this text…
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