Routines...

This is me after a twelve-hour writing day on Saturday:


For some reason I've never been able to find a writing routine that I can stick to.

Some weekends I get up early (early meaning 10am on a Saturday) and work through the day, and occasionally into the evening like this weekend. Sometimes that won't work at all and I'll either end up staring at a blank page until lunchtime until I give up or I'll just start in the evening. Weekday evenings are the same - sometimes I'll start as early as 7.30pm, sometimes I'll decide I'm not going to do any writing, then get the urge at midnight and do a couple of hours until 2am (recently this has been happening a lot). Some weekdays I'll find writing after a day at work unbearable and I'll put everything off until the weekend. Some weekends I'll find the idea of spending all of my free time writing unbearable and put it off until the weekday evenings.

The difficulty I find is deciding on what kind of routine to go with on a particular day. On Saturday I kept meaning to stop, but never reached a point where I actually wanted to. On Sunday I realised I wasn't in any kind of mood for writing and spent the day watching action films instead, which I justified by calling it research (and to a point it was). Then I went to the pub.

Other things that happened this weekend - I watched these films (mostly on Sunday when I gave up writing): Lakeview Terrace (not bad, Patrick Wilson is awesome), Yes Man (doesn't really work as a film, and Jim Carrey romancing Zooey Deschanel is creepy, but interesting enough to keep me awake at 2 in the morning), The Wave (awesome, but I made the mistake of watching the alternate ending straight after I watched the film, thus confusing my perceptions), Best of the Best 2 (surprised me by not being awful, excellent genre cast and a tight script - enjoyed it much more than I thought I would), Rumble in Hong Kong (had to watch on fastforward due to bad dubbing and a terrible transfer), Supercop (pretends it's a film about Michelle Yeoh being a Supercop but actually she doesn't get to do all that much), and The Streetfighter (which was awesome and I can't believe I waited this long to watch it).

I also found out what it's like to be in your own Twilight Zone episode by visiting my local supermarket half an hour before closing (which through bad planning I ending up doing two nights in a row). So presumably because it was late, cold and miserable the local high street was looking pretty desolate at 9.30pm and I seemed to be the only person venturing out at that time. When I got to the shop it looked like half the lights were turned out and there was no one inside. I stood there for a moment wondering if it was closed, staring at the opening times, checking my watch, questioning my sanity and so on, then gingerly stepped close enough for the doors to open. Inside it was silent and empty. There were staff members around stacking shelves - I kept expecting them to tell me they were closed. But they just ignored me. It's a very odd feeling to be the only customer in a huge shop with half the lights turned out and the only other human beings acting like you're not there. It reminded me of the scariest Twilight Zone episode I ever saw where a woman goes into a department store seconds before closing and is terrorised by the mannequins, before turning into one herself:

Hit the Big Time LA screening...

So a lot of my friends and colleagues are in LA at the moment for AFM and though I'm not sure I'd be of any use to them at all I do wish I was there, mainly because of this:

The background for anyone irregular followers is that as the finishing touches were being put to Ten Dead Men I was approached by JC Mac who plays Parker in the film about writing a spin-off featuring his character and his partner Garrett, played by Jason Lee Hyde. I agreed and sometime before Christmas 2007 I wrote a short film script - around 15 pages long. This was then taken out of my hands for a while and went through several rewrites before it came back to me (hence I share the writing credit).

The short started shooting in January 2008 while I started work on the feature, which I agreed to do on the basis that I would get sole writing credit (a drama documented here and here back when I used to refer to everyone I worked with by name). Back then it seemed like I'd been really lucky with independent films - Ten Dead Men had started shooting almost immediately after I finished writing the script and now I had a short that had already started filming in LA, Utah and Vegas. I went along to one of the UK shoots on the weekend in February 2008 that they wrapped shooting. I thought that would be it - another short in the can.

It is now November 2009 and the now 29 minute long short has finally been completed. That's around a year and a half in post-production. I don't know the full story, but I do know it's passed through the hands of a number of editors and has run into numerous problems in terms of the UK and US footage being shot in different formats - in other words technical problems that I have no idea about.

While all this was going I was writing the feature script, finishing the first draft in April 2008. I did another couple of drafts that year and a fourth earlier this year (I think it was this year anyway). This week I finished the fifth draft. Overall I'm really happy with it - it's my only all-out comedy script and is therefore a pretty valuable writing sample, and despite having rewritten it five times parts of it still make me laugh when I read through it. There's probably a rule somewhere about cutting the bits that make you, the writer, laugh but I have it on good authority that it made a few other people chuckle too so I think I'm safe.

Whether anything will happen with the feature from here I can't say - I don't even know how the short film turned out yet. But I am looking forward to seeing it and hope the LA screening goes well. If anyone reading this is based in LA and would like to go along feel free send me an e-mail and I'll give you the details. You can watch a brief promo for the short here.

Adventures in Poundland...

You have to read this.

There is an explanation provided, but to give you a little backstory my dad has become a scholar of Poundland and the odd things you can buy there. He has been documenting his findings on a website for the last two years.

Some time ago I was in the 99p Store in Brighton and found the 'Funny Thing' which I then presented to dad as an example of how much of a difference the penny makes.


And last month Andrea, Brothers Pete & Tim and I had a particularly profitable trip to a newly opened Poundland in Worthing, which is why I now have too many clowns on my desk. We sent the photos for comment.

Halloween...

The lack of posts is not due to a lack of things to post about - there's loads. It's just having the time to post them that I'm having trouble with.

This week I'm finishing off an old script (draft 5) and starting a whole new one (draft 1!). My deadline for both is next Wednesday. I've pretty much finished redrafting the old one, just want to do one more dialogue pass. I'm on page 11 of the brand new one. I have a lot of work to do.

Anyway, last weekend I was best man at my best friend's wedding (no reference to the film intended). It was an excellent day and my speech went down pretty well despite containing obscure references to vampire films. It was Halloween after all.

The party in the evening was fancy dress which was awesome.

This is Brother Pete preparing syringes of glowing stuff:

Andrea went as a Stepford Wife, complete with loose wires:

I went as Top Dollar from The Crow which in hindsight was a little obscure, plus I couldn't really pull off an authentic Michael Wincott voice:

We did eventually leave the Travelodge and made it to the party:

The bride and groom went as Catherine Deneuve and David Bowie from The Hunger and looked awesome:

Halloween parties are ace.

Last night we went to a Halloween themed Moviebar and Brother Pete showed In Case of Zombies, which I don't think I've posted about before so here it is:



Brother Pete would probably blog about this himself but he is busy editing/animating a music video which needs to be finished by the end of the month. Meanwhile, Andrea is busy doing NaNoWriMo. My flat is full of busy creative people.

More Ten Dead Men stuff...

Yeah, there is still more Ten Dead Men stuff to talk about.

Is it really sad that I rented my own film from LoveFilm just to see how long it would take to be posted to me as if that were somehow a measure of popularity (and completely ignoring all the really bad reviews we got on the LoveFilm website)? Well I did it anyway, and the answer is almost exactly six months.

Luckily there is other Ten Dead Men news that means I don't have to fill up a whole post with me renting my own film.

This rather pleasant review appeared on Screenhead which is perhaps the most positive one we've had so far.

And we had our first video review, meaning I got to see my name on a TV in someone else's house (albeit very briefly):

Boris Karloff Blogathon...

Frankensteinia: The Frankenstein Blog is holding a Boris Karloff Blogathon next month to celebrate his 122nd birthday. Being a massive Karloff fan I've signed up to take part, as has Brother Pete.

It took me a while to decide what to write about. I was going to write about my favourite Karloff film, Targets, but I figured it's a pretty obvious choice and I wouldn't really be saying anything more than 'watch Targets right now - it's awesome!'. I also considered The Raven which was one of my favourite films as a kid and has what I remember as one of the best wizard battles ever filmed. But it's been so long since I last saw it I'm not sure what I'd say, other than 'The Raven is awesome, go watch it'. Instead I've picked a subject I'm hoping no one else will cover, although it involves watching a number of films I've never seen before.

Anyway, look out for that and check out the other blogs that will be doing the same - there's a full list on the Frankensteinia blog.

Bad games...

As I've often mentioned before on this blog I am a fan of gathering groups of friends to watch spectacularly bad films and recently I've attempted to apply the same principle to games. This weekend I took Brothers Pete and Tim on a quest for bad games. We came home with X-Men 2: Wolverine's Revenge and Deadly Strike for the PS2, and Bruce Lee: Quest of the Dragon for Xbox. All three were really bad games, but as with films it's sometimes difficult to find ones that are so bad they're funny.

Wolverine's Revenge was the one we thought would be a fairly safe bet - the equivalent of getting one of the later Seagal films for a film night - entertaining with some unintentional laughs. You'd expect such a high profile film licence to be fun and playable if not particularly imaginative. It turned out to be painfully frustrating to play, full of glitches and for the most part incredibly dull. Not even the vocal talents of Mark Hamill and Patrick Stewart made playing past the 3rd stage worthwhile. That was a definite fail.

Deadly Strike certainly fulfilled the comedy requirement. Essentially a two-player scrolling beat-em-up, you play one of six futuristic, gun-toting martial artists hoping to compete in the 'Cyberaction' tournament. You never get to fight in the tournament. Instead you fight across various countryside locations that have names like 'Field of Death' but actually look rather pleasant. The enemies are all samurais and monks which a) makes shooting them with rocket-launchers seem a little unfair and b) suggests you've travelled back in time, although there is no mention of this in the plot. At the end of the game you scale the rooftops of the 'Castle of Mystery' where you fight the shogun who apparently organises the tournament. He helpfully comes out onto the rooftops to fight you so you never have to go inside. Once you've defeated him you are told the outcome of the tournament with a little bit of added story that bears no relation to anything that has occurred up to that point. The whole thing feels like someone took an existing rubbish game and added their own characters. Luckily it's very short, so all of the above is still very funny. Plus the opening sequence is hilariously bad.

Quest for the Dragon was definitely the best of the three. The gameplay is terrible, but easy enough (you can beat any of the bosses by crouching and punching repeatedly). And it's worth playing through to the end for the amazing cutscenes. The voiceover work is fantastically bad and all accents, from Irish to Russian to British, are mauled without discrimination.

The British cutscenes are the best. On arrival in the UK Bruce gets a note from a contact telling him there is a drug lab hidden in a mansion at Trafalgar Square. So you fight your way through this huge stately home in the middle of the countryside then run out onto Trafalgar Square afterwards - the geography is perfect. At this point the police arrive in minis and I'm not sure when the game is supposed to be set but at one point the lead police character directs you to a submarine which he knows about because he fought in World War 2. So the depiction of the English is that we all drive minis, we were all in World War 2 and every other word is 'bloody hell' or 'whoa bollocks'.

But none of the other countries you visit come off any better. I really hoped there would be a clip of one of the better cutscenes somewhere online, but have had to make do with this one: