Film Fund Update & More

The Twitter Short Film Fund has been a great success! A huge thank you to all those who pledged, most of whom doubled the basic request of £5, and some who went well beyond. I am well and truly gobsmacked, and I can't tell you the difference it makes to the final stages of post-production. But of course, I can tell you. It stops me from going further into debt or tapping even more of my meager savings (I say meager; non-existent would be more accurate, especially as the production budget hoovered it up in a blink).

To change your pledge into actual wonga, simply make a Gift payment at PayPal (using dstack30 at hotmail .com). If that makes no sense to you whatsoever, simply use the link in the sidebar (under the About Me section) and select your preferred method of payment. Remember, the basic £5 donation entitles you to the extremely popular Get Your Movie Made booklet, which lists the contact details and key personnel of 22 leading film companies in the UK.

I've got three key stages of the film left. Music. Sound FX/foley. Grading. The music is being done by Laurie Peters (who's also an artist/animator, more notably for Ricky Gervais). Sound FX/foley is being taken care of by these guys, Andrew Wilkinson & Francis Lindsay: officially the coolest guys on the planet. For the grade, I'm getting a digital intermediate done by the good folk at Ascent 142/Soho Film Lab. I've managed to negotiate a good deal for all of this, thanks mainly to my executive producer Paul Sarony, who pulled a few strings. I still have to pay more than I can afford but that's where the Twitter Short Film Fund comes in to help soften the blow. Sweet.

All going well, the film should be 'in the can' by July. The website and trailer will be up before that but until then, the Facebook page provides lots of photos and behind the scenes shenanigans. Getting the short film to this stage has been hugely rewarding but also very time consuming and has distracted me from my writing routine, not to mention generating fears of what my next job might be. Luckily, my recent episode of EastEnders went down well and they've just offered me another commission, which I start next week. Woo-hoo! Absolutely thrilled about this, and will at least ensure that I can pay the bills while I put the finishing touches on the short.

It's all busy busy busy, go go go, but we're only half way through the year. There's still a great deal to do and lots I want to achieve, and we should be getting the Red Planet Prize underway again in the summer, so that's exciting. Yeah. Let's go to work.