And if you're in LA...

then get yourself down to the Audis Husar gallery, 8670 Wilshire, Beverly Hills, on the 17th June, for a show of fine art and film, including Home (thanks to the lovely people at the Milan Int Film festival for putting it forward). Not sure how long the exhibition is running for, but if you're in the area pop in and take a look. I'm stuck in London so won't be able to see it and I'd love to know hwo it looks.

Meanwhile, here's some stills from Home, with Martha Cope and Kieran O'Brien, with Almut's fantastic makeup.

One ends, another begins

So, what's happened with the film? Well, we did more work with the soundtrack, eventually removing all music except for the end credit music. This wasn't anything to do with Tim Olivers score, but just the fact that on repeated viewing any music just seemed to get in the way of the narrative. So no more music.

Meanwhile the film has shown at a number of festivals round the world, including in Vilnius, where I've never been, and most recently the Milan International Film Festival, where I have been. It's also been picked up for representation abroad by the British Council and for worldwide sales by Shorts International.

And even though there are still a number of festivals we're waiting to hear from, that's kind of it for Home. It feels odd that something that takes so much effort only has a shelf life of about a year, but it's time to move on. I loved making this film, and am very happy with the result, but that is most definitely that with short films. The effort to make this is only marginally less that we'd need to make a feature, the main difference being more extending the shoot from 5 days to 18. Oh, and changing the budget from £4k to something much, much more. But apart from that, the effort of production, the reworking, all that stuff, there's not a huge difference between making a short (of no commercial value, for cultural purposes only) and making a feature (something that very much does have a commercial value).

So feature film time it is. No one is going to swan over and offer to let me make my first feature, so we're going to have to do it ourselves. First up: script. Working title of one two three four, a (kind of) romantic (sort of) comedy about being in a band, but a crappy local band not a succesful band (Spinal Tap have made that redundant). Second draft being worked on now. Plan to sell 20 shares at £7.5k each to raise total budget of £150k, shoot on HD. Have had two offers so far of money, and with all our contacts in the music business hope to get many more. Add on tax breaks and we're already almost a third of the way to raising the budget.

And so it all begins again. No holiday again this year, I guess.