The World is my Oyster... or something along those lines...

Yep, that's your guitar from way back, Dylan.

Anyway and blimey. Lot of stuff has occured recently, mainly writing, but a lot on the work front too.

I now have a new job within the company I work for that sells books and it is very exciting to be moving on to something like this. So, yeah, cool.

Powerless.
A lot of people have read it, and I have had some really great feedback. Now I know that they always say that feedback from anyone other than an industry professional is worthless... and they may be right in some instances, but I have a lot of literary friends and lot of friends who are doing what I want to do, or are in exactly the same place as me and their opinion is awesome and completely important and valid. One of the main reasons why this is the case is because I don't get a 'yeah, man, its good, i like it...' I get some very thoughtful feedback, constructive, destructive and mind changing remarks. So since I last posted, saying I was done with Powerless... well I was, then I sent it to a bunch of good folks who read it and those thoughts and opinions made me go back and reasses and rewrite. It has been really helpful and has improved a lot of what I already liked into something better. Of course, some of the feedback I got was bollocks, but you ignore the bollocks.

Next.
Well, I have just finished writing an outline (just in case a five page outline is requested rather than script) and a series outline that kinda sets in place ideas for a potential six episode arc that would make a series (i'm thinking it would only need the one). This series outline is something the BBC wants went submitting material for a series. They have some awesome guidelines set in place for the newly structure submissions department they have recently put together. So Powerless will making a trip to the BBC. I'm not expecting much to be honest. What I hope is that they see potential in the writing. I'm not convinced its a BBC show, but in light of awesomeness like The Fades, there is totally an audience out there. Fuck knows why they cancelled such a great show. Then I shall be gunning for The Red Planet Prize again... fingers crossed, third time lucky...

Work will become a dominating force over the next few months as Christmas takes over the world. My new job is gonna be awesome and intense as I shall be in charge of ordering stock for five stores. I'm really excited to see how I can help and affect my cluster of shops and use the skills I have developed in store to help others.

Writing however will not fade completely away. I should be having weekends all to myself in terms of being away from work so I can focus on writing. Creating a body of work is important so I have a portfolio to showcase. So far I have a tv pilot spec, an award winning short film script I cowrote, a treatment for a feature and a whole bunch of ideas. So my plan is to get those ideas more solid. I wanna write another short that has been titled Pangs for quite sometime and I really wanna write a feature I have had in my head for fucking years. But I also have some other TV ideas that are desperate to get out of my head.

Titles of ideas (in a possible order of being tackled)
The World is my Oyster... based on a series of mental little adlib shorts i made with Dan at uni. I love it as an idea and think it could really work in a sitcom format.
Pangs... short
The Girl at the Centre of Creation... writing Powerless has helped me see this idea in a better light, and identify a better way of structuring it
Pulp Horror... feature
Darkness Rising/Violent Crimes... still in there, still thinking up new ways of go at this thing

So yeah. Busy.

NO LIFE!

Comics that rock my world... DANCER, Snyder's New52 stuff, Debris, The Creep, Rachel Rising, Fatale, Avengers Versus X-Men

Film... Dredd 3D is awesome, Avengers is awesome, Jaws on Blu is awesome, The Master will be awesome, Looper will be awesome...

Tellybox... Newsroom is the best thing on TV, dug Revolution, rocking season 4 of LOST again, The Prisoner being revisited and fuck me ace cartoons TRON Legacy, Thundercats, Regular Show (Ooooooohhhhhhhh!), Young Justice, Avengers...

Books... A Possible Life (New Faulks) is wonderful, The Lighthouse should win the Booker, Scarlet Thomas' book on writing should be THE book on writing, The Yellow Birds should be read by your face now, and I can't wait to read the new Warren Ellis, the new James Smythe

RESIDENT EVIL 6 is out next week! Whoop!

Namaste

Chaos and Riots

Powerless is written. The first draft is complete. I have to say I feel weird about it. It's taken a long time to get to this point on this idea, from it's humble beginnings about a guy who gets abducted by aliens and bestowed superpowers, to a depressed, suicidal twenty something who can't kill himself to what it is now. It's been about six years in development and although there were times when I completed drafts of some of these ideas I was never truely happy with them. Always felt that something was missing, that something wasn't right.

This new draft, which has taken just over a year to complete, feels different.

I started writing it after I completed the short film script Ella with Dan Gitsham, which was in 2010. I wrote the first two pages, which was essentially a wishfullfillment piece... I have always wanted to take a run and jump off a building and fly. It was this idea that allowed me to move away from the despressing nature of what Powerless was always about... what if Superman was a coward. But rather than take it down that dark path of depression and woe is me, I wanted to flip it. What if I had superpowers, wanted to use them, but didn't know how or what the repocussions would be. If I had powers, I would probably be doing exactly what I am doing now, writing a blog about a script I have finished about a guy who has powers. I don't think I would use them. Fear. I think I would be scared shitless to use them, because, as is the case with me... I wouldn't know what the outcome of me using them would be. Unless I can see the whole story planned ahead, I tend to not make a move, I tend to over think and procrastinate until the moment passes. Not a coward, just a realist, a pessimist and a procrastinator.

So yeah, wrote those pages. Sometimes when I complete a project/script, especially if its an intense experience like Ella was, I wanna just drown myself in tv or film or books or computer games, but after Ella I was kinda buzzed, so got to work. But the filming of Ella happened and I got swallowed up with feature film ideas for Ella.

I didn't want to rush the script of Powerless. I wanted it to be a showcase for what I can do as a writer. I wanted to show what my interests were, what I knew and what I love. I wanted to have fun with it and allow it to flow at the right speed. Admittedly I should have finished it a few months back, but Max Payne 3 came out and work got pretty heavy. So I let it play out. Spent a lot of time rewriting the first few pages, stripping it back, over writing it, under writing, trying to get the mood and feel just right so you could feel the emotion, so you could essentially feel the insides of the shoes my main character is wearing. I also wanted to write a lot of personal shit into it. Not personal feelings exactly, although they do figure into it (of course they do), but some actual moments from history. I wanted to give it texture, make it feel real to me without it feeling dull and a bore to write. Because if I find it boring to write, then you are gonna find it boring to read. But then I seemed to get it right. It seemed to flow. At least until I stumbled over the villian. I wanted a villian.

As I have said before somewhere on this blog, that I wanted to write a comic book show. i wanted to do what Heroes failed at doing. I love comics. I read shit loads every month. I sell them everyday. Not an hour goes by that I am not in some sort of comic book conversation with someone. So, yeah, its my passion. And they say write what you know. So, yeah comics.

But every comic hero needs a villian. So I stumbled a little. Ran through cliche and stereotype,until I came to what I've got now. Hopefully not cliche or stereotypical, but recognisable.

The beautiful thing that came out of this was not knowing what to do with him as a villian. I wanted it real and I wanted it to compliment the hero. A hero who doesn't want to be one. What if you are a villian and there are no heroes? How can you be a villian? Can you be a villian?

So, this fed back into my main character and really helped give the script some meat. But it didn't have a canvas. And then I saw Aaron Sorkin's Newsroom. It's awesome. Pretty much anything he writes is awesome. And what he is doing is pretty obvious and has been done before, but something hit me. Give it some historic background, give it a canvas that fits, that matters and that had some affect on me.

The London Riots.

The script runs takes place in august of 2011. It's fucking crazy. It's fucking scary. It's fucking terrifying and feeds into the mentality of my main character perfectly.

So yeah. It's done. I feel weird about it. Mainly because I have an ending. An ending that had been mutating in my head for the last two months. I had about six of them and then one morning they all got stuck together and fucked and had a mutant baby ending that I wrote yesterday. I like it. It has something to say (at least I hope). It's grim and its real and its hopeful and it's wacky and it's definitive but wide open.

I feel weird cos its done and cos i like it. And worried because I like it and its done. I think its done. I feel its done. Its out of my head but always there, playing out. But its playing out completely now. It has a theme that runs through and I think and hope that it ends and plays out with satisfaction. I feel satisfied.

The end.

I wanna write something else now...

NO LIFE....

The Dark Knight Rises... It's been over a week since I saw this. Still not sure about it. I liked it. But didn;t love it. It's good, but not great. It's the weakest of the Nolan bat films. It's the weakest of Nolan's films. It doesn't live up to it's own promise, let alone the promise at the end of The Dark Knight. The promise at the end of Batman Begins was delivered and then some in TDK, but TDKR drops the ball. The script is a great read, the film is great fun. But... ahh shit I don't know. Gonna see it again next week and in IMAX at the end of August.

Newsroom... It's great. I love it.

The Twelve... the epic sequel to The Passage is brilliant. Bigger, darker, weirder. It's very cool.

The Age of Miracles... one of the best books you'll read this year.

Hans Zimmer... his work on TDKR is amazing. Helped the end of Powerless.

Lynch on bluray... AWESOME!

The Grey... Loved this film an awful lot.

ELLA WATCH

Upcoming Screenings

MINNEAPOLIS UNDERGROUND FILM FESTIVAL 2012
17-19 AUGUST, Minneapolis, USA
Screening on the 18th August in 'Freaky Times'


TIFF presents FULL MOON HORROR & FANTASY FESTIVAL 2012
16-19 AUGUST, Biertan, Romania

Namaste...

@jgp_driver

I'm on that twitter thing now.

Reading The Twelve by Justin Cronin. Awesome.

Listening to Tool, 10,000 Days. Forgot how awesome.

Writing Powerless. Near the end. Awesome. Riots. London. Superpowers. Cosplay.Cowards. Argos. Love. Music. Sick.

Namaste.

One Man and His Dog... for a bit...

Last month Ella was nominated at the Limelight Film Awards for best horror... and it won! Very cool, very exciting, very pleased and very proud.

It's been almost two years now to the day that we filmed Ella,and having recently rewatched it after not seeing it for a while... well, I have to say it deserved to win. Although I never saw the competition... Ella is awesome. It is very awesome. I had got my mind into a horrible place where I saw faults with it, that I wasn't happy with it, but having rewatched both cuts I have sitting on a disc... it blew my mind a little.Yeah its messy and ambiguous in what we show, and yeah there are bits that didn't translate so well from the script, but fuck... the mood, atmosphere and feel of that little fucker are so strong that you just forget whatever short comings exist. Fuck, there aint any shortcomings. I showed it to someone who was a fan of it at the weekend and someone who was new to it and it just creates silence in the room when its over. Love it. Love how it makes people feel. The ambiguity of it is only there on the surface, the way it is put together and the things that are suggested kinda do the film a lot of service as it gets the head firing up and filling in the blanks. Its ace.

Dan I salute you and everyone involved with it. Ella week was an awesome week of shooting. Mr. Head is a legend in everyway and Miss Blackwell does the greatest dog barking while being covered in red shit and wearing a dogs face ever! I miss that week of shooting, I miss the scripting of that little crazy film and will never forget the phonecall when Dan suggested 'Dog Face'.

We need to work together again dude. I shall email you those words as soon as I have finished this blog. Something new. Something dark. Something fucked. Something born from the two brains we have between us. Something with blood and dirt in it. Something that says something about the human condition and how fucked we all are.

Namaste.

THINK:BREATHE:WRITE:DESTROY

Happy New Year.

Yeah. Late. Nevermind.

New year, new focus. Proper focus. Two things.Two main things.

Powerless is about half way complete and probably will take most of the year to fine tune before anything happens with it. Its not a bad thing, no point in rushing these things. If I didn't have to work then all would be different. But Powerless needs to be perfect. Its my thing, my passion and I need to get it right, i need to get it down right.

I read a blog by the writer of Death in Paradise, BBC crime drama I had no interest in watching and never actually watched. But the writer is interesting because he won the Red Planet prize, something I have entered a couple of times and gotten fairly far into the process only to be let down by a rushed finished script. Anyway, his blog about how he got started with this whole thing is very interesting. He wrote that you should write what you know. However obvious that maybe, for some reason, when I used to hear that I always thought that meant, what I knew from a day to day kind of thing. Stupid right? Well, not really. But what this writer knew was crime drama. He loved it, he was obsessed with it, read it, watched it, loved it.

So as you know I'm writing Powerless, about a guy with powers. Its a love letter to comics, its a wishfullfillment thing, its a what would i have done with powers in a certain situation. Comics, superheroes... its what I know, so i am gonna write the hell out of it.

This writer dude, also went on to say that because he loved this stuff so much, he would write something thatwas original, that no one else had ever seen, that no one else could write. Now, the whole originiallity thing... cop dramas have been done to death, but its more of a 'no one can write this thing quite like me'.

So, there has been Heroes, and various other cack tv shows about superheroes, but no one has ever written Powerless. Not the way I am writing it. It's mine. And that is why its original.

Lets just hope its good.

Aside from Powerless I have been developing something that started off as a short film, but I think would really extend itself into an ace little character study feature. Its got the working title of Pangs at the moment and is a romance about a guy with an eating disorder and how love can transcend anything when its true.

NO LIFE!

Homeland is fucking awesome. Best new show on the box.

Luck is a little odd at the moment, finding it a little tough to get into. But liking it all the same. Well, i want to like it.

Alcatraz has started promisingly.

Walking Dead season 2 part two continues and I hope it continues to be good.

Sons of Anarchy season 4 is fecking brilliant.

Drive is one of the best films I have seen in ages and has become one of my all time faves. A little obsessed with it...

Whispers by Joshua Luna is brilliant.

Rachel Rising by Terry Moore keeps on getting more awesome with each new issue.

Scott Snyder is a God, as is Grant Morrison and Warren Ellis. Batman, Action Comics and Captain Swing are currently rocking my comic book reading world a lot.

TMNT are back and rule!

Mono and And So I Watch You From Afar and Feist fill my ears with brilliance.

Namaste...