HERE LIES LUCY: A Vampire Yarn

Ah for the days when I owned a DVD rental shop. If you're local to Exeter, you might remember it - BRAZIL. It lasted exactly one year before the credit crunch (and to honest a not so great location) drove a stake into its heart.

But while it was open, I used to let Josh Gaunt use the back room as an editing bay.

I have fond memories of the sounds that spilled out as he was working and I was serving customers. It helped kick me up the backside to get started on my own work too.

In the end, I did a little work on this. There were sections of the film that Josh had intentionally left open to improvisation and he didn't want to write the voice over until he saw what the actors came up with. In the end, I wrote the voice over. In part because I knew the project. In part because I know Stoker's DRACULA quite well. And this is something of a riff on that, and other vampire stories since.

So I wrote the Voice Over for Doctor Seward, based on what Josh was aiming for and what I took from the imagery - whcih is potent, and quite alive.

My only regret is that (sorry Josh) I don't like the way the actor said the words. He's too earnest. Too emotive. He's trying too hard.

It was written in a style that's a little archaic, a little academic, a little more flowery than the rest of the dialogue in the film, as befits an academic character, and one who in the film is a more overt link to the past as represented by the novel. But to counter-blance that - at least in my head - the words were written to be said in the manner of Martin Sheen's Voice Over in APOCALYPSE NOW... quiet, almost flat. The sound of a man thinking aloud to himself, under his breath. Remembering. In some ways it should be the sound of the voice he might hear at the back of his head when reading...

Still, it's a good little film. And got me my first official credit on IMDB: 'Additional Dialogue by...' and I'm happy about that. Enjoy the film.

Here Lies Lucy: A Vampire Yarn from Syndrome Pictures on Vimeo.