Stories like wet clay on the slab...

So, for all the talk when I first started doing this blog, about turning a couple of short stories into short film scripts - it hasn't quite happened like I planned it. The notes still are there (glaring at me) to write them up as short films. But since the audio stuff has been coming to the fore my brain swerved to the left and wrote them that way instead.

Not least because it has become quite obvious that we have to do some of this off our own backs.

And since the trailer got us a solid foot in the door, I'm increasingly coming to believe that a finished piece or two might kick the door wide open. If nothing else they'll go up online as tasters for the work to come - shorts to get some interest, lay the ground work for when the longer audio drama comes. If we're lucky, build a bit of an audience, have them waiting for it when it's done.

I'd like that.

I'd like it even more if they prove willing to pay (go the Radiohead route and put it up as download where you decide the price?). Or it gets the attention of the beeb again, and they come forward willing to skip all the development bollocks and let us take a run at something of our own that we're in love with, and will - hopefully - taint a few minds.

But a fortuitous meeting (okay an online meeting) with an outstanding film maker has me chomping at the bit for my getting back to the screenplays. And seeing as we seem to park our cars in very much the same garage as far as taste and ideas go... I'm hoping we might even work together. His ideas are blisteringly good and absolutely up my alley. Everything I've seen of his work knocks me sideways - in that wonderful way that happens when you recognise one of your own kind, like a weird extended family that was separated at birth. A synchronicity of ideas that at times is a little frightening, but exilerating.

And it's really saying something right now - to note that I've been watching and rewatching the short that he did with Peter Mullan and which you'll find embedded down below - because I've been quite the fucking Grinch of late with watching films. Very little makes me happy, or genuinely satisfies. Some stuff has been good, but not much hit me in the guts.

But this one short did. More than any feature that I've seen this year.

Maybe that's why I spend so much time rewaching those near perfect films and TV that do iT for me EVERY time. TIME BANDITS, THE DEVIL'S BACKBONE, CRONOS, THE IRON GIANT, Svankmajer's ALICE, Jack Clayton's THE INNOCENTS, Val Lewton's CAT PEOPLE, CURSE OF THE CAT PEOPLE, I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE, THE BODYSNATCHER and ISLE OF THE DEAD. KES, JASON & THE ARGONAUTS (Talos! And that glorious pregnant pause BEFORE the skeletons erupt), EYES WITHOUT A FACE, MARTIN (you get the idea, right?). And on TV - well, I was going to give a big long list, and sure, I often dip back into the best of DOCTOR WHO, and I always go back to BOYS FROM THE BLACKSTUFF, THE SINGING DETECTIVE, EERIE INDIANA and THE TWILIGHT ZONE. But the TV that most obsessed me this year and last - for it's spot on tone and the sheer weight of emotional investment and the heft of the actors work onscreen was AFTER LIFE starring Lesley Sharp and Andrew Lincoln, created by Stephen Volk.

Far and away the best supernatural series of the last 10 or 20 years. Brilliantly written and played throughout. I walked in on it recently when my wife was off sick and had put it on... and even out of context found the finale of a late episode in series to had be welling up with tears. Brilliant stuff.

But I think I may wandered away from any particular point... save to say, that currently I'm high on excitement and possibility. And that's a very good thing. More than that it's finding those things that say you're not a lone voice in the darkness or out in the wilds. There are others - those who want to read/hear/see the kind of stories that I want to make for them. And others who want to make that kind of thing as well. Somehow that's empowering. It feels good.

Today, all the ephemeral ideas feel tangible. More real.

So I'm sinking my fingers in to the knuckles and molding them like wet clay.

Here's the short I was talking about (but you should click it and watch on the youtube site - embedding seems to have done something weird and clipped it, like old pan & scan VHS):