20-12-10 / 'SOFT' ON YOUTUBE

After a few years of managing to keep Soft offline, you can now see it on Youtube (Update - the film has been reclassified for upsetting pew-bothering penis-fearers, so was removed then reinstated). The comments have certainly been crashing in (see a selection below but watch the film first). Quite apart from the rage it seems to inspire in young men, it has fired up interesting debates about US/UK law systems, penis size, and, err, the proximity of shops to homes in the UK.

UPDATE FROM THE FUTURE - It was removed from YouTube once again and this version went up about a year later:

"This movie was sooooo great that i wanna get that actor and actually beat him up myself, even though he was an actor, I dont care"

"That was awesome!!! I wish it was a full movie, my heart was racing the whole time"

"Wow!! Well done! Got my heart going there..."

"Disturbingly real"

"One word: epic"

"Amazing. Had my heart pumping"

"This was an excellent short. Really got the adrenaline going"

"This was phenomenal..."

"This was powerful as shit. Really really good"

"I was jumping up and down cheering and clapping"

"How did they fake that shit? Every hit looked so real"

"I hate bullies down to the very core of my soul and this really made me angry"

"In the UK the store is just around the corner?"

"This sucked. Thumbs up if you like sex"

09-12-10 / NEW INTERVIEW

You're cold and miserable, your house is freezing and it's too cold to go out. You wish you could just nestle down in a big warm yorkshire pudding (I really must get over this yorkshire-pudding-bed thing), watch old matinees, drink hot stuff and return to work in January. Or you could hop on over to The Rough Mix and read this interview.

07-12-10 / HEAVEN THEN HECK IN SCOTLAND

Returned from Kintyre Island off the west coast of Scotland at four o'clock this morning, after a seventeen hour journey through the country's worst snowfall in fifty years. It was utter bedlam and quite impossible to describe with the measly limitations of words. Despite the hard ice on the roads, the sunshine in Kintyre had been heavenly for two days but it buggered off as a white-out suddenly set in as we left. If sliding down a steep road towards the back of the car in front isn't much fun, then the sight of a completely overturned car on the roadside was the shape of much worse things to come. Deciding against the ferry crossing because of the winding mountain roads on the other side, the long route to the mainland by road seemed the sensible option. The radio warned of traffic chaos around Glasgow, with reports of people moving only five miles in twelve hours. After witnessing a car in front of us spin almost 360 degrees, at speed, yet miraculously missing a petrified woman and her child in another car by centimetres, everything became utterly surreal and apocalyptic.

At eleven degrees below freezing, the gridlock on the motorway was insane. Snowmen with windscreen wipers for arms had been built on the otherwise inaccessible central reservation, service stations were oversubscribed, causing one entire lane (lanes were indistinguishable from one another) of the motorway to become a parking strip for people to sleep. Some abandoned their vehicles when their batteries ran out, adding to the congestion. People alighted buses in droves and walked through the traffic, ignoring a troubled commuter whose wheels were hopelessly spinning on the ice. Some were standing in the lanes smoking cigarettes while others had no choice but to relieve their bladders in the collective glare of everyone's headlights. News reports today talked of drivers drinking melted snow to stay hydrated, teachers and pupils having to sleep in their school overnight, the army ferrying the sick and injured to hospital, nearby residents delivering hot food and drinks to motorists, and snow ploughs breaking their blades on the ice. Many hours later I arrived home to frozen pipes and no hot water, which has today caused said pipes to burst and rain through my kitchen ceiling for the second time in six months. According to the plumbers, temperatures have plummeted to as low as minus seventeen here! WTF?

Days before :

27-11-10 / TWO MORE AWARDS

Choose a Different Ending just won two more at the BIMAS, whatever those are. I honestly can't keep up with all these different advertising award ceremonies, but I'm not complaining.

11-11-10 / ONE OF THOSE DAYS AGAIN / BREAKING BAD

Here's a little story. This morning, while frantically trying to print out my boarding pass before leaving for Brest European Short Film Festival in France, I'm up against a variety of technical and human obstructions. Long story short, while doing so, the airline's four-hour rule expired. This means you can no longer check-in online because you have only four hours until the plane bounces, so instead you must pay an extra fee to check-in at the airport ten minutes earlier (ten whole minutes in situations requiring train travel to distant airports is a very, very valuable amount of extra time). To my mind, paying more money for less time is a bit like handing over your sister in order to finally have your toes pulled off, or something.

Meanwhile, all the dicking about trying to sort out said check-in meant I had missed my train. The next one was an hour later and would only get me to the airport with about three minutes to spare. One tiny delay like the train stopping because there was a burp on the track would guarantee failure. So I call the festival and tell them my situation, and a very nice girl called Muriel assures me that, despite the risk factor, the festival would kindly swallow the extra journey costs. She then encourages me to "run Simon run".

Half an hour later I get in the taxi cabbage for the station and the journey is taking twice as long as it should due to roadworks. It is late morning but the traffic is comparable to peak-hour congestion. I miss the train. I think back to the posh old man in his bogey-green Mercedes who pulled in front of us before a red light, adding a crucial minute to the journey. His image goes up in flames and I call the festival to say I could get back in the taxi for the hundred miles to Luton and it will cost more than twice the train ticket but at least I'll get to the airport on time. They say "run Simon run" again and I do just that, back into the cabbage.

We're cruising down the motorway and I'm sitting in the back reading a newspaper, feeling like Miss Daisy. The driver knows I need to be at the airport for one thirty and everything is cool. Even the clouds are breaking up, and I think the low sun gives the driver a headache or something. He forever cruises comfortably down the middle lane with a distant meditative frown, things get tense, then a lane closes and we are crawling for half an hour. We arrive at airport at the exact time that check-in closes. I'm resigned to defeat, given the airline's reputation and my own experiences with this airport in particular, but decide it's not over until it's over.

I get the driver to pull over somewhere he shouldn’t, and a horn immediately honks from behind. I'm really not in the mood for this. The driver gives me a receipt and I put it in my mouth while grabbing my bag. I open the door and a big fist of wind punches the receipt from my lips and sends it spiralling up to god knows where. The driver hands me another one and the car behind honks again, spelling merry hell. I look at the two ladies inside, mouths like O's breaking into complaint with palms upturned as if a giant eyeball was having a piss on their bonnet, and I actually bellowed at them. The whole episode can't have set them back more than fifteen seconds. Still, sorry ladies, you caught me at a really bad time and I shouldn't have lost my temper. But I hope a giant eyeball does wazz on your bonnet. And your pillows.

I think that was when karma pounced on me. I wasn't allowed on the flight. Five minutes late. I paid for a train back home and here I am, Brestless.

But let's hear it for Breaking Bad, a US series I caught up with late but, my god, episode six of season three (above picture) just got me really fidgety in all the best possible ways.

02-11-10 / THREE NEW AWARDS

Choose a Different Ending just scooped three more at Campaign magazine's Big Awards. Not sure what the exact awards are as yet.

29-10-10 / BACK FROM THE DEAD / JAM TODAY / CANNES PRESS

That's this blog that's back from the dead, not my still-perished hard disks, which I've been trying to ignore. Their demise knocked me so hard I decided not to write about anything until they were recovered and my lost Swimming video rose from the ashes pissing a torrent of fire. Alas, they still have an appointment to keep with data recovery professionals while I have been busying myself with...

... photographing newts in my kitchen and so forth. Oh, and the edit of my new short Jam Today, which became unexpectedly tricky to keep under fifteen minutes but I'm a gnat's nut away from picture-lock, so I'm taking some days away from it in a ridiculous attempt to maintain some perspective. That's me being responsible instead of buggering off to knock about with Swimming on their debut European tour, catching up with currywurst in Berlin and Hamburg (and no doubt filming something that would only need editing).

There is a nice feature on Choose a Different Ending in The Cannes Report (which claims I'm the world's seventh highest ranking director of 2010!?!) and also an interview I did for Shots magazine after the winning streak.

08-09-10 / TRIPLE HARD DISK FAILURE GRINDS EVERYTHING TO A HALT

One evening after an ordinary shutdown, my computer somehow completely killed all three internal hard drives dead. They won't start at all and I have spent days disassembling and rebuilding and poking around internet forums. I have no explanation for such a massive stroke of bad luck. The computer just wouldn't boot one morning and it has wiped out the entire Swimming music video AND its back-up (including lots of compositing work), plus the two days of syncing I had just done for the new short Jam Today (which is a small loss in comparison to the music video). Needless to say, I am pretty upset about the whole thing and the world pretty much stinks for me right now.

While away on the shoot for Jam Today, which was also a killer shoot but I just don't have the heart to write about it, the knife crime campaign was completed and went online. It is not as I intended so I won't be reporting on that any longer. A big disappointment after the PAIN of shooting it. The cast were so brilliant that I'm writing a short for them specifically, to hopefully be done over a weekend for nobody but ourselves.

13-08-10 / A TON OF SHIZ

Loads happening. A bazzin' recce on the Norfolk Broads for Jam Today resulted in several potential locations. The usual quota of insanely beautiful skies and postcard sunsets worked wonders for the old head and I bagged quite a bit of footage towards long-gestating short Rotation into the bargain.

All of this amounted to the calm before the storm, in the shape of a follow-up to last year's anti-knife crime campaign (Choose a Different Ending). This new one was easily the most trying shoot of my entire filmmaking career so far. Even tougher than What about the Bodies. More on all this and Jam Today soon.

07-07-10 / NICE REVIEW OF 'SOFT'

I hadn't seen this before but just found a nice review of Soft on what looks to be a very interesting site devoted to short film.

01-07-10 / URGENT REQUEST TO ANY POTENTIAL INVESTORS

If you or anyone you know, be it an individual or a company, would be in a position to help top up our budget for my new short film Jam Today, please contact me via the email address at the foot of my home page.

28-06-10 / TWO MORE AWARDS IN CANNES

Unbelievably, Choose a Different Ending has scooped another gold and the inaugural Grand Prix for Good. I received the call on my birthday, no less :)

23-06-10 / AWARDS HAT TRICK IN CANNES

Just heard from the producer of Choose a Different Ending that we have won two Gold Lions and a Young Director Award for Best European Web Film in Cannes.

08-06-10 / NEW SHORT FILM / SWIMMING VIDEO FINISHED / HAMBURG

It's been ages! I'm extremely relieved to announce that my new short film Jam Today has been commissioned and is due to go into production in early September. It's all rather ambitious for the budget we have but it feels GREAT to be getting back down to it. In a nutshell, it is the story of an eleven year-old boy's sexual awakening while holidaying with his family on the Norfolk Broads.

The music video for Swimming has also been finished for a little while now. I have no idea what will happen with it until the single is released so I shall say nothing until the boys are ready. The short documentary we shot in snowy Northumberland last December will also accompany the release and I will upload both videos once I have the okay from the band. The performance promo I shot for them a couple of years ago can be seen here.

Hamburg International Short Film Festival was the usual blast, although I was destroyed by hay fever once again. It was my ninth consecutive year there and I was due to present the Audience Award but I fell asleep in my apartment and so wasn't there when asked to take the stage. I watched more films than usual and recommendations are: Ruben Östlund's Incident by a Bank (Sweden), Anthony Vouardoux's Yuri Lennon's Landing on Alpha 46 (Germany), Ran-hee Lee's A Perm (South Korea), Nicolas Provost's Long Live the New Flesh (Belgium), Antonio Piazza and Fabio Grassadonia'a Rita (Italy), Jay Rosenblatt's The Darkness of Day (USA), Paul Negoescu's Derby (Romania), and Jan Speckenbach's Sparrows (Germany).

27-03-10 / DUTCH RETROSPECTIVE / TEACHER COMMERCIALS ALMOST FINISHED

GoShort International Short Film Festival in Nijmegen (Netherlands) screened a retrospective of my work last weekend. Smack in the middle of editing the new commercials, I made the journey to introduce the programme. I highly recommend this festival and urge all filmmakers to include it on their submissions calendar. Given that this was only their second year, the organisation was fantastic and from a purely technical perspective, the quality of theatre projection was up there with the best I've ever seen. In fact, the standard was so high that it reminded me of the need to remaster my films (not something I look forward to when lots of fiddly compositing will have to be started from scratch). The screenings even started on time, which took some getting used to. The staff were all great and after only three days there I felt surprisingly emotional saying goodbye, waving my thanks to them all as one and more or less scarpering. Films that stood out for me were Rúnar Rúnarsson's latest Anna (Denmark), Supriyo Sen's Wagah (Germany/India), Mechtild Gassner's Today is Yesterday and Tomorrow (Germany), Patrik Eklund's Seeds of the Fall (Sweden), and Jorien van Nes' Den Helder (Netherlands). All in all, after being so absorbed in the very different world of television commercials recently, the whole experience was just what the doctor ordered. An interview I did for the programme can be found here.

So, off the plane and straight back into the edit suite to finish the teacher recruitment commercials, which are now awaiting client feedback (this could potentially change everything yet, but for now I'm happy). There are four in all (two thirty-seconds and two ten-seconds), focusing on Maths and Science lessons. Over the years I have heard many anecdotes about working in the commercials industry (most of them bad) and it's interesting to find out what is true and what isn't, which becomes clear very quickly despite being new to the game. I'm grateful that my intended approach to keep the commercials totally documentary, using the teachers' actual pupils in their actual classrooms, was honoured. Trying to shape a coherent thirty seconds out of it all while leaving lots of good stuff out is another challenge altogether. It has been a long journey with obstacles and about-turns, but as a production company, Mad Cow Films have really had my back once again. The machine that is Jonas Blanchard (Producer) has been tirelessly legendary.

11-03-10 / AWARD FOR 'CHOOSE A DIFFERENT ENDING'

Choose a Different Ending won a Gold in public service advertising at last night's BTAA's (British Television Advertising Awards).

02-03-10 / AWARDS FOR 'CHOOSE A DIFFERENT ENDING'

Choose a Different Ending won two golds (best viral & best online advertising) and the Best In Show award, the Platinum Honour, at the 2010 Creative Circle Awards.

19-02-10 / NEW COMMERCIAL JOB / MIKE FIGGIS

Tired. Preparation for a new commercial has had me travelling up and down the country to interview secondary school teachers. My already-healthy respect for good teaching has gone up a few more notches and my research has inevitably caused me to reflect on my own miserable school years, where 98% of staff seemed doomed to teach out of necessity rather than passion. Sitting at the back of classes as an adult is an odd experience and the absurd fear that the teacher is going to pick me out to answer a question is as prevalent as it ever was. The excessive rail travel required to reach all of the locations sometimes results in as little as one hour's work in a fourteen-hour day, and long taxi rides to remotely-located schools in between trains have involved funny conversations with rural cabbies. Within the space of an hour I had one proudly telling me all about his successful daughter who now works and lives in Manhattan, and on the following journey another proudly told all about his successful daughter who now works and lives in a chateau in central France. It would seem that successful, emigrated daughters are de rigueur in the taxi-driving fraternity. I cursed not having a camera when my train rattled through a Norfolk field of chomping pigs with birds perched on their indifferent heads.

All of this means that the Swimming video has been put on hold until we are all free to shoot the remaining segment.

Attending a seminar at Soho Theatre last week, I was happy to discover a kindred spirit in director Mike Figgis. I had been increasingly convinced that my lack of interest in watching films was at odds with my chosen profession. Is there something strange about liking FILM (the process of making them) far more than FILMS (watching them)? I do enjoy a good film as much as the next person but I am rarely satisfied and find most of them too long even if they are expertly constructed and performed (Un Prophet being the most recent example). I often attempt to remedy such disinterest by making myself watch more but the pile has become depressingly unmanageable and actually quite stressful. I could take this dichotomy to the extreme and watch nothing at all if it weren't for the nagging risk that whatever I am working on may have been done before, and better, so therefore the only way to be sure is by keeping an eye on what is going on. I abandoned television years ago but to abandon film too would all seem a bit Beethoven or something.

28-01-10 / AWARD FOR 'CHOOSE A DIFFERENT ENDING' / SWIMMING PROMO

Osocio, the world's leading social and non-profit advertising blog, have awarded Choose a Different Ending with their Campaign of 2009 award.

Having finished the short, snowy documentary for Swimming, I am now in the middle of shooting and cutting the promo for the single. Both projects tie in so more on them in a later post.

24-12-09 / SINGING IN A WINTER WONDERLAND

Three days ago I was in Narnia with Nottingham band Swimming, for reasons they will shortly announce on their myspace. Okay so we were in Northumberland really, but the landscape was truly magical, consisting of nothing but snow-caked christmas trees as far as the eye could see. Given that we arrived in heavy snowfall we were fortunate not to end up marooned, drinking melted snow and eating tree bark. Or each other. A mile or two short of our destination, the conditions prevented the cars from driving uphill so we walked the remaining distance with all the kit and, ultimately, the day was a resounding success. Out in a brilliant location, in the best snow you ever dreamed of, with a determined, talented group of people - this is what it’s all about.

I will be directing the promo for their upcoming single in January. In the meantime, the last clip I did for them can be found here. Yep, Bubtowers is finally featuring video content after only three and a half years.

14-11-09 / RETROSPECTIVE / EIRE / AWARDS FOR 'CHOOSE A DIFFERENT ENDING'

There will finally be a retrospective of my films in my home town of Nottingham on Sunday 29th November at Broadway Cinema, as part of Bang Short Film Festival’s tenth anniversary Local Heroes slot. I have attempted to cram in as eclectic a selection as possible while keeping the running time down to ninety minutes. If you are local, or even if you aren’t, come along and throw tomatoes. Or money.

Just back from starry and flooded southern Ireland, a country fast becoming the most expensive in the world. Loitered around Cork Film Festival and caught a few films, the highlights being an Italian comedy feature called Pranzo di Ferragosto and a great Norwegian short called Twende, which unfortunately didn’t even get so much as a mention in the rather uninspired choice of awards. The low point was the unintentionally-funny new UK feature Harry Brown, for too many reasons to mention. Also managed to see The Road, which was so convincingly and relentlessly bleak that I felt a strong urge to drink myself to death after leaving the cinema.

My first commercial, the Choose a Different Ending campaign, has just won three awards: Best New Director at the BTA Craft Awards, plus Silver and Bronze at the London international Awards. Check out the clutch here.

22-10-09 / JAPAN

My third visit to Sapporo in Japan for the film festival, and another amazing trip. I’ve just written this paragraph several times before eventually deleting every highlight because it all sounds too much like boasting. Suffice to say: friends old and new (including the fella who played Jimmy Olsen in the original Superman films), cultural madness, mint food, and an unprecedented level of festival hospitality which goes waaay beyond the call of duty. Festival director Toshiya Kubo personally took us to see the Mt. Okaru ski jump when the festival was over, complete with nutters doing the jump in the pouring rain. My body clock never managed to find any balance during the whole trip, but even this potentially-fatal handicap didn’t impede the barmy brilliance of it all.

There are many photographs but I have long given up on the effort it takes to compile a pop-up gallery. However, I had promised Toshi that I would shoot a documentary diary of the week and then promptly forgot to take any kind of video camera, so he proffered that I do it with stills. Depending on how ambitious the post-production of said clip becomes it will hopefully be much more entertaining than a stills gallery, although there is enough material and ideas to ensure it could remain unrealised for a fatal stretch of time if I let myself get stupid about it.

One thing that isn’t likely to make it into the diary is the twelve-hours-to-kill-between-airports on the return journey. Starving, my arrival at Tokyo Haneda airport from Sapporo was just after the 11pm curfew on all shops, food, and helpful members of staff with English-speaking tendencies. Through a miracle of universal gesturing, nodding, shaking and frowning, a very kind gentleman who could smile his way through a funeral managed to communicate that I could find a 24-hour hamburger if I jump on the imminent (and last) train of the night, to Hamamatsucho. Having still to interface with the brain-bumming ticket machines, I didn’t risk any of the valuable remaining seconds asking how I might also get to Narita airport for my connecting flight to London. An hour later in Hamamatsucho, my appetite was considering its threshold while choosing between Cuttlefish Guts pickled in Salt, Fried Chicken Skin pickled in Sozu vinegar, Raw Horse meat, Fried Pop Chicken Gristle, Homemade Stewed Innards and Vegetables, Stir-fried Hot Pork Innards, or McDonalds. Fortunately, the untranslated Japanese menu (which, to be fair, this particular Izakaya would be better off sticking with) featured a photograph of Gyoza so I pointed at that and managed to get some quality munch. Four hours later, after some carefully-considered loitering, reading, drinking, and a spot of short-range strolling with my luggage, I managed to go the distance until the 5am train to the airport.

11-10-09 / GHENT FILM FESTIVAL / 10 TIGERS / TV LICENSING

There is nothing that relaxes and inspires me as much as chugging a boat around the enchanting Norfolk Broads, place of my conception and, dare I say, my spiritual home. Having returned from a long-overdue holiday there, where I completed further tests for the long-term night-photography project, I attended Ghent Film Festival in Belgium for a couple of days.

It was my third time at this particular festival and an impromptu drinking session in Nottingham the night before saw me arriving in a crabby enough condition to leave my passport on the plane, doh. The hospitality was first class, as always. It never gets any less surreal, especially when the hotel staff, who love it so much they have all remained since last year, remember you (and I won’t bang on about the enormity of the beds for fear of repeating last year’s entry, but they are BIG, okay). So, with enough food vouchers to eat like a king in a choice of amazing festival-sponsored restaurants (which all serve Westmalle beer!), it’s hard to escape the nudging sensation of being a lucky bugger. To think that I could have stayed the whole ten days in the lap of luxury, flicking peanuts at Kevin Costner or Andy Garcia. Another time.

Made the final tweaks to Tony Kelly’s short film 10 Tigers, which we started work on right after Andrew Brand’s Things We Leave Behind. Tony’s last short film, which we cut in 2006, is available to watch on the excellent BBC Film Network here.

Finally, nothing to do with work, but an outrageous example of Orwellian privacy-invasion that we should all be aware of. It takes a Jupiter-sized dose of willpower to summon the calm required for writing this without pissing fire from all orifices. A few years ago, I was finally granted exemption from paying a TV license fee when an understanding member of TV licensing, who also confessed to hating television, finally believed that I never watch the damn thing. However, given my trade, I own a set for watching DVDs. I just received a typically tiresome and dogmatic letter from TV licensing saying that Amazon.com have informed them that I recently purchased a television despite not possessing a valid license and blah-blah-blah. Naturally, the first thing I wanted to do was rip off Amazon’s nuts.com and introduce them to its bumcrack.com. Then I discovered that they aren’t the only retailers obliged to inform TV Licensing of such purchases. Honestly, this world. Said purchase was actually an HD monitor for editing purposes, but of course they cannot entertain that, oh no, you simply must be watching television.

22-09-09 / MILANO FILM FESTIVAL

Having attended the Milano Film Festival in 2003 and 2004 I was very much looking forward to being there again, and it didn’t disappoint. Okay, so I got savaged by Milanese mosquitoes again and one even seemed to follow me home (as I simultaneously write this and scratch the tumescent bites on my arm, a threatening buzz keeps zipping past my ear) but you can’t have everything. Partying got the better of me every night, despite my efforts to the contrary, and old friendships resumed while new intelligent, funny and charming acquaintances were made. A funny snippet of information was a member of the festival team telling me that he screened What about the Bodies in Antarctica to a boat full of Russian sailors travelling from Argentina. That has to qualify as my strangest exhibition location so far.

The jury work was interesting as there was much difference of opinion and while things threatened to become heated, a level of democracy prevailed and we got through it without anyone throttling their fellow jurors. Somebody told me after the ceremony that there was a palpable tension when we were on stage together, which I certainly didn't feel, but looking at the photograph (above) there can be no arguing against their assumption. Best film went to Laurence Thrush's Tobira No Muko (Left Handed) from Japan, and a special mention was awarded to Futoko (The Dark Harbour), also from Japan.

Something amazing happened on the closing evening which I feel lucky to have witnessed and been truly touched by. The lion’s share of the work was over for the staff, who could now start to unwind, so everybody was drinking and eating food in the park when the heavens opened. Now, I have been to a ton of festivals and as many of their parties, but this moment was something else. The DJ cranked up the music and MSTRKRFT’s remix of Justice’s D.A.N.C.E will never be the same again. Although the tables were sheltered by huge umbrellas, people leapt out into the rain to dance and became joyfully drenched. And it was good rain too, accompanied by the electrical storm I had smelled coming all day long (the last night of the same festival in 2003 also featured a storm over the castle). Everyone present versus the world. Crunchy beats, thunder, lightning and rain. I was happy to be alive, such was my whimsy, and it was a festival highlight I will never forget.

17-09-09 / PROGRESS IN DUNGENESS

Had a great few days on the UK’s south coast, in Dungeness, with Soft actor Jonny Phillips and his brilliant dog Bess. The perfect location for peace and quiet, luxuries like internet access and mobile phone coverage are replaced with howling winds, angry seas, cosy log fires and a barren, desert-like landscape. It is truly inspiring and comes as no surprise that Derek Jarman chose to relocate there. The New York Times once said of the area “If Kent is the garden of England then Dungeness is the back gate”.

The primary intention of the trip was to untangle the sprawling feature film idea I have been developing for the last seventy-nine years, which threatens to become quite unmanageable for my pudding-like brain. Although we made some progress, the solitude also proved ideal for viewing the feature films in competition at Milan Film Festival this week, where I am on international jury duties.

Most gratifying of all was the photography and the successful tests I did for an ambitious short film idea I mentioned in the 01-03-09 entry. Despite being a year or two away from any kind of completion, it's exciting to finally start the ball rolling. May it roll and roll, crushing all baddies in its path. No goodies, though. We like goodies.

02-09-09 / THINGS WE LEAVE BEHIND / AVATAR

Finished editing Andrew Brand’s new short film Things We Leave Behind, an old-school chiller set in the appropriately desolate landscape of East Anglia.

I have become quite fascinated by the general disappointment surrounding James Cameron’s trailer for Avatar.  Having been his only project since Titanic, largely consisting of ten years development and research into “cinema-changing” 3D technology, the first teaser (albeit in standard 2-D) admittedly looks like nothing more than a computer game.  I can’t help but fantasise about this being a deliberate ploy, a masterstroke of reverse-marketing genius.  Paranoid fantasy and complete rubbish of course, but the suits are always looking for the next marketing gimmick and if any film’s hype is massive enough to take such a risk without damaging its potential box-office, it would have to be this one.  Daft conjecture aside, it does amaze me how everyone has decided the film’s fate on the basis of a trailer because, let’s face it, trailers are shit. The fuss has been almost entirely about how it will revolutionise 3-D technology (therefore getting bums on cinema seats AND taking a huge step towards anti-piracy) so let's wait and see. Meanwhile, yet another redux of the much-spoofed scene from Der Untergang (Downfall) sums the whole thing up nicely and is well worth a few minutes of your time, unless you speak German, in which case it won’t be very funny at all.

In other news, a bewildering choice of potential projects threatens to confuse me into pursuing none of them.  I even had to stop myself from beginning a comic strip while unable to sleep.  Still, it’s all exciting and gets me out of bed in the morning.  As do the fresh duck eggs from a Derbyshire farm I recently camped in, oh yes.

03-08-09 / PICK OF THE WEEK IN CAMPAIGN MAGAZINE

Choose a Different Ending has been honoured with 'pick of the week' in the industry bible that is Campaign magazine. Scans can be seen here and here.

27-07-09 / CHOOSE A DIFFERENT ENDING

Good lord, a quarter of a million hits now.

16-07-09 / CHOOSE A DIFFERENT ENDING

The campaign has so far received an impressive 36,000 hits on YouTube. A lot of people, that.

05-07-09 / 'CHOOSE A DIFFERENT ENDING' ON YOUTUBE

The interactive version of the anti knife crime commercial is now online if you fancy a muck about. The sixty-second standalone version will presently begin rotation on MTV in quite nifty style, taking the start and end of the commercial break. The online campaign is made up of approximately thirty individual segments which you can navigate through. Two of the segments end with music videos and I should point out that those are somebody else's work. I hadn't even seen them until the films went live. To be fair, I had little to do with the post-production throughout the whole project, which is a first for me. I don't exaggerate when I say it's amazing that the work retained any kind of coherent shape considering the bizarre volume of complications, so I doff my hat to a persistent production team, editor, and agency for being such soldiers.

22-06-09 / HAMBURG / COMMERCIAL MADNESS

Haven't had a moment to post for some time. The Hamburg Short Film Festival was only a couple of weeks ago but it may as well be months. It was my eighth consecutive vistit to the festival and the first time I wasn't screening in competition, although Telling Lies screened four times as part of their 25th anniversary 'Best of' programme and my favourite outdoor event 'A Wall is a Screen'. I also found out afterwards that What about the Bodies screened in the 24hour marathon screening, which would have been great to attend, grrr. Highlight shorts for me were Juho Kuosmanen's Citizens (Finland), Benjamin Kracun's Plane Days (England), Susanna Wallin's Marker (Sweden/England), Ken Wardrop's The Herd (Ireland), Abdolrahman's Mirani's The Wooden Carpet (Iran) and Daniel Elliott's Jade (England).

While I was at the festival two other things happened back home. First, I made the shortlist for a new short film commission, which I'm very excited about. Second, I got the job directing a commercial, which resulted in constant phone calls asking me to return home prematurely and, when I didn't, an immediate return to London instead of Nottingham. So it was straight onto casting duties after stepping off the plane and one week after that we were shooting. It was easily the toughest shoot of my career, though all of the difficulties were of the unnecessary kind. I certainly won't be the only crew member to be saying "Oh man, once I did this job where..." in years to come. More on the actual commercial in due course.

12-05-09 / RETROSPECTIVE IN ROMANIA

Timisoara, Romania. A ten-film programme and the weather was perfect. My biography in the festival brochure was amusingly sourced from the internet and was a combination of my own bio and that of a music producer, also called Simon Ellis. So, aside from making films, I now work with Britney Spears and All Saints. This has to be the best clerical error of my career so far.

The trip was only a couple of days long, but eventful. My favourite shorts were Ilian Metev's documentary Goleshovo (UK/Bulgaria), Anthony Chen's Haze (Singapore) and Yasmine Novak's Zohar (Israel). The producer of Zohar told me a great story. I was at a festival in Bulgaria a few years ago and I met a filmmaker/actress who is Julia Roberts' doppelganger, and it turns out that she is now acting in a feature film where she is constantly mistaken for the actress. I can't wait to see it as the resemblance is uncanny. One thing that wasn't so brilliant about the trip is the nasty cold that I contracted, which the paranoid gremlin is hoping isn't swine flu now that the aches have started. I was fine one moment, then I walked from one side of the square (pictured above) to the other, and started sneezing. As i'm typing this my red-raw nose is dripping, which is shit.

31-03-09 / PICTURES FROM HAMBURG

I have finally got some photographs from the al fresco screening of Soft at Hamburg Short Film Festival last year. It was shown as part of the brilliant Wall is a Screen programme and there were something close to one thousand people present. The images can be seen on the Soft page.

14-03-09 / 'SOFT' BOWS OUT WITH FINAL AWARD

After a nerve-shredding few weeks where everything was looking grim and I had seriously been considering dissolving my company, Soft went and won the grand prize at the European Short Film Festival in Reus (near Barcelona in Spain). I couldn't believe it, this far down the line, at the very end of the film's festival life and in its last competition. I was so sure that its run was over, especially when it was up against Rúnar Rúnarsson's Smáfuglar (Iceland), a beautifully crafted awards-botherer. I couldn't think of anything to say that came close to the immense gratitude I felt. It is literally a life-changing prize right now.

01-03-09 / FILM INSIDERS TALENT FESTIVAL

Just back from Barrow-in-Furness in the Lake District, where I sat on a panel to yak about "the leap from shorts to features" with Nottingham producer Al Clark and others. It was so brilliant to get away into Cumbria's fresh air for even a short time. The skies were grey and threatened to unzip on us but it didn't matter. I hadn't been across Kirkstone Pass for ten years and it was a real tickle going through it again, having become so familiar with the route in my photography days.

The fog prevented us from seeing much at high altitudes but it was a buzz just to stand at the edge of Ullswater and wee on a tree, the clean air being essential compensation for eating nothing but rubbish food and drinking too much alcohol. I wanted to row a boat on Ullswater but they wouldn't let me until Easter. We stayed above a cosy pub where they don't even lock the door at night and inside the celings had loads of low beams for you to twat your head on. Most significantly, it smelled wonderfully nostalgic, like a musty pantry or second-hand bookshop, or my grandma's house when I was but a little scrote.

The trip also rekindled the urge to begin a short film in the area this spring. It's an ambitous project that marries my night photography background to film and it will take years to complete, involving lots of trial and error, the invention of a bespoke camera mount, and many hours sitting next to mountains through the night with a blanket and a pot noodle. The best-case scenario will be that I have an IMAX masterpiece on my hands. The worst-case scenario is that I will be found dead in a stream at the bottom of the valley like the dead zombie at the end of 28 Days Later (which was actually filmed there).

25-02-09 / DUBLIN INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

The screening in Dublin was a pleasant affair with almost all of the cast present. I completely forgot to take my camera along to the show, so there are no pictures. There is an interview with Irish national radio station RTE here, an interview from Totally Dublin magazine here, and a scrappy scan of a post-Rotterdam Screen International article here.

Saw a whole bunch of other films too, my favourite being Andreas Dresen's Cloud 9. Anvil's appearance at the screening of Anvil! The Story of Anvil was memorable enough, as it's not every day you get to see a metal band perform in a cinema after a screening. Oh, and my smart-arse predictions for the BAFTA and Oscar winning shorts were fantastically wrong.

03-02-09 / ROTTERDAM PRESS

Some tidbits of press from the festival papers - one interview in English (It's high time I got a new publicity shot) and another in Dutch.

There are also a couple of rather unflattering pictures that were taken the morning after a heavy night. Nothing like crawling out of bed with eyes like atoms for a photocall. The paper even reveals how I slept through my scheduled appointment (I ignored it), only for the hotel staff to walk into my room and offer a rude awakening. Now call me miserable but you can't just tell someone at short notice that you want to photograph them in their shared room when there are pants, socks, beer bottles and a composer laying around. My escape plan didn't quite work out and after regaining unconsciousness almost immediately I had to gimp myself two hours later. The photographer had this 'theme' where he was capturing directors in their hotel rooms doing something 'interesting', so after a bleary shot in the hotel reception we headed upstairs and I opted to hide down in between the twin beds with only my arm visible, thrusting an apple into the air. The apple was shit. Golden delicious, which are everything but.

The scan above just means that we were the most viewed, proving that word-of-mouth was effective, maybe because of the success of Soft or maybe because of the title.

31-01-09 / THOUGHTS AFTER ROTTERDAM

Well, the screens were HUGE and the shows sold out but the whole thing was so surreal I don't really know what to make of it all. Word of mouth on the film was big, topping the official 'most viewed' list in the video library, but those who responded to it most were definitely the film students I got to meet while there. Two of the actors (Kate Heppell and Justine Glenton) were also in attendance, as were two of the producers (Allan Niblo and Jane Hooks) and the film's composer (Tom Bailey).

There was little time to catch any of the other films between three screenings of my own, interviews and Q&A sessions, which was something of a skiddy bummer. A couple of critics have responded as expected so no real surprises there. Compared to somewhere like Sundance I thought the festival itself was great and the technical side of things was top-notch so I'm well pleased to have premiered there, even if I saw nothing of the city. I bumped into many familiar faces from other festival jaunts and I was even grown-up enough to get an early night on the final evening. Shameful, that.

The only terrible, terrible thing was discovering a mistake in the opening credits. It's too late to fix this for the cinema release but it will be corrected for the DVD. I could have died. Massive apologies to Production Designer Sami Khan, who is erroneously credited as Costume Designer for the time being. When I called to tell him he followed his "thanks for ruining my weekend" with a hearty laugh, which was really bloody gracious, I thought.

I feel the need to bring some attention to a festival report by a David Jenkins who, by some miracle I cannot fathom, ‘writes’ for Time Out (and I use inverted commas in honour of his own apparent obsession with them, to be, y'know, 'ironic'). In prose better suited to red-top newspapers, he refers to Singaporian director Royston Tan as the “Singaporese underachiever”. Apart from unintentionally inventing a new word in the first half of that two-word statement, the second is nothing short of ludicrous and factually inaccurate. Having completed four feature films by the age of thirty-two, you would be hard-pressed to find someone as prolific as Mr Tan, who seemed close to exhaustion when I last met him. I very much doubt the same can be said of someone who spends his career scribbling, it would seem, about other peoples' work. Would Jenkins say the same about others of similarly unstoppable output? Shane Meadows, for example? Makes my piss boil. Mr Jenkins, remember to a) research, and b) write with even a little flair. It’s the very least you can do.

25-01-09 / 'DOGGING' IN ROTTERDAM AND DUBLIN / OSCAR NOMINATIONS

It's the world premiere of Dogging in Rotterdam tomorrow night, eek!

Apologies to those who booked tickets to Dublin International Film Festival for Dogging before the infuriating change of screening date at the eleventh hour. Well, there are only two of you who were organised enough to book before the switch, but it doesn't hurt to exaggerate one's popularity if the mood fits. Right now I'm in a fairly vacant mood. A brain of broken biscuits. Held together by cheap jam. I'm having a spaz of a time trying to write a new feature film, spending more hours researching than actual writing, in the hope that when my cup runneth over with knowledge it will just shoom out of my fingertips onto the page. Yeah, right.

Congratulations to Reto Caffi on his Oscar nomination for his short film Auf der Strecke (On the Line). Having already watched the film bag many awards, it doesn't come as too much of a surprise. Reto, I haven't forgotten that you still owe me a couple of vodkas, so now you can make it a bottle if you bring home the bronze fella, thank you very much, ta, nice one. Competition will be tough with the Irish short New Boy also nominated. I think it's exactly the kind of film the academy will go for. Plus, it's Irish. Say no more. My prediction is that New Boy will scoop the Oscar and Sam Taylor-Wood's Love You More will take the BAFTA. The whole thing reminds me of Soft being disqualified from the oscar nominations last year because of a 3am screening on UK television. Television, of all things, something I couldn't care less about and only have the misfortune to spar with when I drop by friends' houses to eat their food. Some of which I might throw at said telly.

13-01-09 / 'DOGGING' IN ROTTERDAM

I almost forgot, my debut feature Dogging is set to premiere at Rotterdam International Film Festival in two weeks. It screens on the 26th, 27th, 29th and 31st, just in case you are passing through, like.

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