Thought I’d catch up with everyone with some details of my upcoming film project. Just to show you the wiring under the board on this a little I have been paying close attention to one of my many zero-budget film making mentors on this one Robert Rodriguez (via another Kevin Smith) who advises budding film makers to make their idea play to their strengths and downplay their weaknesses. Back in the mists of time when everything cheap was shot on some form of video tape control of replica firearms was not so strict in the UK. This was roughly 1994/5 and every male media student in the world wanted to be Quentin Tarantino… actually one guy I knew wanted to be Richard Donner or Steven Spielberg but that’s another story.

Basically if you had foul mouthed gangsters threatening each other with guns, or cheeky banter and guns between any set of characters you were considered to be on the royal road in those days. Of course this meant that the amount of gun-centric unimaginative posturing increased the “tosh factor” of indie cinema for a while. When everyone worked out they weren’t Tarantino then things calmed down a bit. I, at least, had foul mouthed gun toting angels/13 year old psychopaths in my work so that was a new wrinkle. Was still a bit cruddy though.

These days, of course, even replica firearms are frowned upon and I am of the opinion that the drama that grows from the barrel of a gun is a lazy kind of drama. So I was keen to downplay guns in any screenplay I chose to make. Only problem is my genre of choice was SF thriller.

So when it came to me to use psychics as a plot tool (who needs a gun when you can kill people with MIND BULLETS - that’s telekinesis, Kyle) I was initially excited. 20 seconds later I was unexcited again. Psychics always look constipated or like they’ve just wet themselves in filmic drama. Even the Scanners looked as if they were attempting a dump the size of Newcastle while they were exploding people’s heads. Then, when looking at Ronald D. Moore’s excellent re-imagining of Battlestar Galactica and partnered up with the excellent Dead Zone series starring the weirdly burly Anthony Michael Hall (no more the classic wimp since he grew up) it all clicked at some point.

What if you had psychics who had to do no more than daydream to turn your brain to icecream? What if you partnered that with more psychic abilities that relied on editing and simple digital effects for their specialness? What if nobody playing a psychic ever had to look constipated or say “empath” things like “I feel a great… fear” (TM Counselor Troi - Star Trek Next Gen)? What if it started to look a lot like Ultraviolet (the UK Vampiric TV series not the rubbish Wimmer movie) shot by the production team from The Shield and helmed by Tony Scott in Man on Fire mode?

What if I could find a way to set the majority of scenes in typical UK houses of people, well, a little bit like you and me? What if I could keep the costs down and still produce an incredibly polished nearly-TV ready yet super cheap pilot for a television series about these psychics?

Well I don’t know if *all* of this is possible. But much of it certainly is.

I expect to have a first draft of the screenplay (which has already deviated from the treatment a little but only in terms of necessity and sophistication, honest) mid week next week. Then I plan to put together a more modest screenplay and production bible and screenplay for a short in which I intend to explore the way the filming should work and my techniques for conveying the “story” of psychic powers such as, remote viewing, astral projection, mind control, shapeshifting, invisibility and, of course, head popping.

If you would like to be involved in either project (but particularly the short at this stage) please comment below, message me etc.