So, I’ve decided to produce a short film I wrote. What on earth was I thinking?!
Let’s go back to the beginning.
I stumbled upon a short film competition that asked for the whole story to take place in a hotel room with two people. So off I went and scribbled down a couple of ideas and one of them really stood out – it was about two people who were waiting in a hotel room to be abducted by aliens. I thought, I could have some real fun around that central idea.
As I started putting the characters together, it seemed to lack a bit of conflict to really add weight to the story – why not have one convinced they were going to be abducted by aliens and the other completely disregarding the idea – of course!
Nope.
It was just a little bit too silly. I played around with the tropes and clichés of sci-fi abduction films, even making reference to a mash potato mountain. Best thing to do, was pop it into a drawer and come back in a day or so.
I’m a dad to two lovely daughters, aged five and eight. Since becoming a father, it’s turned me into a huge cry baby – Toy Story 3 – tears everywhere. Coco – tears and audible gasps. It’s the bond that you form with them, the responsibility to protect them from the world – what would they do if I wasn’t around anymore?
The metaphorical drawer was whipped back open and I smashed out a first draft of a story about the relationship between a father and daughter who come to an airport hotel room as the father is convinced this is where he’s about to be taken by aliens, but his daughter thinks he’s a little delusional, but secretly is scared what she would do if in fact he was taken. I kept it light and littered it with jokes, but at its heart it was a story about a child preparing to lose an adult and what that meant to her.
After a few edits – what would become Departure was in good shape to send out to people.
One person I sent it to was Andrew Harmer.
Myself and Andrew had previously worked together in trying to put a feature script together, but as so often happens, it got to a point and we had to admit defeat.
However, lucky for me, Andrew loved my short script and even luckier, he was looking to direct a script. He also mentioned, that when he read it, he understood that it was a story about loss, but also he saw in it that the way the father prepares himself for his looming departure, it was like someone suffering from a fatal disease. Heart breaking stuff.
I did some rewrites on the script and really tightened it up so it became a story of dealing with the imminent loss of someone you love, how you the only thing you can really do is help them to prepare to leave and to come to terms with that loss.
Yes, it does have tin foil hats, jokes about probes and some fruity language, but at its core it’s a film about love.
So convinced of the script, we decided to plough ahead and get it made. We managed to get a producer interested pretty quickly, but we didn’t have any timescales to work to yet, so we unfortunately had to loss the producer to various other commitments. That’s when I said, I’ll give it a bash!
I don’t mean that in a flippant manner, I know producing is really hard, but I really wanted to bring this film to life – I think it could be an important film for people – jeez, I sound like some big headed auteur, but I think it may resonate with people who have sadly lost loved ones. It’s tribute to them.
I couldn’t do this on my own of course, so we brought in Kristen Brookman who is just starting out and producing and directing some exciting things and together we started planning.
How’s it going? Well, it’s going. We’ve launched the crowdfund and we’ve had a good start – at the time of writing this, we’re 23% funded and have 21 days left to raise £6000.
Producing so far has mainly entailed me hunting around for potential investors for the project – we have one Executive Producer on board (that’s one of the rewards if you pledge £500) and a whole host of people have been super kind and pledged. I’m planning tweets, social media activity, approaching actors and just trying to get the word out there. This is just the beginning, I know it’s going to get much more difficult when we look at locking down locations, music and everything else. Yet, in a weird way, even though it’s hard work, I’m really enjoying the process as I know ultimately we’ll be able to get a film made that originated in my head, one that I really love and one that I’m 100% sure Andrew will do justice to.
I really need everyone’s help to share the campaign, get it out into the wild and to hit its target. As we get more pledges, it enables us to be able to budget accordingly and we can start to drip feed some of the exciting things we can get over the line. So, please do share the campaign, and don’t forget, if you do want to pledge, you can donate anything you like – even it’s £1 you’ll still get a digital copy of the film, so for less than a coffee you could help to make a movie!
Together, we can get this beautiful film made: https://greenlit.fund/project/departure