Things are moving along nicely now. The second draft of 'Mnemosyne' was finished recently and sent out to fellow filmmakers Kevin Gates, Leslie Chain and Hakan Besim.

Hakan also popped up to see me over the weekend so we could get some location scouting done. It might be tight to try and shoot the film over one weekend, and this might cause problems due to the fact I am lined up to go the States sometime in late June. This means I could ultimately end up shooting this film over two separate weekends in two different months.

Kevin Gates has also agreed to do an interview on 'being your own producer' which I will line up soon.

It's Easter, and I'm back in Chatham (My home town) putting the finishing touches to the second draft of 'Mnemosyne'. I was a little distracted today, though, as I ended up going to see Phone Booth, the new Colin Farrel film. The film was very 'edge of your seat' stuff, and for the first 3 quarters I thought it might end up getting a 90%+ score. But, as is the way, endings are the hardest to write, and the film kind of fell down at the end like an athlete collapsing over the finish line of a 100m sprint. I use that anology as the film was very short. Some argue it would have made a better short film, but I a not convinced. As a feature it was awesome and my hat goes off to the people involved for putting together such an entertaining and focussed piece of work.

Speaking of shorts, Mnemosyne's second draft is likely to be close to the final draft. I therefore will get onto ShootingPeople sometime in the coming week and get some casting sorted. I plan to upload the finished movie together with all the drafts sometime in July so other filmmakers can see the progress.

Today I had an opportunity to help out on a special effects scene for Kevin Gates' movie The Unseen.

I'll have some stills soon from Kev to put on the site. Basically the scene was for an exploding head. One of the special effects guys working on the shot had actually been in New Zealand for a year where he worked on the Lord Of The Rings trilogy.

I took my camera and tripod along with me. Kev also had a friend bring along a Sony HandyCam, so there were three cameras in all if you include the VX2000 which The Unseen was shot with.

Kev's DoP also brought a camera to my attention that looks pretty damn cool. It's called the Sony DSR-500 and records in DVCAM mode (So I can pump straight to Premiere, etc and edit on my PC). It's not at the DigiBETA level, but a lot of people have used it and in most cases it has been indistinguishable from 35mm when blown up and projected (to non-film studenty people anyway!). Scott Billups used it to shoot a commercial not so long ago and he said people thought it had been shot in HiDef (What they used to shoot Attack Of The Clones). Kev's DoP said the rental of the camera is quite cheap, so I might use it instead for my feature. There are many options....

Anyway, the FX shoot was a cool experience, and Kevin said I should go on a few more shoots to see how established directors interact with cast, as that will help me when I finally get around to the feature in 2004.

Yesterday I met with Kevin Gates and got some more glimpses of his feature film 'The Unseen'. The film is really starting to take on a professional look and I am keeping my fingers crossed that it will make it to a video release and be picked up by a number of territories.

Kev asked me if I'd be interested in helping out with a special effects scene his team are going to shoot later this month. We also worked out a possible interview he can do on the subject of Directors being their own Producers.

Kev and I spent a long time going through the script to 'Mnemosyne' so we could iron out all the dialogue problems. Kev said this needed the most attention, closely followed by certain scenes which broke up the atmosphere (important as Mnemosyne relies heavily on the creepy atmopshere). I will begin work on the second drfat tonight. I plan to shoot the film in June, and we are still well on course to do so.

My other film that has the working title of 'Living Dead' is being polished off by writer, Jeff Day. I want to film this using digiBETA sometime later in the year once I have completed Mnemosyne and maybe one other project.

Today I received feedback from Eastenders writer, Jeff Povey. The feedback has been generally positive for my short film, which now has a working title of Mnemosyne.

Jeff said that this was a massive improvement in writing for me, a comment that is mirrored by all the other script supervisors. There are still some areas for improvement, but overall the story has held up well. The ambiguous ending (although that's all I will say at this point) has raised a lot of questions and got a lot of the supervisors talking. Generally it has been accepted as a good thing.

Jeff has said I need to work a little bit more on the history of the character so that people will feel a lot more for him. This will hopefully be sorted in the second draft. Mnemosyne will run for appriximately 15-20 minutes. I am really looking forward to filming this movie. It will be a spectacular feat to pull this off, but I need something really substantial to get my teeth into to get me back into directing.

Last night I finally met with Hakan Besim, the producer of the film Vincent. We both rate Vanilla Sky as our favourite film, so it wasn't much of a surprise we'd get on very well! Hakan showed me a treatment for his new film which sounds excellent. We also talked over the first-draft of my short film , which now actualy looks like it might last for maybe 15-20 minutes.

In other news, origins was accepted into a film fesival in New Orleans; the criteria (aside from the film actually being good) was for the film to run on a mobile phone. Origins is in the drama category of the festival.

Today I finally got some steadycam tests done. A direct comparison was done of hand-held (with optical image stabliser) V the SteadyTracker. I will try and get the footage into an MPEG to upload soon.

In other news, the response has been very good so far to the first draft of my 10 minute short. Jeff Povey has yet to read it as he is juggling four scripts at the moment. I'm sure when he sees it there will be some big changes. I'm actually thinking about changing the ending yet again. I will upload all drafts as the same time once I have settled on and registered a final script. Once I get Jeff's remarks I will be in a better position to judge a timescale.

BBC talent was also relaunched recently, but there is no filmmaker section - just a music video thing, which has been poorly put together. So competitions are a bit stale at the moment...

The first draft of my script for a 10 minute film was finished today. I finished the writing yesterday, but touched it up today at work with the help of one of my colleagues, Stuart Folley. Jeff Day also had a look and came up with some useful criticism which helped me polish off the first draft. It has now been sent to a fellow filmmaker, Hakan Besim, and to script expert, Jeff Povey. I hope to have enough feedback from them in the next week or so to go on and produce a second draft.

I am also having second thoughts about whether or not I should enter BBC TALENT. The last two competitions I expressed an interest in turned out really weird. Six Minute Cinema seemes to have been a lot of hot air. No sponsors, nothing. And they also expected people to pay to enter! No way! The other was the camcorder user competition. I saw the films that came 1st, 3rd and 6th. They were really good and I was impressed. But then I saw the film that came 9th (Some guy running around in his back garden with a light sabre) and I had to wonder how it beat Origins, let alone made the short-list (An opinion mirrored by every person asked). I realised that the shortlisted films all contained some sort of special effect. I am pleased that organisations are embracing digital film, but it worries me that there is this mind-set that there must be some kind of special effect in each movie. There is nothing wrong with a great digital film that has digital effects; but rewarding filmmakers for making crap digital films with effects at the expense of good digital films with no special effects is totally bizarre. My plan now is to watch last year's short-list and decide that way if it is a legitimate competition or a waste of time.

I have binned the idea for the film HOLE and have put Living Dead on the backburner for now. I actually am thinking that once this 10 minute film is finished, it might be worth doing another before jumping into a project with as much depth as Living Dead. Another reason for holding off is that I plan to shoot Living Dead on DigiBETA. So as much experience as possible is necessary before I pick up a 'real' camera (no offence intended to miniDv users).

I looked over the finished script today, and came to the conclusion that the ending was bloody awful. I plan to revise this tomorrow. I refuse to send it out until I am happy with it, and right now the ending is very poor. I just hope I have the energy and enthusiasm to finish the ending off after a full day's work tomorrow.

I went without sleep last night and got 4 solid hours of work done on the new script. Today I spent another 4 hours and finally finished the script. I know there will be a lot of editing and revising to do, but the basic idea is laid down.

I also got to see Solaris today after 28 hours without sleep. The film was intricate enough on its own, but the lack of sleep made parts of it inpenetrable. There were loose ends I couldn't figure out; some were explained later after deliberation, but other parts still leave questions. The film was very slow (just how I like them) and built up the atmosphere beautifully. I saw the film in Chatham, so I guess I shouldn't have been surprised when a parade of young girls all marched out at the end moaning to each other how they wish they had seen jackass instead. Overall, Solaris was very deep. Maybe too deep for me. But in terms of its effect and the way it explored loss, it did its job wonderfully. Thank you for another awesome film, Mr Soderbergh. Still up there as my top director!

I stumbled upon another excellent website today. My current focus of research is obtaining good sound, and this website hits the spot niceley. It is called Film Sound Design and it is a brilliant resource. Combine the knowledge here with the tips in Julain Willson's interview, and you pretty much have all you need to get stuck in and do some good sound design. It is worth mentioning at this point that the sound effects one can hear in my short film Origins came from CD's that can be purchased at ths site: www.timespace.com. They're on my links section, but I thought I'd reinforce the point today.

In other news, I am entering Origins into a mobile film festival, which I'll give more details on soon....

Today I met again with the director, Kevin Gates, writer and director of The Unseen. I took my MV30 to his studio to run some tests. I had a sneaky suspicion that something wasn't right because the burned out pixels weren't appearing as bright as before, and one of them had moved! After pumping the footage out through S-Video, we noticed there were no dud pixels! The CCD change performed by Canon's technicians had removed the problem! That was obviously the best news I've had in ages, but it doesn't explain why the LCD now has those burned out pixels. Maybe it is behaving like a monitor without a screen saver? Who knows. Anyway, I'm happy as now the camera seems to be back to normal. I will have to keep a close watch on it, though, as Kevin said sometimes pixels like that 'come and go'.

I finally got a sneak peak at some of the footage from Kev's film The Unseen. Very impressive! The special effects were excellent also. Looking forward to the test screenings!

I have been doing a lot of thinking lately about what I am going to do next. I can't blame the lack of films solely on the lack of camera, as the scripts written so far are not of the quality - in my eyes - that they need to be, in order to be filmed.

The Hole is far too experimental, whilst Living Dead is far from how I imagined the story (This is mainly down to me not giving Jeff Day a rigid framework). Then there is the issue of competitions and opportunities. Six Minute Cinema seems to be going nowhere. There are newsletters here and there, but still no sponsors on the site, amd still no good reason for me to part with cash to enter the competition. I've decided to wait until the second year for this, assuming there is one!

After much deliberation, I have decided that the only thing worth entering is BBC TALENT and that is assuming that that even runs this year. So that means working on one 'ten minute' film, and then when that is done, thinking about progressing on Living Dead.

I have scheduled a deadline of the end of March to write the script by, and then I will film the thing in the United States in April, as that is when I am next out there. I will try and get Jeff Povey to critique the script and give me his blessing, but will go ahead even without it because I really need to get directing again after such a lull.

I received the SteadyTracker today, and must say I am very impressed. I ordered the SteadyTracker Xtreme, which is the larger model. This is because I intend to use it for my feature which will be shot with a larger, heavier camera. I must say, for what works out as £160, this was an excellent purchase. Well done to ProMax, and in particular to Rene Kropf, the international sales manager.

The device comes with a video which shows you how to put the thing together - even I could understand it, and I am terrible with instructions unless they are very precise. I balanced the camera and did some movements and all seemed well. Once I get my camera back from repair I shal upload some footage taken using the SteadyTracker. But this is definitely good enough to be used in my tools set for the feature.

Yes - it still hasn't been repaired. I tried to persuade the Canon Warehouse Manager to plug the output into a TV to check the pixels had gone before they sent it back, and his response was something along the lines of 'look, these guys get paid £60 an hour, so I am sure you have nothing to worry about!'.

So having been without my camera since November last year, I now have to send it off again. I'm not due to film anything until April anyway, so I'm not too pissed off - I'm just really disappointed in Canon.

Today I met with the director, Kevin Gates, writer and director of The Unseen. What a small world! It turns out Julian Willson, the sound recordist I had only just recently interviewed, had done the sound recording for Kevin's film!

Kevin, who has a degree in film, and a masters in experimental film, was full of useful advice and stories. One thing he said was that most of what he has learned over the years has come from trial-and-error. This presses home the point Leslie Chan made (see 30/Jan/2003).

As a result of my interview with Daniel Outram, I have subsequently conducted an interview with his excellent sound recordist, Julian Willson. Julian did the sound recording for Daniel's film, Racing Post, which I saw on the Raindance DVD. Check out the interview here.