Beautiful film from director James Sharpe - Birds & Batteries
We love this stark, beautiful film - the fashion, music and film worlds colliding again!
There’s no shame in 14 drafts.
FIBS is the 20 minute short I’m currently working on, shooting at the end of march, with completion set for June 2013.
FIBS tells the story of Naomi, a teenage girl lost in her own world who desperately wants to win back her older ex-boyfriend Owen. She attempts to emotionally manipulate Owen’s younger brother Josh and use the biggest lie a girl can tell in order to get what she wants but quickly learns some fibs can be painful.
The film is a tale of identity, memory and about a time and a place between childhood and adulthood.
The film was developed as part of Derby Quad’s “Quad Shorts 2” scheme, funded by Creative England. The producer is the tireless Russell Noon of Mornray Films and we have joined up with 2AM Films and executive producer Gillian McNeill.
Our casting director is Anna Kennedy. Our director of photography is Annemarie Lean-Vercoe, the first cinematographer ever to be featured in Screen Internationals stars of tomorrow (2012) who has previously worked with Michael Winterbottom and shot the film Wreckers, which featured in the 2012 BFI London Film Festival.
So far we have an incredible team and we’re not even fully crewed or cast yet!
A bit of history: FIBS has been in development for a long time. Initially submitted to Quad in December of 2011, script development started early 2012 with script mentors Adam Marsh and Doug Smith with Anna Seifert-Speck from Creative England joining us later. Script developed concluded later than expected in August 2012 where, despite my desire to make a new film before the end of the year, we decided to set the shooting dates for early 2013 as our budget wouldn’t allow us to move as quickly as we wanted. Now with only a month to go before we shoot, we’re very glad of the self-imposed extra time!
As a writer, this script is by far the best thing I’ve ever written (if I do say so myself) it’s one of those that makes you wince to look at your back catalogue and realise that you can get better at these bloody things. The Douglas Adams quote comes to mind - “Writing is easy, you just stare at a piece of blank paper until your forehead bleeds”
FIBS started out as a very different blank piece of paper, as a more fantastical story about two teenagers with a very strange relationship who discover a dying robot bird. The story being a sort of meditation on growing up, friendship and…robot birds. It was producer Nicola Clayton who helped open my eyes to see that the characters were more interesting than the story they inhabited. So I took the characters and let them be themselves. I found the story that became FIBS grew naturally from the characters without plot having to be imposed. It’s nice when that happens isn’t it?
Today I’ve been going through the casting tapes and getting excited emails from producer Noon. The shoot dates are fast approaching and despite everything not being in place those 14 drafts are giving us some solid foundations.
Finished reading: A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
You all know about this one. Mknd boggling use of language.
Finished reading: Are You My Mother? By Alison Bechdel
I loved Alison’s first book Fun Home and her second book has left my mind buzzing in a different way. Dense and brilliant.
