Thursday, September 20, 2007

Absolutely cream crackered

Pure dead mental busy of late. Got a fistful of deadlines to meet over the next two weeks, off to Norway for the Raptus comics festival, opening night looms for a play I'm acting in and the device that controls the boiler has packed up, so the house is stone bloody cold. Gack. Still, enough of the self-pitying crap. Busy is good, money will be great when it finally arrives and hopefully the boiler problem will be resolved today or tomorrow. The way things are panning out, I figure I should be able to relax sometime after Sunday, December 16th. Which will be nice.

Spent yesterday scrambling to get my 23-minute script ready for the TAPS continuing drama workshop. I'd somehow gotten it into my head that I had until midday today to post the hard copy and email the electronic file. Just after ten yesterday morning I got confirmation both hard copy and pdf had to be at Shepperton by midday today. Since our local post office shuts at one on Wednesdays, that made for a frenzy of rewriting. Big thanks to all those people who gave feedback, and those who offered. Much appreciated.

Still, at least the TAPS script is now off my plate. From the 25 writers who attended the Nations workshop in Cardiff earlier this month, ten will have their 23-minute scripts selected for further development, with the chosen scribes named on Monday October 8th. They'll get feedback from a professional TV script editor before writing a new draft in about ten days. From those two will be chosen [along with two from the Regions workshop held in Leeds last weekend] for filming as showcase pieces with professional actors and crew on Emmerdale sets in November.

By the law of averages, that means my effort has a 2 in 5 chance of making it through to the next stage of development. Me, I'm happy to have gotten this far. More than 400 people applied for the 50 places available on the two workshops, so that's a good start. I think my 23-minute script's got some good stuff in it [one reader said the ending moved them to tears of joy], but a few more drafts and further development would be a huge benefit. Fingers crossed it gets that chance with TAPS.

Having hit those deadlines, I went to Edinburgh for a presentation by MEDIA, the European Union funding agency. More than half its budget goes to distribution initiatives, helping European films get seen, but there's also money available for training and development. I was the only writer there, everybody else was producers. I met an animation start-up team with some exciting aspirations, and others doing some interesting work in both film and TV. A nice outing from the office. Now I need to do some work to pay for my afternoon of [relative] leisure. Onward.

1 comment:

Lucy V said...

Gack! That was the name for silly putty over here in the 80s. It was green and made a mess of the carpet too. I remember 4 of us kids in my family managing to kill off a super shag in the living room with a huge pot of it. Which is not as bad as it sounds now I read that back...