As my regular readers will remember, my brother and I are currently developing a feature length version of our award winning short film Hallo Panda in which a lovelorn American zoologist comes to London to help get their pandas to mate and ends up getting some spectacularly bad romantic advice from a talking bear. As a result for the first time in our lives we find ourselves trying to negotiate our way round the American agent system as we try and hunt out our charismatically hopeless leading man. Though we knew it was never going to be easy for a low budget film from late night Channel 4 to attract attention in the sunshine, we have been surprised and delighted by the response that the script is getting. Whilst we hoped Americans might take to its quirky English humour it seems that mainly they’re just being excited by the highly commercial romcom beast that lurks beneath the jokes.

All of which has made us plan a trip for the first time, for this film and for others. But it’s massively daunting. I still get exhausted and confused by the mechanics of our industry, a broken antique pocket watch set beside the massive atomic clock of LA. So our first stop isn’t going to be the Universal Studios coach tour, it’s not even going to be the In And Out Burger, our first stop is going to be Alan Denman’s strategy-packed London seminar with the reassuringly blunt title Breaking Into Hollywood.

Alan has lived and worked in LA for the past seven years and is only here on a visit, so the session promises to be contemporary and comprehensive. Of course I’m not expecting it to make our trip easy, but I can think of no better map to guide us, and at £55 (£45 to Shooting People members) it’s the best value travel insurance on the market. See you there?

Wed 14 Sept – 6.30 – 9pm – Birkbeck College, Torrington Square, London WC1E
Full information at www.script-to-screen
info@script-to-screen.com

Rejoice then because at long last the technology is catching up with the hype and buying and watching films online is finally becoming as good as they said it would be years ago back when it wasn’t…

For instance if you’re fed up of hearing me bang on about my film “Hallo Panda” because you’ve not managed to see it yet and don’t really know why everyone loves it so much, then all you need to do is click on this link:

http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewMovie?id=374965584&s=143444

or alternatively just open up your iTunes and type “Hallo Panda” into the search window.

If you’ve already got an account with the iTunes store you can watch the film with one click. You’ll barely know that you’ve paid £1.49 and within moments you’ll have thirty minutes of bear shaped hilarity pouring out of your internet into the very room you’re sat in now. It’s well worth it, this is a film that, when it was screened late night on Channel 4, inspired the unprovoked adoration of an unoffical Facebook fan site created by lovely insomniacs. To convince you further there’s a delightful trailer on iTunes cut together by our friend and father-to-be, Mr.Ben Adam.

So how does iTunes compare to other delivery methods? Well, Apple are soon to overtake Microsoft as “the IT Giant everyone irrationally hates” and getting our film on the site is kinda how I imagine it would be for a small farmer getting his bacon taken on by Wal Mart. On the one hand it exposes us to a potentially staggering global market, on the other the cut is slender and the process of getting there has been numbingly painful.

Our distributor, Shorts International, have an exclusive deal with iTunes and seemed pretty confident from the outset that our film would be the sort of the thing that iTunes would want. First we were scheduled to be part of an anti-Valentine’s day theme. That was 18 months ago. Now, with the 4th anniversary of the film’s production just passed, the film is finally for sale though it’s not listed in their directory, not filed as a new release and they’ve not credited either my brother or one of the two producers…

So yeah, the massive global market that iTunes potential offers is appealing but if I’m honest what I’d love you to do is take a moment to go to iTunes, rate the film as high as you can, watch the trailer because it’s cool and then come to my website and watch the film using Dynamo player because that way more of your money will come back to us…

So it is with some reticence that I post this little film I found on youtube, for fear that it starts all over again. However, I have to say, this is just the loveliest thing I’ve seen perhaps ever.

Anyway, on Monday night excerpts of our feature length version of “Hallo Panda” were featured as part of the BAFTA Rocliffe New Writer’s Forum. I’d heard from my mate Claire that the event was brilliant and something that was worth our time submitting stuff to, but I have to admit I did so with a degree of trepidation. Now I’ve been through the process I understand it and it’s smarter and harder than you think…

Photograph by Mat Ricardo

The basic set-up is quite straightforward. Ten minute extracts from three scripts are given a rehearsed reading in front of an audience and an industry figure who then gets to question the author.

Naturally a great deal of attention goes on the reading. Each script is given a director used to working in the Rocliffe way, each is also given a composer, an expert casting director and an artist to create a mood-setting back drop. Though the actors are not expected to be off the page, the extracts are not merely read but acted out. In our case, director Paul Cavanagh also used a couple of chairs as a very flexible piece of scenery which morphed seamlessly from the back of a bus to a tree branch as the story progressed.

TOM WU as Panda and CHRISTIAN CONTRERAS as Mark
Photographs by Mat Ricardo

But despite all the effort and energy going into the reading I still had my concerns. Could ten pages really give a full insight into the script? Would this semi-theatrical approach obscure the cinematic element of the script? Paul had convinced us to change the extract and though I trusted him, I couldn’t quite shake the feeling that in giving the audience the start of the story we were really just repeating what we’d done with the short and not quite showing off the real depth of the story.

However I had overlooked the impact of the Q&A session with the industry chair. In our case this was the magnificent Gillies MacKinnon who, after all three projects had been given their turn, gave a brilliant and concise run down not only of the twists of his career to date but also of his creative philosophy which feels something like “never the mind the bollocks, what’s it about?”

Having read our extract before the evening started, Gillies had, not being a man to mince his words, crossed out large sections of our dialogue which he felt were redundant. He’d even, apparently, toyed with the idea of bringing along his own version of the script to give to the cast instead… however, after watching it performed he was magnanimous enough to admit on stage that he’d happily eat his words. It worked. It was funny. It has a natural rhythm and flow that the cast really got hold of and, thanks to Paul, the piece leapt off the page.

Gillies did have concerns though and asked us (as usual) a series of painfully searching and accurate questions that got to the heart of what will make this film work or fail. And this was when I realised how Rocliffe really works. Of course the extract is not enough. Of course performing it on a stage with a couple of chairs does not paint the fullest picture. Instead it gives you no hiding place. It forces the audience not to enjoy it but to question it.

It’s ordeal by fire, especially as this court marshall is taking place in front of an audience and at BAFTA. However if you have a clear sense of what your story really is, the questions soon stop feeling difficult and just become opportunities to get the film across.

Chris, Me and Gillies

On stage Q&A kept in check by Farah Abushwesha

We submitted to Rocliffe a first draft we finished a few months back and we’ve been working on the second ever since. Already the story has progressed and our thinking about it has clarified. Besides, in one form or another this film has been in our lives for four years or more. We know this story. The rehearsed reading grabbed everyone’s attention, made them laugh, made them engage, but it was the Q&A session that then enabled us to really explain the film. Which just shows we were right to trust Paul, not only was direction smart and sympathetic but most of all, his choice of extract set up the Q&A perfectly.

Paul asks us a helpful question, cheers Paul!

I couldn’t recommend it highly enough. Their next submission deadline is Spring 2010. It’s a great platform… just remember that it’s the Q&A that really counts. The extract should engage but it should also create questions for the audience. What matters is that you can answer those.

Submission information here http://www.rocliffe.com/scriptappl.php

Hallo Panda Trailer from Blaine Brothers on Vimeo.

Tonight’s your first chance to hear how Panda is shaping up as a feature script… please come.

In the end this didn’t really work for us. I’m delighted to say that the film has found fans, even its irregular 3am screenings on Channel 4 have been enough to encourage an unofficial fan site on facebook not to mention a regular stream of people finding Chris and me through the internet as part of a quest to prove that they hadn’t dreamt the whole thing. However, as great as it feels that other people love our film, the honest truth is that Chris and I still have unfinished business in the Panda enclosure.

There is a tired maxim about the mistakes of translating a short into a feature but whether you think we’re barking up the tree or are just interested to see how we’re approaching the task of enlarging without padding, tomorrow you have your first chance.

We are over the moon that a section of our first draft has been selected for the BAFTA Rocliffe New Writer’s Forum and will be performed live at BAFTA from 6.30pm tomorrow. Tickets are five pounds and are available at the end of this link: http://www.bafta.org/public-calendar-event.html?btype=day&Gday=20091130000000

The event will be chaired by the brilliant Gillies MacKinnon and two other projects will be showcased alongside ours. All three are works in progress and it’s a rare privilege to be able to share something at such an early stage so I’m excited and terrified in roughly measure and both Chris and I would be really grateful for anyone who can come down and give us some thoughts on what they hear.

More information…

Rocliffe – http://www.rocliffe.com
Rocliffe at BAFTA – http://www.bafta.org/whats-on/bafta-rocliffe-new-writing-forum,380,BA.html
Our Event – http://www.bafta.org/public-calendar-event.html?btype=day&Gday=20091130000000
Hallo Panda Short Film – http://www.charlieproductions.co.uk/films/hallopanda/index.asp
Hallo Panda Fanpage - http://www.facebook.com/pages/Hallo-Panda/160488370696?ref=search&sid=598966706.4224794191..1

For those of you (me) who care about this it’s now down to 99 and a half pages and has taken us about twenty actual days to write. Now I’m too wired to sleep…