This feels like a Dear John letter. Bollocks. Here goes… For the past twelve months or thereabouts, I have spent a great deal of my day on Twitter. I don’t regret any of the time I spent meeting people, talking, arguing and joking. But I’m only now realising that I haven’t worked as much or as [...]
September 21, 2009
My trip to FantasyCon in Nottingham at the weekend has reinforced my assertion that the best, most imaginative writers in the UK exist outside of the mainstream. It’s long been the case that our best script writers are not to be found in the committee-led world of British TV or the barren wilderness of our laughable [...]
September 8, 2009
This is apropos of nothing, take from it what you will… The boy was about sixteen, if memory serves, and he’d left the family home in a piss-poor area of Burnley to seek his fortune in Blackpool, a rancid shithole of a town. His parents thought he was going to work in a restaurant or maybe [...]
August 24, 2009
A couple of musical pieces to inspire, provoke and confound. Excellence in any endeavour is achieved through a combination of talent, dedication and practice. This is what it looks like… Victor Wooten playing bass. A couple of minutes in, your jaw will drop… Carter Beauford is the drummer with the Dave Matthews Band. Oh to be this good [...]
August 22, 2009
It’s been a while since I put anything up on here, so I thought I’d break the silence with a little compendium of excellence. There is nothing as inspiring as seeing people at the top of their game doing what they do best. Here, then, is a series of clips of excellent people doing excellent [...]
June 13, 2009
The answer is Hargrave, Northamptonshire, a tiny village on the way to the in-laws' place. We were encouraged to stop off at Hargrave because they're mounting a 'Scarecrow Festival' this weekend. I had no idea what to expect...
June 9, 2009
Stuck in a creative rut? I often find it helps to reacquaint myself with the music video work of Michel Gondry. These are pure visual ideas of the kind that would make your head explode if you thought about them for too long and they are also a good reminder of the power of the imagination and the value of thinking a long way outside the box.
May 18, 2009
I decided I was going to make a film. That was what I wanted to do, I wanted to make films. I'd wanted to make films since I was about eleven years old. Go to film school? I couldn't afford it and I didn't really believe in it. I didn't think I could learn anything in a classroom that I couldn't learn better and faster by doing. I still believe that about pretty much everything (although, if you're about to operate on me, I'd love you to have passed some exams).
October 31, 2009
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