A quick follow up to the previous video I think it was where I mentioned choosing animation over live action. While I don’t have the budget of Disney and I do know that animation tends to be a lot more expensive to do than live action.

There’s another reason why I didn’t just get carried away because I was amongst so many fantastic animators and visual effects people. A little bit of personal history. In the late 90s when I was doing my Open University degree I took a module in CAD and computer animation, computer design, computer modeling or whatever, graphics modeling.

Because I had an interest and I’ve been doing CAD and graphic design, technical drawing, sketching, drafting because of my engineering background. So I thought I’d love to do that. And at the same time this wonderful new thing that come out called POVRay, Persistence of Vision is a ray tracer. It’s the old school constructive solid geometry building blocks that comes up with a fantastic, real, very realistic image. And I love that and I did explore that.

Now back when I remember this is late 90s the tech was a bit slow. I then decided to go a bit further and actually produce some moving images. So I wrote a lot of C programs to move the camera around and eventually I mean a long time of processing afterwards I’d have hundreds of frames that I could stitch together and create an animated film of a 3D environment which was cool.

The same time as that I was also getting into painting and I had some success there with exhibitions and selling my artwork and yeah, I’m a creative kind of guy. All on a few years back into the early 2000s and the wonderful product that we all know and love as Blender was created. It’s that old. And this revolutionized some of the animation process with a massive learning curve of course which I thought was worth it.

So I created a few still scenes in Blender then managed to create the animation sequences. Obviously we’re then into the time of the talent of Pentium 4’s and Core Duo so still a lot of processing and a more complex environment.

I built leftover machines from the office, well a company where I worked at I was sort of management, IT management, so I claimed some of the machines after a PC refresh and built a OpenMOSIX cluster as my rendering farm. Had about half a dozen, the small room became very toasty I have to say when there was an animation was being rendered and that allowed me to produce a few animations and I really enjoyed this.

Then the kids came along, I lost my studio and the render farm for their bedrooms and put it all to one side 20 odd years later I have rediscovered the love of animation again. The kids like watching animation and to be honest I do too. It’s so much fun. And obviously Crash [festival] changed my opinion that it is within the realms of possibility so I picked up some software, OpenToonz and started to give it a go.

I’ll talk more into this process a bit later but I just wanted to say the animation choice or the choice to do animation wasn’t just on the spur of the moment like doing a live action film was because that was there is history behind making this decision and yeah I thought I’d just clear that bit up because you know some people think the ambition could be heading for disaster so this sort of soothes the possibility that this could be viable.

Anyway catch you all later. Bye.

Hello, I thought I’d actually come outside to do this one mainly because right here at the marina which hopefully the B-roll is showing you, this for episodes 1 to 3 that roll up to form the feature for Alice and Margaret and Alice, get that right because Margaret is the important one, is where things begin and where they end.

Subsequent episodes, if they’re episodes or full feature will be mostly here too. So I think I’ll talk about a little bit about the origins of the concept and the script development. It sort of started in 2021, I was writing a set of Edinburgh Friends shows called “Inky Mystery Files”, it’s sort of local history, mythology, weirdness.

Think X-Files meets Scooby Doo meets my hometown of Deal which is a small town eight miles north of here along the coast from Dover. I was after lots of little weird interesting freaky things that I could work on and I was scooting around in the history files and I found that when Mary and Percy Shelley eloped to France they stopped here and got a ship across the channel and I thought oh let’s have some origins of Frankenstein and that led to what became my Mary Shelley script and the concept there was that on the crossing they hit some storms and Mary met a fellow passenger called Margaret who told her the story why she’s leaving the country and it was all pretty horrific stuff and that inspired Mary Shelley to come up with Frankenstein or fictitious of course.

Now, in 2022 after I had written that script I had it broadcast on the local community radio and then in 2023 I did a performance in Stafford Uni for a festival and in between there I know I was probably telling it.

What’s very memorable about most of those performances for the solo storytelling of that script was that people thought it was true mainly because I sort of prefixed it with on her crossing a missing diary page has been found describing how Mary came up with the idea for Frankenstein and this is it and people obviously thought that was true and then I had to break them and say no I’ve just made this all up so it was quite entertaining I loved it.

Later on I did then a radio drama that didn’t quite work for casting issues and it was never finished in the production then at some point I started to associate myself with and network with filmmakers and I called the bug and as I said in the last one I got caught and decided to do this as a feature.

The script obviously with Frankenstein that’s been done to death literally no pun intended and especially that I think there’s been a recent Frankenstein production feature so I didn’t really want to have the Frankenstein IP so what I did was take Mary Shelley out completely swap her character with one called Alice and focus purely on Margaret’s story of why she left and then the continuation once she had left so it’s it’s grown from there and I love it and all the rehearsed readings and so on have been really enjoyable and people have loved it and when I’ve been pitching it people say this has got to be done.

So we are going for it however that happens I hope yeah I really hope this comes off because I’m putting a lot of effort you know since 2021 and you know 2026 end off it’s yeah it’s been a long journey obviously there’s been other things in between but you know this this is the one if I’ve got a film in me this is probably the one I’m gonna probably end up only doing.

You never know we could do more and I did originally well I originally created it as a continuous drama with the first episode is what most people have experienced as story as well as some rehearsed readings and table reads episode two in three oh that was another point; I just suddenly remembered now after the the failed sort of drama radio drama I was doing I mentioned about the casting issue I got really fed up with this and then about a week later I had to end up going to Edinburgh Fringe.

Maybe 2024, as 2025 was “Run. Scream. Die.”. I had an epiphany while at Edinburgh Fringe and you know in the sleep deprived state I just came up with this idea of doing a whole continuous drama and I came up with two series worth of episodes I ultimately rolled up to doing two full episodes which those three now form the feature because they link well together and we’ve got some suitable endpoints.

Then I’ve come up with some more script ideas for a continuous drama from that point onwards I don’t want to give too much away about what’s in episode two in three but there’s international travel so I don’t really want to have to do a live action with that because you know on on on location is going to be a bleeding nightmare but more about how we’re producing this later.

Well actually if you’ve if you’ve seen that the website you know how I’m going to roll with this but I’ll do some more recordings with those those reasons later but for now I think I think that’s probably it this is going on long enough and I suppose I better actually get back to auditions. Oh well back indoors then bye for now

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