Lucky

I studied in the National Film School, Dun Laoghaire and in 2007, I made a short film called ‘Lucky.’ I always liked the film but never completed a satisfactory final cut – (other college projects got in the way and I had moved onto several more ideas.) Anyway, I came across it on a hard drive over the weekend. I sat up till the early hours two nights running to work on ‘Lucky’, tightening the cut up, replacing the audio with better sound FX and music and adding a few touches that I learned over the intervening years.

It tells the story of a young boy struggling with his English homework. (It’s more fun that it sounds!)

Anyway, here’s Lucky for your viewing pleasure. Six years in the making.

5 to try

Author Joe Hill posed an interesting question on his blog earlier. What 5 things have you never done as a writer that you would like to try? It got me thinking so here are my 5.

 

1.Write a graphic novel

This is an easy one. I’ve always loved comics and have a pretty decent collection. I also love art and have studied fine art, graphic design and film in college – all of which work nicely with the medium of graphic novels. It’s years since I made any art on paper properly and I’m sure I’ve lost whatever talent I may have had in that area so I wouldn’t be able to draw a comic but I would absolutely love to write one. If any comic artists or illustrators out there want to collaborate, give me a holla! Read the rest of this entry »

Book Trailers

There’s a great article over at Inis Magazine that discusses the book trailer, its effectiveness and the producers’ ways of showing enough but not too much.

It got me thinking about my own book trailers. Since I come from a film background, I was, of course, excited about having a trailer for my book. Even before I had discussed the possibility with my publisher, Mercier Press, I had an idea of what the trailer should be. Dark, atmospheric, creepy were some of the adjectives that came to mind.

I had quite a bit of experience with trailers like this, having produced short viral promos for various theatrical productions over the past couple years. These plays often faced a similar problem that books do – until the production is staged, there is a lack of actual filmed footage. So I would take photographs and text and animate them to suit the piece. These trailers seemed to be quite successful in getting bums in the seats so I was certain that something similar would work for my book. Read the rest of this entry »

Locke & Key

Joe Hill is one of my favourite new horror writers. His work is always so original and manages to meld fantasy and terror as well as Neil Gaiman. He writes characters you care for and the plots keep you guessing right up till the last page.

So I was thrilled when I heard that Fox were adapting his comic-book series Locke & Key for TV.  I was even more thrilled when I heard that the cast would include the much underused Nick Stahl and Ireland’s own Sarah Bolger and that it would be directed by Mark Romenek (‘Never Let Me Go’, Johnny Cash ‘Hurt’ video, etc).

But then Fox, in their infinite wisdom, have decided not to screen the episode. At all.  Read the rest of this entry »

Film Review: Super 8

Allow me to preface this review by stating categorically that I have never liked any JJ Abrams film. To me, Mission: Impossible 3 is little more than a generic action film, Cloverfield is a failed experiment and Star Trek is just plain boring.

But now, with Super 8, Abrams has finally lived up to his hype.

The film tells the story of thirteen year old Joe who, along with some filmmaking buddies, are at the site of a train crash and accidentally record some blurry beast stepping from the wreckage. When the Air Force show up and put the town under lock-down, only the group of friends can work out what’s going on.

Read the rest of this entry »

Bridesmaids Review

I’m going to avoid rants on this blog as much as possible but decided to write a review of Bridesmaids for one simple reason; to balance out the reviews it’s been getting so far.

Let me start by saying that I have a lot of time for Kristen Wiig. I think she’s a great comedy performer and an amazing writer. For me, she’s the highlight of Knocked Up (another Judd Apatow-involved comedy I dislike) and her brief cameos on HBO’s Bored to Death are hilarious. Going by the rave reviews Bridesmaids has been getting – (even better than The Hangover) – I was looking forward to seeing this. I just left the cinema an hour ago and I couldn’t be more disappointed.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Hobbit – First Glimpse

Here are the first glimpses of The Office star Martin Freeman as Bilbo Baggins in Lord of the Rings prequel, ‘The Hobbit’. According to director Peter Jackson, he got quite a shock when he saw the schedule for the adaption. ‘I felt a terrible drop in my stomach when I saw that we’d be shooting for 254 days’, he told Entertainment Weekly, ‘We’re only 12 days short of The Lord of the Rings even though we’re only doing two movies!” Jackson went on to say that he warned returning star Ian McKellen (Gandalf) that ”this isn’t Waiting for Godot or King Lear. This is The Hobbit. This is the real thing.”

 

Coffee

I got a new camera recently (the Nikon D3100), which I’m loving playing around with. So I made a very short film about making coffee to test the camera out. Here’s two versions.