Originally the third piece from my London Actors Workshop course but it took me longer to get around to filming it as I was tied up with the final term project and monologue, so it’s now my fourth! This time we were tasked to take a familiar song and deliver it as a monologue. Can you name the song? Answers in the comments, please! Let me know what you think in the comments and if...
Here’s my third monologue which I loosely call: “God.” It’s taken from a popular TV show (can you guess which?) and adapted slightly to reduce the run-time to around 90 seconds and also drop the f-bombs as this was a requirement for the showreel. Back to the drama and with a slight Texan drool in this one to give it very a different quality. Let me know what you think in...
As part of my ongoing training with the London Actor’s Workshop, we’re doing regular monologues. Here’s the second one for the course: “Hotel Lobbies” Let me what you think in the comments. I’ll be posting new ones periodically as I film them. This one is a more technical one where we spent time working with sight lines. I opted for a more comedic approach on...
As part of my ongoing training with the London Actor’s Workshop, we’re doing regular monologues. Here’s the first one for the course: “At School.” Let me what you think in the comments. I’ll be posting new ones periodically as I film them.
Earlier this year I was asked to go and help produce the Women Unite NFT collection. I worked on the production side doing final checks, ensuring every model had the right costume, make-up and props immediately before their photo was taken. Initially, we created a collection of 2,222 stunning photos but they were all so unique that we extended the collection to 10,000 pieces. On some days we were...
Or, Why Movie Universes are suffering from Cosmic Inflation. Movies, or more specifically, movie universes and franchises like Marvel, DC, the Hunger Games series, Harry Potter, Warhammer, the Divergent series, etc, are big. But are they getting too big? The TV Analog In television, a show is developed to run over a series of episodes. Depending on the run, this can be a handful like 6-10 or a...
Dr Who. A TV series that has endured more than 50 years (albeit with a hiatus for 16 years, notwithstanding the 1996 film introducing us to the Eighth Doctor). It began in 1963 and is now in its 35th series (season). There is no other series in history that has come close to this longevity, aside from the James Bond (007) films which first screened in 1962 and now enjoying his 24th outing in...
I read HP Lovecraft in my teens and early twenties. Like many of my friends, we all enjoyed a good scare and Lovecraft provided something primaeval in his mythos. Films such as The Evil Dead and Reanimator supported this stage of life, but were they really any good and true to the books? Returning to the stories 20+ years on with talk of a movie that will ‘finally’ give us the Lovecraft movie we...
There are many shows that rumble on season after season, and there are some shows that stop abruptly part-way through their entire multi-season story arc. Examples of the latter are Heroes, Dollhouse and, to an extent, Legend of the Seeker. Other shows such as Chuck and No Ordinary Family are also teetering on the edge of termination while there may be still much mileage in their plots. What is...
I have been thinking about this since the last couple of posts on this subject (“From cliffhanger to cancelled” & “Why do good TV shows get cancelled“) and the more I think about it the more I have come to the conclusion that TV shows (especially sci-fi and fantasy ones) have become the 21st century comic book. The parallels are clear – they are both planned as...
About 40 years ago, I discovered role-playing and Dungeons and Dragons in one of the after school clubs. It revealed a universe that allowed me to flex my storytelling muscles and enjoy a mixture of fantasy and sci-fi and feed the escapist dreamer inside.
Over time, I played (and story-led - marked with *) many systems including Call of Cthulhu*, Shadowrun, Dungeons & Dragons*, Middle Earth, In Nomine*, Bushido, Chivalry & Sorcery, Chill, Warhammer, Warhammer 40k, Gammaworld, Hawkmoon, Stormbringer, Immortals*, Marvel Super Heroes, Paranoia, RuneQuest, Vampire: The Masquerade*, and a couple of systems my own devising (Medieval* and Parody*).
I explored live-action role-playing – eventually running my own club and creating my own LARP systems (Fools Gold and Dream Conquest) – and usually found myself in script-writing or game-master duty, writing over 500 individual live adventures over the period (usually weekly), many linked into the world events of the fantasy land we created. I also volunteered for Curious Pastimes and Lorien Trust at their main LARP events (special effects at the Ritual Circle), and did a little script work, cameos and improv for Curious Pastimes. I was also the South East's Editor (UK) for the LARP magazine The Adventurer. The biggest event I ran was a 10-month modern-day "murder mystery" LARP set around parts of Kent where characters were "always-on" and could get updates and interactions at any time outside of scheduled events. That was in the 1990s.
I was also the artistic director for English Heritage for their live Halloween Horrors events at Fort Amherst in Kent from 1998-1999.
Now, I write as the mood takes me with occasional competitions and challenges, and this year (2020) I will be taking on #NaNoWriMo.
Here's to the future!