Hands Up... Punk!

(Clint Eastwood)

Things have been fairly quiet since I got home. Not much going on. Well, Thomas and I got straight back to work on Iscariot and we had the broadcast of Emily's Song on Channel 4, which was quite a big deal. I had a bit of a struggle to get the money from kickstarter transfered, my own fault. I click deposit instead of withdraw, so my account went into overdraft! But the money didn't show up anywhere else, so when I hit withdraw and the money went into the bank it wiped out the overdraft and my account went to '0' - the money disappeared!!!

Luckily it was sorted out, but I panicked a bit for a couple of days... can't really afford to lose $2,200 dollars at the moment! You'll also notice I wrote $2,200 and not $2,580 as is on the kickstarter page. Unfortunately not all the funds came through, for whatever reason, maxed out credit cards, expired cards, I'm not sure, but a few donors were unable to complete the transaction. Kickstarter are following it up, so hopefully we can sort it out. But in the meantime it's a substantial some and I'm read, willing and able to spend it!

On the shopping list are: Posters and postcards, always useful for promotion at festival, screenings and markets. DVD duplications, essential. Beta tapes, specialised tapes for projection at festival. I already have an NTSC copy, which I will most likely count as my own donation to the cause, rather then seek to be reimbursed from everyone else's donations. And some of the money will also go toward entering festivals. Fees can add up, they can be anywhere from $15 to $100! I'm going to be very selective and do my research. It's always a risk paying entry fees, they are nonrefundable and I don't want to squander any money, but sometimes it is a risk worth taking.

So we'll keep 140 rolling and see how we go. We're also going to be looking different options in terms of making the film available after it's festival run, more on that later.

In other news:

On Monday I start, or complete, a new project, the working title of which is Hands. It is based on a collection of photography by New York based photographer Scott McDermott. The film will be a montage of his Mandela Day project. In it are photographs of hands of famous people, all of whom gave 67 minutes of the time to help improve the world in some way, on July 18th, Nelson Mandela's birthday. People like Robert DeNiro, Sharon Stone, Will.I.Am, Morgan Freeman and Clint Eastwood.

The exhibition was originally curated by Elliot Kotek with Nation of Artists. I saw it on the website and while chatting with Elliot on facebook chat I mentioned that it reminded me of an idea I once had for a short film, and wouldn't it be cool to do it with a cast list like that! He suggested mentioning it to Scott, and did, and while we were unable to utilise those people again, we were able to utilise Scott's images - and it went from there.

Elliot wrote a piece of narration, Scott provided his amazing work and I'm going to put it all together. I don't know where the film will go once complete, but it should be an interesting project. So watch this space.

This project also has special significance for me. Clint Eastwood is one of my heroes you see! I always wanted to meet him, and in my idle moments often daydreamed about working with him - that may never happen, but at least this is a little way there (if not still a million miles away!) - and I start the project on his 80th birthday! So that's kinda cool! But who knows, maybe someday - this'll do for now.