QUESTION#1: Can you describe your film in one sentence?

A ten-year-old boy's imagination is so vivid and infectious, that it has the power to reignite the imagination in his grumpy old Great Uncle.

QUESTION#2: What would you like the BSFF audience to know about your film that they wouldn't consider from it's title?

I think the title is fairly self-explanatory, but I guess it might be interesting for the BSFF audience to know a little more about why imagination was such an important subject for me to explore.

I wanted to show people (or at least remind them) that imagination is not something to be underestimated - it is so important in life. So many of us lose the ability to imagine as we’re forced to ‘grow up’ and abandon that inner-child. Filmmaking for me is all about keeping that inner-child alive - allowing it the freedom to play, experiment and learn. I want to share this simple truth with the world, to help all those people living unfulfilled lives, to realise they don’t have to be unfulfilled - with imagination, even the most depressing lives can be wondrous if you learn to see the world with child’s eyes again!

So the film is about the wondrous gift of imagination, that it is not just something kids do for fun, but that it is integral to a fulfilling adult life. The good news of course, is that even if you've lost your imagination, it’s never too late to get it back!

QUESTION#3: Can you tell us about yourself and your filmmaking career?

I grew up with 70's Star Wars and Doctor Who, that inspired me to want to get into special effects.

I started making videos with my friends in a derelict quarry as an excuse to blow things up and in the process grew to like filmmaking more. I made my first 16mm short film when I was 21, set around a waterfall - a dragon fantasy inspired by Willow and featuring plenty of stunts, explosions and and animatronic dragons.

At Uni I wrote and directed three more 16mm shorts, that were more true to life, getting a better grip on character and storytelling. I then went to work in the feature film industry doing various assisting roles, landing my first job on Star Wars - Episode One, as well as working on Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow and Robert Altman's Gosford Park.

Itching to make more films and pursue a directing career, I want back into education to complete an M.A. in fiction directing at the NFTS -The UK's top film school. I graduated with a dark family fantasy short called The Happiness Thief that premiered in competition at Cannes and went on to screen at over a dozen more international festivals.

I spent the next few years developing feature projects, gaining representation through the Curtis Brown Literary Agency and making more shorts for the BBC, Screen South and the UK Film Council. My low-budget feature film thriller screenplay Blackout beat 200 other projects onto The Big Pitch, a nine month feature development scheme where you had the chance to win a 250,000 prize. The script was successfully optioned by Ipso Facto Films having attached Martin Copmston (Sweet Sixteen) and Jessica Hynes (Spaced), but sadly failed to get funding at Cannes due to the effects of the financial crash in 2008.

In 2010, while working as a crown court usher (to pay off my film school debts), I wrote The Infectious Imagination Of Henry Bramble in court, during 'points of law' (where the jury were sent out). Screen South then awarded me £20,000 to make it through their Innovative Shorts Scheme. Half the budget was to be spent on the production and the other half on the visual effects. Sadly the vfx team assigned to the funding, unexpectedly disbanded half way through completing our vfx, leaving us with 35 vfx shots to finish that London vfx companies wanted to charge £60,000 to complete.

Over the next seven years I tried vfx schools, crowd funding and the online vfx community, but to no avail. I looked into stop-motion model animation, 2D animated children's drawings and the possibility of converting Maya software files to open source Blender files, but every direction came to a dead end. Then finally in 2020 during lockdown I decided to learn After Effects and was able to finish them myself.

QUESTION#4: What have you learned in the process of making your film?

Making this film I learned to never give up - there are always solutions to your problems, just as long as you keep an open mind, are willing to think differently and compromise a little. I also learned how much skill, talent and time is involved in creating a cgi photorealistic biological creature. It's one of the hardest things to achieve in vfx, so next time I'm sticking with something a little simpler - A CGI German bomber plane crashing into the Northumberland countryside!

I've also learned that audiences will forgive a film for being a little rough around the edges if the story is gripping and emotionally engaging.

QUESTION#5: What's does the future hold for this film you?

My aim was always to use the short as a 'proof of concept' for a feature length version, which I have been developing alongside the short. I am currently working on a final draft that I can hopefully send out to potential funders.

That said, original family fantasy screenplays (like E.T. for exampe) rarely get funded these days as studios prefer to adapt existing IP that already has a proven audience. It saves on marketing costs. So once I have finished the screenplay, I would like to eventually write it as a children's novel.

I consider this one-off family fantasy, along with a trilogy of stories (based on my graduation film The Happiness Thief), to be my legacy projects. So even if I never get to direct these as feature films, I hope to be able to leave behind finished novels of them, so that even if they don't ever get published, my great, great, great granddaughter might stumble upon them in the future and read them as fully formed, finished pieces of work, rather than a blue-print to a film (which screenplays are often described as).

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