Scampenstein

Well apparently the producer is still interested but busy finishing his latest film. This presumably is what they call ” development hell”. More as it happens…

First the bad news.

Well sadly I haven’t heard back from the Pinewood based producer who expressed some interest in the project. No reply to various emails and telephone mesages etc so I presume its back to Square One. I’ve also decided to close the Facebook group as I was putting too much time in for very little in return - though special thanks to those such as composer Phil Mountford, Gareth (Sheikspear) and JohnnyA of PhotoshopNinja who did stand up to the mark and deliver.

Thats the trouble with pro bono work and trying to get momentum. It seems that Feintheart worked on MySpace because it had corporate backing but the initial favorable support for Scampenstein didnt translate into actual digital content to grow the project as intended.

But…

The good news is that the nice folks at Lionsgate Animation have agreed to read the script when completed plus I now have my first live action feature in development with an established producer - the same guy I did the live action/CGI mix short for last Christmas.

Its called Dirty Hari and its an Anglo-Indian cop comedy set partially in Mumbai, India but mostly in Birmingham which is pretty damn cool!

So onwards and upwards as they say!

Sorry things have been so quiet. I’m still waiting to hear back from the producer who was interested and wont here now until next week at the earliest.

August is a bit of a funny month anyway with people coming and going on holiday but hopefully things will pick up again soon. I’ll keep you posted.

I had an interesting meeting with the good folks at The Character Shop yesterday - a local award winning animation house. Have a much better idea of how an animated feature is put together now! Learnt all about how a script makes the transition from page to screen. Simply didn’t know before what animatics were but I’m well up with it now.

The Character Shop are actually working on their first feature Sarila at the moment so it was a good time to go in and visit them. They have done tons of other good stuff too - witnessed by all the awards and certificates etc on their walls. Annecy, British Animation Awards - you get the picture

They were very supportive of the project too!

I’m delighted to announce the first ever Scampenstein ringtone which has been created for use on the mainpage and on mobile phones.You can download here.

The ring tone was produced by Birmingham composer Phil Mountford who has done some great work on a number of local features.

This is a picture of the dog who inspired the Scruffy character in the screenplay.

Scruffy - the inspiration for? Well - Scruffy!

Scruffy is the leader of the gang of strays that Red used to belong to. They help Red, Rocky and the others to find Doctor Frankenstein’s secret lab.

This Scruffy was a B&B owners dog who led myself and a friend to the pub and back down some very dark Irish country lanes when we visted the Árainn Mhór Island off County Donegal.

Did it all the time apparently! A very useful friend to have given that:

“With no less than six pubs, Arranmore is a pub crawler’s dream. Given that there is no permanent Garda Siochana presence on the island, the pubs are usually lax in adhering to closing times, if at all”

I think being given treats at the pub might have had something to do with it too!

Feel free to post pictures of your pets on the Facebook Friends of Scampenstein page. You can also email them direct.

I have now managed to sort out a meeting with Screen West Midlands - my local regional screen agency who are keen to meet early next week.

Hopefully that discussion combined with the producer who is now interested in the project could lead to some major developments soon. I will keep you all posted.

Fingers and paws crossed etc!

I was very pleased to receive an email reply from Jonnya who runs the site photoshopninja this morning. As the name suggest he is a wizz with photoshop which is a great skill to have.

Jonny was at WordCamp ‘O8 in Birmingham last weekend. WordCamp ‘O8 was a gathering for people and organisations who use WordPress the open source blogging/CMS application par excellence.

We were told by Puffbox head honcho Simon Dickson that thanks to him even Gordon Brown now uses WordPress for the number 10 website now. GB is so hip ! Incidentally from what I heard of Simon’s talk on e-government and so on - I have a feeling that its a pity that it isn’t Simon that’s running the country!

Anyway Jonny created a nice WordPress plug in that supporters of the event could use to place a little ribbon type banner in the top corner of their home page. I thought that was really neat so I asked him how easy it would be to do the same thing for Scampenstein.

Result. Not only has Jonny volunteered to reverse engineer the plug in and create a Wordpress Scampenstein supporters plug in - he has also agreed to provide instructions and code for non WP websites to incorporate the same little ribbon support banner into their sites. So most excellent all around. Its exactly the kind of thing that I want from supporters of the project.

I think during WWII they called it “doing ones bit”! So a big thanks to Jonny.

I am going to be adding some static webpages, galleries and other functionality over the next few days to exhibit the digital content that people have started to make for the project.

A couple of people are doing character designs. Someone is doing a sculpture of Scampenstein himself based on the poster and a composer has agreed to do a ringtone.

I am much better clued up about this having attended WordCamp UK 2008 over the weekend. It was very fortunate that it came to Birmingham just as I was starting to learn about and use WordPress more extensively.  Met some nice folks - amongst them a strong local contingent -and also listened to some great speakers on a variety of WP issies. The highlights for me being Nick Garner - head of search at Betfair, Ben Ellis from Redcatco and Simon Dickson of Puffbox who was very passionate about e-government etc.

Following my visit to Pinewood last week and a tip from someone I met there I sent an email off to see if a certain producer was interested in Scampenstein.

This is an established producer who has been involved with lots of films and has actually just done a feature animation - so I thought perfect fit!

The good news is that the producer rang me Friday 18th July, he likes the project and what he has read i.e. synopsis and script sample and wants to get involved.  So brilliant news!

I will keep everyone posted as this develops and firms up but I’m pretty confident that this is a big step forward to realizing the project.