Brrr… for two days now there has been actual snow actually in my garden. Christmas is over, new year celebrations have lurched from hangover into the shocking mundanity of it actually being 2009 and the temperature is plumetting. All of which can only mean one thing - it must be time for Kate and Phil to unleash another Film Festival!

Now 6 years old, the London Short Film Festival is the coolest thing at the coldest time and if you’re interested in films and able to get to the city over the next couple of weeks then it is your moral duty to get involved.

All the information you need is here: http://www.shortfilms.org.uk/

Why would a TV remote control have braille etched into it?

I’ve noticed Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours theory popping up in all over the Shooting People bulletins in recent days as various filmmakers try and explain the creative process.

Gladwell is a terribly beguiling figure. Odd enough to be trustworthy, mainstream enough to sell by the library load, his ideas all have that delicious lateral-thinking, counter-intuitive smack that often convinces you of their truth long before you really listen. “Most plane accidents happen when the pilot, not the co-pilot is in charge” he boldly declared when I saw him talking live at the Lyceum theatre a few months ago. You could feel the ripple across the audience, I could feel it in my bones… what? No, surely the pilot is better at flying than the co-pilot, that can’t be right, therefore it must be true otherwise he wouldn’t have said something that sounds so wrong… and indeed, magician statistician that he is, Gladwell pulls out the research and gives the neat lateral answer that when the co-pilot makes a mistake the pilot has the authority to tell him, but when the pilot makes a mistake no one dares argue until the plane is plunging into the sea.

The 10,000 hours theory is a perfect book selling idea. At first glance it is democratic in that appears to debunk the myth of creative genius. Geniuses are not magically gifted with their work, rather they have all put in a minimum of 10,000 hours into perfecting their craft. Which is great because that means we can all do it, which is very reassuring.

The interview here is a delightful example of the process working. He talks winningly about wanting to debunk the myth of the self-made man and how he feels the concept of genius merely enables successful people to pat themselves on the back. But when you realise that 10,000 hours turns roughly into 10 years it becomes something that, actually, most of his target audience have already done. Watch the response of the interviewer when asked how long he took to feel comfortable in his job… it’s lovely to see a man so comforted, safe in the knowledge that he has already served his time and is now scientifically allowed to feel superior.

In a stroke Gladwell goes from debunking the smugness of genius to supporting the smugness of hard work. This is lucky because geniuses are rare and there are a great many more people who have worked hard for ten years and who would like to buy a book that makes them feel it was worth it. Or, for those more sanguine moments when sitting behind a desk in a TV studio no longer feels like such an important contribution to the wealth of human history, it explains why it hasn’t worked out.

Like all the most sale-able self-help ideas 10,000 hours gives you the boost of making you realise that you too could be a genius before giving you the kick in the guts that all you have to do is precisely what you’re not going to. How can you put in 10,000 hours when you’ve got to get the kids to school and pay the mortgage. That’s what stopped you, you didn’t have the 10,000 hours free because you’d rather have a life. As a result, in the end the genius remains the genius, perhaps redefined a little as the workaholic obsessive, but never the less a distant force set apart from the common crowd.

I’ve not read the book. Like so many others of the thousands in the Lyceum I was hoping he’d do the 10,000 chapter in his talk so I wouldn’t have to. Naturally, canny unit shifter that he is, he chose instead to talk about plane crashes for an hour and a half and made it quite plain that if we wanted anything else we could buy it in the foyer. However by this point I’d rather lost faith. It’s not that Gladwell is especially wrong about anything merely that he is not as right as he’d have you believe.

The core of his plane crash argument is that plane crashes, like all industrial accidents, are caused by an incremental creep of small problems rather than a single big failure and the key factor in most such accidents is a too rigid chain of authority which prevents people lower down the chain speaking clearly about mistakes. This makes sense and is both illuminating and sickeningly familiar to anyone who has been involved in any sort of corporate balls-up. It’s a basic point about the organisation of groups that all producers and directors would do well to be aware of. However his hour and half book-pushing rant on the matter stretched the point and included various examples that only really work whilst they hang like diamonds on his lips… after all, whilst the co-pilot whose death formed the main narrative may have failed to make the ground control properly aware of his perilous situation, he certainly did make it plain to the pilot in precisely the way Gladwell claimed he wouldn’t.

Likewise the 10,000 hours theory holds a couple of fundamental truths. People who are good at something practice it and practice makes, if not perfect, then at least significantly better. This is not news and once again Gladwell’s case studies don’t always hold much water. Famously one of his big examples are the Beatles a band he claims put in 10,000 hours practice in Berlin before they had any real success in 1964. Here his perspective is surely skewed since whilst he’s right that “Love Me Do” hit number 1 in the US in ‘64 the track was actually recorded in September 1962.

I’m not arguing that Gladwell’s cavalier attitude towards his data disproves his thesis. I’m merely saying that when you hold his revelations up to the light they generally turn out to be examples of the blindingly obvious. Accidents happen when people don’t challenge the errors they see. The best work is done by those who practice. It’s not worth buying a book for.

Lastly to claim that the young Mozart’s childhood compositions are ‘rubbish’ must be one of the most disingenuous remarks ever made about the poor man. They may not be world shattering but they clearly mark out the eleven year-old composer as different from other eleven year-olds.

Mozart had something others didn’t and this is the root of my problem with the 10,000 hours theory. What this rough statistic hides is the fact that first you need to be willing and able to take advantage of the effort. By “able” I don’t just mean able to devote the time (though that counts), I mean naturally skilled enough to really benefit from the practice.

Throughout history thousands have played piano as often and as well as Mozart - yet the number of composers who rank alongside him for the beauty, innovation and impact of their work wouldn’t be enough to make up a medium sized orchestra. There are many bands who put in as much work as the Beatles, as many physicists who put in as much graft as Einstein. 10,000 hours may be what it takes for genius to shine, to move Mozart from an eleven year-old’s rubbish to a twenty-two year-old’s masterpiece but 10,000 hours at the piano will not enable you to write the 9th symphony or create any other masterpiece so don’t go building them into your New Year’s Resolutions. To be a genius you still need talent and luck.

Perhaps a better way of looking at is that, statistically speaking, on average, it takes a talented person 10,000 hours to get lucky. Now who’ll buy my book it’s called “Random Chance In A World Of Disappointment”…

Risking the fact that I sound like an eight year-old boy squirming in his seat with embarrassment when the hero finally kisses the girl, can I ask - am I alone in wishing that there was less sex on tv?

Oddly I wish I meant that the way it sounds. I always revel in having an unfashionable opinion and I’d love to find some bizarre moral high ground in me from which I could condemn the delightful tide of seething flesh that all to rarely floods the airwaves. However I wouldn’t have a leg to stand on because I made this film (which is rude so don’t watch it if you don’t want to watch a rude film):

Free Speech

Now in the eyes of some I guess that makes me little better than a pornographer. (If you read the comments the film gets on Atom.com then you’ll see that in the eyes of many it makes me worse than a pornographer because instead of any actual filth my brother and I have done a story. Shocking.) Whatever, the point is, I clearly don’t cut the mustard as a bastion of morality - but I think this gives me even more right to openly beg for a world in which not every story is reduced to the natural human urge to get naked and sweaty.

I’m writing this because I made the mistake of watching the BBC’s recent adaption of John Buchan’s jingo-istic thriller “The 39 Steps” and was appalled to find that it had been bizarrely reshaped as a Mills & Boon. I’m not going to make any claims for the book other than it is significantly less awful and marginally less racist than Buchan’s other work. I’ve never yet reached a satisfactory conclusion to my private argument about whether book adaptions should seek to remain true to the unpalatable views of the past, or whether it’s better to present the story in a version fit for today’s audience. Historically this process, as seen in the cheering-up of Shakespeare’s tragedies for the Victorians, is generally looked down upon as low-brow. To be fair I think a lot depends on the source, when Radio 4 did all Buchan’s Richard Hannay novels they took the view it was best to preserve the astringent racism of the original. At first I thrilled to their bravery, in the end though I turned off “Greenmantle” because it really is just mental and nasty.

So when the BBC saw fit to give Hannay a suffragrette side-kick called Victoria I groaned a little but tried to convince myself that this was fair game and she might at least stop him piffling on about the dastardly Turks. However, Hannay has not survived nearly a hundred years of literary history because of his politics. The 39 Steps is worth remaking because it is a cracking thriller and Hannay is a superb template for the resourceful man alone hero who comes down to us as Bond and Bourne. So imagine my despair when halfway through the 2008 version the entire story grinds to a halt to so that Hannay and Victoria can rub mustard on each other and go and stay with her brother whose been cut from the pages of a Wodehouse novel…

I just don’t get it. If you don’t want to make a thriller - don’t make the 39 Steps. If you’re adapting a story which has the single merit of a tightly paced plot why abandon the plot? If you’re looking for a romantic hero, invent someone - for God’s sake don’t turn to Richard Hannay, the man’s an arse.

Doctor Who, Richard Hannay, Ms.Marple - why is it that characters who have survived decades without a sex drive are suddenly only deemed comprehensible when it’s made plain that really their actions are all driven by the urges of their loins? Is that really the only motivation we can believe in? The only motivation that still excites our interest? Please, someone, as Lady Chatterly said, “…tell me it’s not just fucking”.

So anyway, my brother and I have finished a script for a feature film.

(Start the applause.)

And we delivered within in minutes of our deadline.

(Increase the applause)

So after four years we finally have a working draft!

(Applause starts to falter… how long?)

Though of course we still want to do another draft…

(Applause stops. Sorry? What? Four years and you want another draft…)

Or at least that’s what goes in my head when I try to explain what I’ve been doing recently. Perhaps you’re all much more rational than I am and are well aware how long a feature film actually takes to write. If that’s not the case and you’re just thinking “wow, them Blaines are useless, what the hell were they doing, learning the language as they went?” then here’s a brief run down of what those FOUR YEARS actually involved.

First off, about four years ago, my brother Chris has an idea which we both think would make an excellent film.

I’m not going to bore you with the details, but to give you a sense of the style and tone, one of the most awful parts of the past four years has been watching the production news and seeing a constant stream of films that could be about to trump us. “Dead Man’s Shoes”, “Collateral”, even, Heaven help us, “Outlaw” have all, in their time, been described in ways that made it sound like our film was dead in the water. Thankfully our script is nothing like how any of those films turned out (though if you enjoyed at least two of those, you’ll enjoy ours too).

So we have an idea and a main character and some situations and things that feel like they work as part of the whole thing. Feeling like this isn’t enough to start writing with we hold a couple of days of workshops with actors, improvising scenes and generally trying to spark the idea into something more constructive. This gets us nowhere since we don’t know what we want and that’s no way to try and direct anyone. So, come the autumn we decide to take a weekend away and try and hammer out a draft in 48 hours.

Now, from the hindsight of FOUR YEARS, the idea of a 48 hour draft probably seems quite risible. However our previous attempt at writing in this way had worked tremendously well and we had managed to write a very silly 90 page script over the course of a long weekend. But our new, nameless project was not only much more serious in tone but also had no plot. It was an idea, a “what if…” but whilst the proposition was interesting we had no idea where it was going… So the weekend ended with about forty to fifty pages of far too many characters standing around spouting off about politics.

That’s September 2004 and between then and June 2005 we try and whip this up into something cinematic. Our first draft never gets beyond the fifty page mark. The second, in which we try and tell the story entirely in flash backs doesn’t get beyond thirty-five before we give up on it. The third also runs out of steam around fifty pages.

To put this into context, according to the information recorded by Microsoft Word the various drafts and revisions that we did in this period amounted to about 136 hours. Of course that can only be a record of time spent with the file open on a computer with one or other of us staring at it…

We go and see our script editor from a previous project, she tells us that our characters are dull and unlikeable and the whole idea feels a down at heel. We get stuck in treatments, trying to solve the structural problems with the story but getting horribly bogged down in also trying to write a good treatment.

Then come the London bombings which throw various elements of our plot into sharp relief. We hold our breath and count our blessings. We also go on a friend’s stag weekend to Portugal which once again gives the pair of us some useful time away from normality. So, party animals that we are, we spent a fair amount of time indoors talking about what’s not working with the script… for the first time we start to properly realise the theme of the film and this helps us see what we actually need to happen to make that theme apparent…

That autumn, after, apparently 115 minutes blood sweat and tears we finally have a complete draft that runs to 95 pages. This is then revised five times before we have a finished 4th draft. Gone are the people standing around talking about politics and in their place is a tightly paced action thriller complete with a shoot-out in the sewers… at last we have a story.

This is now April 2006 and we’re taking part in the first ever Guiding Lights scheme and lucky enough to be mentored by Gillies Mackinnon. We’ve been telling Gillies about the film and now we’ve finally got a draft we’re happy with we send it to him… and, like all good mentors, he promptly burst our bubble. He praises of our writing and grows into a general sense of “this is not the film you told me about…” he ends with the following…

“…have you really deeply asked yourselves what this story is about? … Have you, somewhere, lost sight of a greater reason to tell the story?”

He was devastatingly right. The politics was what had interested us in the story and by jettisoning this in favour of action we’d written a film but entirely lost the point.

I have no recollection of writing the 5th draft but I have a copy and Microsoft Word assures me that it took up 96 hours of our time between the 2nd August and 6th December 2006… all of which simply seems to have added 5 pages to the length. I do though clearly remember the sense that we’d got lost. Somewhere the beautiful fury that we’d always intended had become a blur of running about.

That winter we went back to first principles and wrote a different sort of treatment. Focusing much less on getting the structure of the story to work and much more on expressing in words the energy and passion that was what really mattered to us. We took some pictures that we felt again captured the mood and started showing this to anyone who’d care to read it in the hopes that someone would give us some money to write a draft.

Eventually this worked - but the wheels move slowly. It took us six months before we had a serious offer of development money and it was a further year before this money actually turned up in our bank account. That was this summer and we were finally on the downward slope but still much further away than we thought.

The money, which came from our screen agency, Screen East, enabled us to work once again with script editor Carolyn Young who, once again said that our characters were unlikeable and the whole idea felt down at heel. She pushed us to make it more cinematic, bigger, more exciting. We pushed on with trying to transfer the successful treatment into a script… but this sixth draft didn’t work. It proved that whilst the treatment had been a very useful tool for conveying the heart and soul of the project it had done so by working as a piece of prose rather than as a genuine map of the story.

The sixth draft was a rambling mess of over 130 pages and Chris and I were cross and grumpy. The seventh draft, much like the second, never got much past thirty pages. It did, however, prove to be the break through because it showed clearly what was the wrong direction to go down.

We then made three decisions that largely solved our problems. First, rooting through all the stuff that worked and didn’t, we finally found our way to the core of the film. It wasn’t a story about the law, or disorder, or money, or right, or wrong or any of the other concepts we’d hurled at it over the years - it was about powerlessness. Powerlessness was at the root of Chris’ original inspiration and it was this was the note that always chimed right.

As a result of this we realised we had to change our protagonist. Again the reasons of it don’t really matter but one of the things that gave me the sense that we were making the right choice was that sidelining the man who’d always been the hero meant getting rid of two or three of the best scenes in the film. Losing these was really hard but the compulsion to do so felt like it proved we were onto the right track.

Lastly we agreed that’d we actually get back to writing together. For sometime we’d had a theory that serious scripts needed each of us to have serious thinking space. However the summer had proved that all this meant was that we both expended a lot of energy rooting off through the undergrowth in opposite directions. So we locked the doors, turned off our email and got down to work. Three weeks later we had an eighth draft, shockingly much much closer to the original concept than anything we’d ever written previously.

So that’s how it takes four years to write a film. The moral of all of which is… what?

I’m not entirely sure, except, perhaps, don’t be afraid of it. One of the best strokes of good fortune we had was to take part in “Think Shoot Distribute” just as the wheels were falling off. Here story editor Kate Leys pointed out that on average a script takes 2-4 years and you should expect to write 10 drafts before you can tell if it really works. This felt like running a marathon, all the while cursing because you were last, only to hear a noise and realise that actually we were way out in front…

Still, if you’re stuck in a draft that seems to be going nowhere slowly, I think Gillies advice remains the best - “Have you, somewhere, lost sight of a greater reason to tell the story?”

Two years ago Chris and I had a story but we’d lost our reason for telling it.

Whilst I’m talking about nice things that have happened recently I should mention the “THINK-SHOOT-DISTRIBUTE” scheme, which is easily one of the nicest and all round best. Now in it’s fifth year TSD is a week long intensive seminar course designed form a massive kick up the arse for people like me who have reached a certain point with their filmmaking but now find it hard to take the next step.

There may be a couple of raised eyebrows (and a couple of delightedly smug grins) at the thought of me and Chris falling into this category. Indeed we got a slightly sceptical response from the organisers when we first applied. But the truth is it’s been a hard couple of years since we made “Hallo Panda”. it’s a mistake to think, as some do, that getting to make a film through Cinema Extreme means an end to struggling, as is shown by our being joined on the course by fellow Extremists Gaelle Dennis and Johnny Barrington.

What the course also proved was that it’s as much a mistake to imagine there is ever going to be an end to the struggle. Creatively a film marries the difficulties of drama with the challenges of visual art on a scale that usually forces massive amounts of creative collaboration, co-operation and understanding. Whilst financially each film is a small to medium sized business that will take an average of three years to produce a single product for a market that is deeply unpredictable. Thankfully though the other thing that every speaker had in common was a reassuring belief that though it’s never easy, it never need be impossible either.

One of the best speakers was the immaculate Kate Leys, a story editor, a story obsessive and a useful blast of common sense about an industry steeped in depression. For starters I loved her debunking of the British usage of the term “development hell”, a phrase I have been misusing all year, as I’m sure have you.

Kate points out that it’s an American expression used specifically for when your script is optioned by a producer who is doing nothing with it, either because they are no good at their job or because they’re deliberately trying to keep it off the market because it’s so similar to another project they’re already working on. Development Hell is when your script is not allowed to progress. However over here, where, lets face it, the purchasing of scripts to silence them is a luxury far beyond the wildest dreams of most producers, the term is generally synonymous with development. It means “Oh God someone is giving me tedious script notes and I can’t put the damn thing to bed…” it means “I’ve not finished it yet”.

This is a mistake. If, like me, you’re writing a script and it keeps going wrong and you keep changing it and improving it and, amazingly, someone is giving you some money to help you with the process, you are not in Development Hell no matter how painful the process may be. You are just in development. It’s what should happen. The mistake we make is in ever expecting the process to be quick and painless, to be a long weekend or a month in the country. Writing a film script takes time.

She was equally sanguine about the state of the British Film Industry. I’m ashamed to say I didn’t actually realise that we’re working in the third biggest film economy in the world. Nor the surprisingly high percentage of the population who regular go to the cinema. Nor the surprisingly high number of British qualifying films that fill our box-office charts. These stats are so surprising I’ve done gone and forgot ‘em (sorry) but it’s her argument not mine so take it up with her. My point is that it’s delightfully refreshing to meet someone who puts forward a persuasive case against the extremes of death and hopelessness that usually pervade discussion of the state of british film. It’s great to meet someone who has a message other than “we’re all doomed…”

The one problem with TSD was that it clashed with the launch of the second round of Guiding Lights, the superb Skillset funded Mentoring Scheme through which Chris and I passed a couple of years ago, around the same time we did Cinema Extreme. Oh stop grinding your teeth! I know I’ve been lucky, though perhaps not in quite the way you imagine. It is not luck that brought Chris and I or any of the other brilliant participants (some really and truly quite quite brilliant) onto any of these schemes. That was down to hard work and being good. The luck comes in living in a country where our talent and dedication is in some way recognised as worth supporting, worth nurturing, even though we’ve not yet managed to write a feature script despite shunning short films to focus on the task two years ago.

It is never easy to make a film, it will never be easy to make one in the UK. The scale of our film industry, third biggest in the world or not, still means we cannot approach the task with the American attitude of throwing money at it. The US model of making ten films in the hope that one succeeds and funds the nine that don’t isn’t possible here. However with intelligent support and the kind of long term investment in talent that is now taking shape we can continue to make some remarkably good films… remarkably good like Hunger, remarkably good like Slumdog Millionaire and if it’s anywhere near as good as the clip I’ve seen, the remarkably good Shifty.

Because I needed to earn money I spent some large chunks of last year working. As a result this year it felt like the important thing was to lock myself away and write, as you can see from the massive gaps on this blog! What I found though was, whilst I’m sure this did have some value and use for me, overall it didn’t work. What worked far better was meeting other filmmakers and reconnecting with the outside world. That’s where the inspiration is.

Recently my brother and I were lucky enough to be voted second place in the inaugural Thunder Clap award. To quote their press release…

“The British Thunderclap Award was set up to find and publicly recognise the director who, as voted by the British film audience, is producing the most innovative or interesting work in British independent film. Be it in features, shorts, documentaries or fiction, the award aims to reward the director who so clearly stamps his or her own individual identity, creativity and vision on an independent film, regardless of budget or professional standing.”

So it’s delightful to come second, but more delightful to come second to Chris Jones. Chris is, aside from being an award filmmaker, the author of The Guerilla Film Makers Handbook which for some years has been the one truly indispensable guide to film making that everyone who wants to make one should own. What’s more it’s the book that got my brother and me started so quite literally without Chris Jones we’d never have come second.

The Handbook takes you step by step through the process of making a film from script development through to DVD sales agreement. For our first few films it was a completely invaluable piece of kit, almost more important to us than the camera. I have read, re-read, re-read, copied out and come to terms with the advice within so many times that there are still parts I know by heart.

Living by the Handbook also gives the vicarious thrill of occasionally meeting the people, going to the places or using the services detailed within. Our first, our only, neg cut was by Jim Heffernan. Talking to him felt like being accepted into the real secret brotherhood of filmmaking. Finally being in all the places mentioned in the Handbook was like crossing some invisible line into adulthood. Being beaten into second place by Chris Jones feels like the best defeat I’ve ever had!

Thanks and congratulations to all those who braved the weather in coming out to the BFI on Monday. As usual, and the teeth of a storm, we were a sell out… or a give out I suppose since the event is free. Lucy and Joe both spoke with wit, insight and modesty about their work and I was, as usual, relieved to find that my eavesdropping of conversation in the bar proved that people had genuinely liked their stuff!

I never take that for granted. At a screening of my work I feel nervous but strangely bullish, when I’m screening other people’s films - that’s when I feel really scared. I suppose when I’m presenting mine and Chris’ work I know in advance what the failings are and I’ve already agonised over them. Obviously I’m terrified that everyone will hate stuff but since I can see all the reasons why you might I guess it’s less of a fear. Screening the work of other people who I think are great is nerve wracking in an entirely different way. It’s like introducing your new girlfriend to your oldest friend. What if they don’t get on? What if they now both think I’m a fool?

Well, thankfully, it seems that, this time at least, that didn’t happen. There were even questions from the audience - good, solid, creative questions like “what are the creative themes that drive your work”. So in the end I’m not only proud of the filmmakers, I’m proud of the audience too.

Thanks Shooters…

So it’s a month ago, longer. I’m sat in Luton airport and have just found out that my flight has been delayed by an hour. I am flung once again onto the hard spike that is the real truth that underpins the theory of relativity. An hour is not a fixed unit but a form of currency, it has an exchange rate. An hour in bed is short change, an hour in bed with someone you love is scant minutes, an hour alone in Luton airport is the longest hour you will face.

A girl walks past hauling a suitcase almost twice her size. This is no exaggeration since she is tiny, a teenager, on her own, I force myself to stop looking at her, realising it’s rude and probably intimidating for one so young all alone in Luton airport. Snail like she seems to carry her world on wheels as she disappears into the crowd.

I am flying to Jersey. Or rather, I am hoping to fly to Jersey at some point this morning. The hour passes second by second, each one astonishingly horrible to taste, an over-sweetened medicine full of synthetic fruit flavouring and the insane dazzle of lights that threaten me with a full english breakfast for only ten pounds. TEN POUNDS. I’m not in Jersey. I’m in Luton. You can’t charge me TEN POUNDS for breakfast in Luton. Everything is expensive in this building, every second is expensive.

A man is smiling at me. I am in the holding pen, at the front of the queue to get onto the plane, my fellow travellers and I all lined in anticipation. From the front of the queue behind mine a man is smiling at me. Not nonchalantly like one might perhaps smile at someone who one doesn’t know who one might have been accidentally staring at. Not, for instance, how I would smile, friendly and apologetic, at the small girl with the massive suitcase who, I now realise, is there at the far end of the queue for the Jersey flight. No, he is smiling at me as if he either knows me or is trying to sell me drugs.

I smile back in what I hope is a polite refusal of drugs and return my attention to the doors through which I can see the walk to the plane. I love the walk to a plane. I don’t much care for flying, emotionally it upsets me, physically it tires me, psychologically it freaks me out and intellectually I disprove of it… but the walk to a plane, rich in anticipation and that starry sense that you are needed somewhere only a plane will take you, your shoes on that soft dark tarmac, that is as delicious as stepping into fresh snow.

Behind me two women are talking about perfume. Their conversation is all I can hear. I have to admit that perfume is not something I regularly think about, it is, I realise, as I listen to their passionate comparison of their favourite scents, my loss. I turn to try and see who they are - the small man is still trying to catch my eye. I turn back to the walk. Soon I’ll be doing the walk.

Sat on the plane a hand is thrust my way… “Excuse me…” I look up, it’s the smiling man from the holding bay “You’re Ben Blaine aren’t you?” I panic and probably say something fatuous like “usually”. “I’m Phil Dixon from the Canary Wharf film festival, I screened your films!”

The relief is immense. He sits, we talk and he doesn’t try and sell me anything. However before the flight finally departs the third seat in our row is taken by the small girl, now free from her luggage. She too is bound for the Branchage film festival on Jersey, she is an actress and star of a short film playing in the same programme as mine. She is actually in her twenties but has been blessed with a casting bracket nearly ten years younger than her.

At the other end of the flight we are all picked up by one of the festival drivers, me, Phil, Ellie and the two women who were discussing perfume, one of whom, it turns out, is also a filmmaker bound for the festival.

In short, and I’m sorry to have taken so much of your time to reach this conclusion, but, in short, that holding pen was nothing more than my own personal establishing shot for the weekend to come. Some how my subconscious edited out all the other non-festival attending crowd in the room and just drew my eye to three who would later play some sort of role in the story.

I mention this purely to illustrate something I think of as the integral truth of the Branchage Film Festival on Jersey. It is not just a festival of films, the whole crazy thing is like one long cinematic dream.

I could be completely wrong (I often am) but I think the Branchage Film Festival on Jersey has basically been willed into existence because somewhere on the island someone has started wondering why the Isle of Mann has a film industry and Jersey doesn’t. If this is the case then they’re very smart because I can think of no better advert for the island than the Branchage Festival, easily the best and most exciting new film festival I’ve been to in years.

There are two things that attract filmmakers - money and ideas. Jersey has money. This is inescapable the moment you smell the air. Inescapable when you use a cash point and are delivered a massive fistful of their astonishing currency, which still includes one pound notes and has the “I’m a millionaire” feel of monopoly money. Perhaps I was lucky to have had my first introduction to the place on a sun-kissed afternoon in what had otherwise been a dreary autumn; it certainly felt like I had stepped out of a land of darkness and wind into a paradise of sun light transforming the windows of expensive cars into sheets of pure gold. Here at last is a land full of people where ‘tax incentive’ doesn’t refer to working cash-in-hand.

But what was so really attractive was the atmosphere of the festival. Again, perhaps I’m biased because I’ve been spending the past months in virtual isolation struggling with a feature script that was refusing to obey. As a jazz musician will tell you, a change is as good as a rest, and a weekend surrounded by people who love, hate, fight and understand film as much as we do was exactly the inspiration we both needed. All too often writing ends up being a solitary task (he typed, alone in the bleak white light of a November morning…) and Branchage was full of people. Amazing people. Delightful people. From the scattering I met on the plane to the sweating, heaving mass of the Spiegel Tent which formed the hub of the festival - Branchage was a collection of supremely fascinating people. But what really made it good was that they were all on the same tiny island as I was.

The real magic of the Branchage festival was, I think, that you had to cross water to get to it. As a result there was no hiding place. You can’t just go watch a film and then go home - you’re here, you’re stuck, you’re on an island. As a result rather than all the creative and fascinating people who attend a festival disappearing off back into their own private worlds, Branchage saw everyone flung constantly together.

What was also nice was that we were also flung into the arms and houses of the natives. Far from being a bubble of the film industry floating out to sea, this felt like a community celebrating film, celebrating it’s own odd sensibility (the musical runner up in the prize for best film by a Jersey resident gave me an insight into life out there the like of which I’d never quite imagined) and welcoming the world to it’s bosom.

Inspiring people, on an island, celebrating the ludicrous act of telling stories with pictures and sound. Far more than any of the island’s financial wealth, what Branchage so effortlessly proved was that Jersey is a place that can inspire you, a place where you could make amazing films.

I bet you thought I was dead!

Well, perhaps I was but appropriately for Halloween I have sprung back to life like a Creature sliding off a slab and I am currently in hiding in the snow bound wastes of Hertfordshire. There have been reasons for my silence on this frequency, some interesting, some less so, none to be revealed for the time being - especially since I have great and important news… I too have created a Monster.

But, as all good and avid readers of the original book will tell you the Creature, far from being a lumbering mess with a bolt through it’s neck, is a thing of beauty - perhaps a thing of perfection. More specifically it is the 4th in my series of increasingly irregular BFI showcase screenings and it is made up of equal parts of the filmmakers Lucy Moore and Joe Tunmer.

For those of you unaware of the Split Focus screenings, this event is a unique chance for me to bring to your attention two cinematic artists whose work I think you should be aware of. Not a mere greatest hits compilation but a chance to really get inside the heads of two people who are right on the brink of brilliance.

Lucy Moore is something of a first for Split Focus in that she is more writer than director. I think it’s very hard for a writer to really stamp their mark on a short film, especially in a world where so much of the kudos and attention goes straight to the director. But I think it’s also uncommon because so much writing for short film is lazy and make-do which is why it’s always been a delight to watch anything that Lucy has written. You feel in safe hands - you get told a story.

A member of the Royal Court Theatre young writer’s programme for five years before turning her attention to screenwriting, her first script Gone was made as part of the Digital Shorts scheme in 2004 and won the BBC New Film makers award. Her next short Undone, which she also directed, was selected for the Cannes Online film competition in 2006 and screened at festivals in France, Italy and Canada. In 2005 she wrote an original drama for Channel 4’s ‘Coming Up’ strand entitled Heavenly Father which was pick of the day in Timeout.

Her first feature script Lullaby is currently in development with Miramax and she is developing a horror project with Hammer Films called 6 Sunnyside Road . She has recently been commissioned to adapt Daphne du Maurier’s short story The Apple Tree for the BBC and is working on an original TV series idea for Hillbilly Films/Talkback Thames. She is represented by Tally Garner at Curtis Brown.

By contrast the first thing that strikes you about Joe’s films is his gift for the image. He has a strong background in commercials and music videos and has the synesthesiac’s gift of freely translating musical and visual emotion. However whilst, for instance, I’ll never forget the purple he uses in his film “Mockingbird”, what really makes the piece a success is the sublime performance he gets from William Houston and the bedrock of yet another damn fine script.

Joe has written and directed a number of short films which have been funded by the UK Film Council, Warp Films, BBC and Meridian, and have screened and won awards at Cannes, Aspen, Edinburgh, Palm Springs, and Bristol Brief Encounters amongst many others. They have also sold internationally, screened theatrically, and been distributed on DVD. He has also directed commercials, virals and made music videos for artists such as The Pipettes, Animal Collective, Gomez, Cornelius, Simian Mobile Disco, Frightened Rabbit, Múm, Brakes, Elisa, Emiliana Torrini, Help She Can’t Swim, Royal Treatment Plant, Radar Brothers and Barringtone.

His first two feature projects are in development, after receiving support from the UK Film Council, Screen South and The Script Factory. He was recently awarded a place on the Skillset/Film London/BFI LFF Think-Shoot-Distribute scheme for emerging talent, and is also a part of the Guiding Lights mentorship scheme, with Stephen Frears as his personal mentor. Joe is represented by Giles Smart at United Agents.

So we have a writer who can direct and a director who can write and we have some of the most compelling and visually arresting films you’ll find on a screen… but, and this is the nice bit, we also have two old friends who have worked together for years and who have had a hand in each other’s films in more ways than one…

Hard Facts:
BFI Studio on the Southbank at 6.30pm (7pm start) on Monday 10th November for films, talking, drinking, more talking and quite a deal of inspiration.

Admission is free but space is limited so please RSVP to james@shootingpeople.org - if your name’s not on the list then we will resort to cliché.