I am just putting the final touches on a film script I have been working on for six years. By finishing touches I mean that I have achieved a script that we (writer, director, potential producer) feel is good enough to start thinking about finding some money to make it.

I am being a little anti here just for the sake of it, but I wanted to make people think through the permutations when they sit down and think - "You know what, I am going to make a short film, I am going to be a producer..."

So here's some grumpy things to say about short films and some more optimistic thoughts to go along side them!

Update: If you do go ahead here is a useful wee PDF from Shooting People/BAFTA about distribution and marketing (PDF)

First - 99% of short films completely suck

There was a good debate over on Twitter yesterday about writing for free, trying to get credits and all that with various points being made by the excellent people thereon.

I came to it rather late (by which I mean an hour on two!) so I thought I would take ten minutes to write to the notion of writing for free and how to get credits. Herein lies an attractive jumble of ideas and approaches...

Writing your own stuff

I wrote this one for a forum question on Twelvepoint.com, but liked it enough to copy it over here. The question was whether is was a good idea to write a treatment or outline etc etc. It is a good thread, but it was frustrating me as words like 'always' and 'never' got used; always write a treatment, always do this and so on. So here's what I wrote back to the thread...

Everyone is wrong, it's only you that needs to be right