A great big Thank You goes out to all the artist’s involved and to those who helped with the DTP side of things. But especially to my girl Faye, for her support and hard work throughout the project. What follows is a straight cut and paste of a prepared press release.

PR: A girl trapped in a box, a boy chained to a rock and a friendship between a child and a flower. These are just a few of the themes that storyteller Fehed Said explores in this collection. Joining Fehed Said, the acclaimed writer behind SLG’s Clarence Principle, and Sonia Leong, the award winning artist behind SMH’s Romeo & Juliet is a sterling lineup of the UK’s best new talent. Featuring artwork from Nana Li, Wing Yun Man, Chloe Citrine and Faye Yong.

“It was such a varied mix of stories” says Said. “When I was trying to come up with the title for the book, I wanted to find a connection between them all. Evidently, the critical moments in each piece came up as the protagonist’s talked with strangers.”

Nana Li was the artist for ‘Box’, and sums up that story as: “It’s a short and dark story, but I think the ending will leave a tingling sensation in the spine.” The same could certainly be said about the reading experience of this title. From the morbid fairy-tale style ‘Malignant’ and the sweetness of ‘Flowers’; this anthology showcases a variety in storytelling and artistic talent.

Talking To Strangers is due for release on 24th October 2009 at the London MCM Expo and available to buy online from the Sweatdrop Studios website.

Just yesterday, I had finally completed the first draft script of a new book I’m putting together. I’ve never printed out my scripts before, and was excited to see how it would look on paper. Came out to about 91 pages in total. That’s about standard for a script, I believe. There is an artist attached to this since last January and work starts on the project in October. I’m afraid however, that nothing more will be aired until the first quarter of 2010.

I’d been talked into publishing it online while we shop it around. I normally shy away from putting full projects on the web, but the Pro’s outweighed the Con’s in this particular case. I’ve considered doing this using episodes, similar to Freakangels, primarily because this is not a webcomic and a page-a-day release just doesn’t pack enough punch, in my opinion, nor do the flow of the story justice. I do like this new episodic trend and hope more people pick it up!

Faye ran through half of the script last night proofing it for me and as I occasionally glanced over her shoulder, I realised some of the earlier dialogue may need tweaking. It never ends! The last scene was rewritten about 5 times in my head, then 3 times on paper. I found myself stuck at one point going forward because the moment I was on just read horribly wrong.

I had to take it in steps and literally reverse engineer the scene, almost like looking for bugs in programming code, until I found the dialogue that started the downward spiral in the first place. Once I made the cut from that point on, I was able to rewrite the scene and finish it.

It always feels really strange reaching the end of scripting out a story. It’s hard to explain. Really, it’s merely the beginning of the project, but to hold the full story in my hands, when just a mere 10 months ago it was all notes and pieces of dialogue inside my head, gives me a sense of pride. For now, this is the first goal on a long ‘to-do’ list. I’ll enjoy this moment while it lasts.

Hello all, I’ve finally launched the short film on a special mini-site created to help promote the title. This thing has taken ages to complete, but it’s done and I’m proud of the accomplishment.

Many thanks to the crew who helped put this thing together! They really are a superb bunch.

Special thanks to Dock for taking time out to help me with the editing of the images in the first scene, Emma who composed the music and Rik for editing/mixing the music.

For those of you who’ve read the book, as a special treat, I’ve released a downloadable PDF of the extended ending that we handed out during San Diego Comic Con when the title was first launched. This ending never went to print and it does offer a bit more closure than the original, should you need it :)

Dear Blog, sorry for neglecting you, but I have been busy/lazy when it came to the net lately. No promises on getting back on track with updating you, but I think there’ll be things worth saying soon enough.

I showed my sister some Maximum the Hormone videos last night, and we shared a common moment for an urge… no, a need to mosh to the music. Unfortunately, they don’t seem to tour anywhere outside of Japan at the moment. So I guess I’m just going to have to go to Japan then to see them live :P

Quick Summary of To Do’s -

• Follow up on ‘Talking to Strangers’ anth (read ‘poke people lots’)
• Finish Editing ‘Clarence’ short film by Aug ’08
• Complete ’184′ pitch by Dec ’08
• Write up ‘Second Sky’ pitch by Jan ’09

Had a hectic film shoot weekend (some behind the scenes pic’s posted here). It was very educational to say the least. I was cursing myself for taking on such a huge project when things didn’t go smoothly during those 2 (and a half) days, but now that the hard part is over, I find myself thinking “What should I shoot next summer?”.

I figured I’m going to write something about the film once it’s done, so I may as well do an in depth post once that’s ready to go live, save me blabbering twice about it.

In Other News -

Hmm, let’s see… Oh, FreakAngels just got a little more interesting. It’s free to read, so you really have no excuse not to be following it. I ran into Paul at the DFC launch and we had a nice catch-up. Apparently this comic is taking up a lot of his time, and it really shows why. He’s gone all out on it. Cool stuff. It’s still weird seeing London submerged in water :)

Sweatdrop Podcast was down for a month due to ODEO’s transition to their new website. It’s up and running again and Episode #13 is now live. Should hopefully have #14 with you by Monday! I just need to finish editing it this weekend.

More up and coming Shakespeare Manga from SelfMadeHero, and Emma announced her involvement with the title “Much Ado About Nothing” and showcased some concept colour art on her site. I must say, that when she showed me the characters in sketch form, I was already sold. It looks like it’s going to be a hoot! There’ll be a plethora of titles coming soon but I can’t really announce any until the artists themselves make them public. You are SO shunned!!

And finally, was invited out to see Hancock tonight. I know that’s not technically news worthy, but I’ve been looking forward to seeing this film for a while, so I’m a little excited XD At least I didn’t do a write up about my 6th viewing of ‘Brick’ and how I really enjoyed listening to Clute and Edwards discussion on their “Out of the Past” podcast, where they broke down every element of the story and the filming of it to show me things I hadn’t even considered before. Like how the introduction scene is so intricately delicious with it’s subtle muted colours and the similar details between the first scene of when Brendan is kneeling down near… woah woah, almost fell into that one!

Okay, end transmission!

I was going through a bunch of print outs of character designs, thumbs and plans earlier at work today, and I quite liked how they looked together. When I got home this evening, I fanned them out a bit to take a picture :)

This is the first public peek anyone’s had at the anthology so far. I’m still working on the last two scripts, but I figured thing’s are moving along nicely so it’s fine to divulge some artist info finally.

Here’s the list of the artists and stories in the book:

• Chloe Citrine – Malignant
• Nana Li – Girl in a Box
• Faye Yong – Flowers
• Wing Yun Man – Static
• Sonia Leong – Hero

**edit: some artists changed since I posted this and one title was knocked off. List is updated.

Having some real fun with this so far, especially with the piece I’m working on with Wing. Which also happens to be one of the unfinished scripts *cough* So uh.. yeah, back to work.

I’ve been sending out books at the start of the year for reviews and a rather lovely one came out today at Sequential Tart, by Sheena McNeil.

Each new twist and turn had me fully captivated – I literally could not put it down till I’d read every last page! The art is vibrant and energetic [...] Every detail adds realism to this spectacular world, and each character stands out as important and unique – each with a story to tell. [...] The story is compelling and entertaining with an excellent flow that makes it fun and easy for such heavy topics of death and sadness.
# read the full review

She awarded it a Grade 9 out of 10. Stunning! My report card has never been so good :D

In other news, today I went out to meet and interview two ‘Set Production’ Designers concerning my little film project. Everything is being shot on a budget, so the first thing we needed to do was to find a Set Designer so we can discuss costs for building the set and try to keep things affordable.

It was very educational. The two ladies I met today had a lot of experience in the industry, shooting for both Film and Television, and as I explained to them what it was I wanted to capture, in terms of Set Design, they offered a lot of advice and concepts. I was really thrilled by it all. What I thought was very humble about them, was how even though they have all this experience, they’re still very much into working on Indie projects for free, purely for the love of the challenge and to get more items on their Show-reel’s.

They were both explaining how we have to be careful with what materials we use, as everything reflects light, so we need to take that into account and take measures to stop fracture effects from the lighting. Found it extremely interesting. I’d never thought about that before, as I mainly only worried about shadows when it came to lighting. Everyone who’s approached me so far is really keen to get started on this project too, so it fills me with great confidence that I’ll have a fantastic team to work with soon enough.

My Producer has been looking into people he’d worked with before who he thinks may be suitable for the project and sending their details my way. Tonight he sent over the holy-grail of all finds. A link to a Studio he got to film in earlier today and it’s ideal for our project. We’ve been needing to find a good place for the shoot since we started talking about it. You can’t design a set if you don’t know how much space you have to work with first. Great find!

I have more interviews to conduct next Monday, then I need to move onto finding a Lighting and Camera man. Leaving the Casting till last. Oh, and I guess I can tell you now. We’re planning to film a stylised live action version of the bathroom scene from ‘The Clarence Principle’ :)

Wish me Luck!