About

A whole load of blah is made up of Hels and Ant, two film fetishists fantasising about a future full of skiwear in Sundance and cocktails in Cannes. Or something like that. Hels seems to have a lot of thoughts and feelings about films that most people don't talk about or don't think are there to be thought. She wanted to see if her thoughts really are as wacky as many people seem to think they are. She'll be the one mostly blahing about movies, Ant might sometimes pop by, but mostly he's obsessing over making a lot of his film ideas instead of watching them day and night.




Ant is Anthony Carpendale, his films can be seen here and there. At the moment he's trying to get several new projects, three shorts and a feature, off the ground with funding instead of the usual budget of 50 quid for train fare, a couple of falafels and a round in the pub. His problem is he's not too good at self promotion, and he's going to have a go at trying to get the balance right; communicating and advertising more about what he can do, without padding out his abilities or sounding like a punchable cunt in the process. As far as Helen is concerned, he's the next Edgar Wright, but Ant thinks that's a bit of a punchably cuntish claim. We'll see who ends up being right.

Hels is Helen Dunleavy, who has been teaching herself screenwriting for quite a while. She thinks a lot and sometimes it makes her look like she isn't doing or thinking anything. Go figure. Years ago she was an office drone wanking for coins and chewing on her own soul for masochistic sustenance. She didn't try to get into filmmaking because she was laughably afraid of failure, and used needing to keep her crappy jobs as an excuse for never trying anything better. Kidney failure then interrupted this two years ago and she enjoyed a year and a half of the joyful monotony that is dialysis. She was also able to get away with doing nothing useful of productive loads of the time by claiming her renal induced gout was always just ('ooooOooOoo') too painful. This was true a lot of the time but some of the time she just wanted to be lazy and watch Back to the Future again. Then three months ago Ant donated her one of his kidneys and now it's time to try to get back to normal, stop sitting on arse and find ways around the arm joints sometimes seizing up. And more than that - try to get into filmmaking properly, climbing over health obstacles, making something you can really be happy with, making things interesting and mind boggling. Something about emotional intelligence and empathy. Something about the irreconcilability of human nature and the self fulfilling prophecy of self destruction. Something with a lot of blood, and exploding things, and running, bazookas, bombs in ferrets. But you know, thought provoking, vindicated by allegorical meaning, tastefully done.

Ant and Hels are currently working on the pre-production of a feature film and the development and fund sourcing for a documentary, as well as several small projects because Ant needs some hand-held action or his camera hand starts looking for other things to do against the body's will, like feeding pigeons baking powder or stealing Hustler. We are naturally two people who do what many others do - procrastinate instead of working, getting distracted by catbinlady or any old video of a cat thinking of hitting another cat (the Ikea cat thing was rewatched a lot) but we are finally going to make a go of just getting on with it, each day, or for as many days as possible without some inconvenient distraction, like Hels being told to have yet another blood test to check that she isn't developing kidney rejection or Ant having to take the cat to the vet because he thinks she's eaten too much plastic.

These are virgin projects and this blog may chart the development of the projects, from background research to novice mistakes made in the process of discovering how you make the move from making shorts to making features, as well as of course charting whether we are actually developing each week or getting distracted by the latest Cyriak. If it turns out we're living in a universe where the films will become enjoyed and successful we thought it might be a nice testament in hindsight to the transition from small time, almost hobbyist film producers to somewhat professionals, and the novelty nature that goes along with attempting that transition. If the films are laughably shit or pathetic disasters then this can be a nice potted history of two self aggrandising idiots on the internet. In a nutshell we're either setting ourselves up to cook and enjoy the perfect scrambled egg with salmon and cream cheese, or to get egg on our faces. Hopefully fun either way.

So, this blog is in many ways an experiment. An experiment in transparency by two people who aren't particularly used to being transparent.  Not on the internet anyway. An experiment is seeing if the way we see films is similar to a lot of you out there, and by proxy what the audience is for the sort of films we'd want to make. And it's also an experiment in seeing if two people with lots of stuff going on, some stressful and sad, some hectic and funny, can rise above all the stupid shit trying to get in the way and just get out there and see if they can make something really great, really exceptional, inspiring, riveting, provocative. Something people wouldn't be able to get out of their heads for days, and would hold close to their heart forever.




You can throw up in your hand now if you want. Ant did.


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