It was roughly in the mid 1990's, that I, and my friends, were asked to do some concept work for a low budget sci-fi horror film. My friend John had been approached by a first time Producer/Director asking for some advide on fight choreography. John was a well know figure within the martial arts community as a fighter, journalist, and magazine editor. One thing lead to another and when John showed him some of our sculpture work, we got involved doing characters designs and other conceptual work. By this time, John and I had been joined by two other artists, Paul and Juliette. Once we began working on this film project, I brought in a guy called Andrew, whom I'd been friends with for a while, to work on some of the concept art and storyboards. Between us all, we were a pretty good team.
There was no money to cover our own expenses on sculpting and making things. The producer could not give us anything, but he did want us to come up with some designs etc, that would help sell the film and also show what we could do, to a degree. So we did what we could, but because we were all struggling financially at that time, we were limited on what we could make.
Unfortunately, the film never happened, which was a shame. It was a fun time though, and very inspiring for us all. We got some coverage in the local newspaper so more people became aware of us. We even had some students from the local Art College coming over to visit us and wanting to work with us.
Below are pictures of some of the things that I sculpted.
There were a lot of drawings, storyboards, and artwork created for this project. The ones below were done by me for a creature transformation scene.
After things didn't happen on the sci-fi horror film, John and I spent some time writing various scripts. We'd gotten a taste of film making and producing, and wanted to write our own ideas for horror films etc. No one here in the North East was making anything horror related. We'd been approached a few times by different people wanting us to do a few make-ups for them, but when we started talking about budgets, and the cost of materials, they would balk at the thought and we didn't hear from them again. People seemed to think that all of these things could be made for nothing.
So John and I wrote. We packaged our ideas together along with some concept art and storyboards created by our friend Andrew. We sent them to the regional Arts Council as we new they had a film division, but they were not interested in helping us. There was no internet back then, so trying to find out any information on whom to send things to, was very difficult for us. We did send our pitch-packages to BBC, ITV and Channel 4. The head of development at Channel 4 did reply and was interested. However, after corresponding with him for a short time, we suddenly had all of our material returned to us. It turned out that he's left to work somewhere else and his replacement was not interested. We tried to find out where he's gone to, but had no success.
