The last three years have been brutal for me. As I know they have for so many others too. I am not unique in this regard. While smarter people may have chosen to allow their companies to go under during the pandemic, I chose to fight through bankruptcy and have emerged from the other side. […]
Stop what you are doing. Switch off Facebook and Twitter. Turn off your phone. And play… We also this video converted into a podcast below for those on the move. Onwards and upwards! Chris Jones My movies www.LivingSpiritGroup.com My Facebook www.Facebook.com/ChrisJonesFilmmaker My Twitter @LivingSpiritPix Sign up to my mailing list for updates on events, books […]
Every time I have embarked upon a major project, bee it a book, web initiative, festival or feature film, I choose not to engage with the enormity of the project until I am almost there. You see, if I think about it too much, I will conclude that it’s quite simply impossible. And in many […]
Ken Loach is one of our most prolific and uncompromising filmmakers here in the UK. With decades of ground-breaking work under his belt and an astonishing track record, we are delighted to host an ‘In conversation’ with him at the London Screenwriters’ Festival tomorrow night. You can get your pass HERE. And here are his […]
‘Five Came Back’ is a three part Netflix documentary about five Hollywood directors who ended up shooting and making documentaries for the US government about the Second World War, often from the battlefront and in genuine peril. My parents lived through WW2 and my dad was a conscript in the years after the war, stationed […]
Last month we shared that we were quarter finalists in the 2016 Academy Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting. We were delighted as there were 6,915 scripts entered. This morning we received this email… ‘Congratulations! You have advanced into the Semifinal Round of the 2016 Academy Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting. Your script is one of only 149 […]
Earlier this year I directed my first short film. I had always thought that making my first film would be similar to most other people’s first short film experience – it’d be small scale, probably filmed in or around my own house with just a few people to help out. More like a ‘practice and […]
In today’s connected, online world, filmmakers have to build and nurture their fan bases so that they always have a ready-made audience for their next film or crowdfunding campaign. But have you considered involving your followers directly in the making of your film? If not, you could be overlooking a valuable asset. In 2009 I […]
The interview was taken from the USA Guerilla Filmmakers Handbook and was done BEFORE the Twilight phenomena. So it’s a real insight into a moment when a female writer and director got traction in her career by doing work that was groundbreaking. The festival is running at the end of October and you can get […]
Guest post by Ewan Thomas, Writer / Director I started working in the film industry 10 years ago, in post-production. But I’d always wanted to shoot my own film, so I moved to London wanting to “make it” as a film director. Shoot my first feature film. This means facing challenges and obstacles – so […]
The Star Wars universe and characters give access to young hearts and minds to powerful truths and beliefs about good and evil. But most importantly for these young hearts and minds, it unlocks and unleashes courage and potential to take a stand for their OWN truths and beliefs. JJ Abrams knows this and there are […]
Over the weekend, three girls from Mexico went viral with a cover of classic metal anthem ‘Enter Sandman’ by Metallica. And these three girls, Daniela, Paulina and Alejandra, simply SLAYED IT! If you haven’t seen it yet, watch above So what can we take away from this success and apply to our own projects and […]
I came across this keynote from the legendary Neil Gaiman from their Digital Minds conference. So much in this conversation resonates with me. Above all, for creatives, is the notion that we must create and set free our work. We must innovate ideas in both creativity and commerce. We must become prolific. Each individual creative […]
This outstanding TED talk from Monica Lewinsky highlights for me what the biggest problem the internet poses. While many get all worked up about porn, piracy and other easy internet targets, I am more worried about the way in which we exploit other people’s misfortune, either for personal pleasure, or for profit. That we partake […]
Keep the investment to a minimum and the innovation to a maximum. We are living inside a technological and social evolution / revolution the scale of which the planet has never seen before. Being inside it, it looks slow, but judged in historical timescales, it’s extraordinarily rapid. The rules are changing so much and so […]
More than once I have heard successful creative people complain that it’s too hard for people to break into the business as there is simply too much competition. It’s an easy assertion to make from the top. Made with good intention I am sure. It’s an even easier assertion to make from the bottom too, […]
The first film that impacted on me significantly was ‘The Ten Commandments’ which I believe was the first film I saw in a cinema. It was, for a five year old by in the seventies, a quasi religious experience that has never left me. Whether god truly exists or not, to me, God was present […]
Guest post by writer and filmmaker Luke Kondor I’m going to get serious with you. The odds are, you’re never going to make it. Not as an artist, a writer, a filmmaker, whatever. You’re going to spend your life ‘trying’ to make it until the day you lose the energy and resign yourself to a […]
As a kid, no director inspired me more than Spielberg. Sure there were others whose work was hugely influential, John Carpenter and Ridley Scott foremost. But Spielberg remained the person I most admired, someone whose films I wanted to model, whose career I wanted to emulate. Perhaps it’s because he started his filmmaking career by […]
Life has really been happening over the last few weeks. I will share in due course, but it’s part of the reason for my absence on the blog. Life accelerates when we commit. In the moment of commitment, instead of being paralysed by indecision, we find ourselves on the rollercoaster… When I am not moving […]
Adrian, a new LSF Team recruit looked at me with concern… ‘When you said we will firewalk I thought you were speaking metaphorically…’ The penny dropped as a LARGE crate of shattered glass spilled onto floor. Before we firewalked, we were going to ‘glasswalk’!!! He looked at me in sheer terror – should he stay […]
‘Creativity is not a talent, it is a way of operating’ John Cleese Following from my post a few days ago on strategies for manifesting creativity, I remembered this excellent seminar from the early nineties with John Cleese on the very same subject. It’s total gold dust from writers and filmmakers and you can listen […]
It’s often forgotten that we storytellers are in fact magicians. In all the hullabaloo of egos, opinions, reviews, funding proposals, endless rewrites, never ending shooting days in the rain, bad food, overdrafts, broken relationships… we have all been there and have that T shirt right? But what keeps us going is that we recognise at […]
So on Tuesday I posted a blog about peer groups, and also emailed it out to my newsgroup. I got about fifteen messages back and the responses were quite polarised. You can read the original blog HERE but in short, the message of the piece was that we are heavily influenced by those around us […]
Environment is EVERYTHING. No-one wants to really confront this, but it’s really simple. We become the five people we hang out with. And these five people may well be the biggest five reasons your career is not going where you thought it would be going when you began your journey. Uncomfortable, I know. Don’t get […]
