INDUSTRY. ALTERNATIVE FUNDING
“Instead of just writing the script, we could make it ourselves with a small budget. That way, good or bad, we’ll end up with a film”
CUT-PRICE COMEDY James Wren (left) claims to have produced feature film Peacock Season (right) for a grand total of around £50 – by calling in favours from Edinburgh Fringe chums and simply plunging into the process
don’t know each other but proclaim to be lightworkers. So I wrote a left-field comedy based on that and we’re sending it to festivals.” HOBSON’S CHOICE Dan Hobson, writer and co-founder of Lovebomb Pictures, knows the commissioning process all too well. “We’ve had a few sitcom script commissions,” he says. “One was set in a school. The BBC commissioner was keen on it but said there was something else in development – ‘if that falls through, we’ll go ahead with this one’, they said. The other one was Jack Whitehall’s Bad Education , which was never going to fail. Timing can screw you over.” Lovebomb is made up of Hobson, writing partner Jon Bridle and stuntman Will Haynes. The writers have had some success writing for TV, such as for That Mitchell and Webb Look . However, Hobson says ‘a lot of it is about jumping through hoops’ and trying to please producers who don’t know what they want. “Will came to us with this nice film idea about stuntmen who hijack a studio in order to make their own film for a change,” says Hobson. “Instead of being run over, beaten up with big bats or set on fire, the stuntmen wanted to be the stars.” Hobson warned him how soul- destroying the development process for this kind of feature could be, so he suggested a different strategy. “I said instead of paying us to write the script, we could make our own film, working within the boundaries of the budget we
came up with an idea and we decided, instead of pitching, let’s go and make it.” The production, The Lightworker , is a self-contained 17-minute short film about earth angels, or awakened beings who bear the highest interests of people. “It’s a comedy about a person who’s a self-proclaimed ‘lightworker’, which is stuff I picked up from the internet and social media,” he says. “These people work light, whatever that means. One steps up and says they’re a lightworker and then gets utterly overwhelmed by madcap clients. I know two people on social media who
34. DEFINITIONMAGAZINE.COM
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