Thursday 16 October 2008

Title stress...

So originally I was thinking I’d just post the first ten pages of the dark room up here by the weekend, but as no one at all has read any of it yet I’m not past the ‘this could be so embarrassingly bad I’ll get banned from writing forever if it gets out', so I’m testing it on a sympathetic guinea pig first. Said guinea pig happens to have a day off next Friday so I'm setting that as my first draft deadline and will aim to post the sample up here the weekend after this one. In theory.

In the meantime, I might have to change my title cos of this:


I can’t really be too angry because I met Mike Hurst in LA last year and he’s a) a really nice guy and b) had already made his Darkroom at that point while I was still thinking about mine. So fine, he can take it. Now I thought I'd checked The Dark Room at imdb before, but obviously not because as well as Mike's film there are four others, one released last year. Bugger.

To be honest I was never that attached to the title anyway (and I’m not just saying that because I might be changing it). I’m fairly rubbish at coming up with titles generally. In this case it was extra hard because I wanted to come up with a title for a franchise. That may sound over-ambitious, but I’ve got enough material on these characters to take it far beyond one film and haven’t ruled out trying to do it as a comic or, depending on the feedback I get, possibly a novel (a very scary thought, but I’m not there yet). Anyway, The Dark Room clearly isn’t a franchise title but it sounded inoffensive and un-cheesy so I ran with it. Essentially The Dark Room is the nightclub which the story is based around. I came up with other, more cheesy club names which would also be the name of the film, like The First Circle (as in the first circle of Hell – pretentious and bad) or The Strangler’s Chord (which sounds like a bad thrash metal band) but I don’t think any of them sound like films. I’ll have to have a think. For now I’m a long way off running into any rights issues so it can stay as it is.

On a random note, I was talking to a friend in the pub the other night who hadn't seen any of Brother Pete's animation so, since I only just figured out how to post YouTube videos in my blog (which is pathetic, I know) I thought I'd post this here. If you like it go to YouTube and watch his others:


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