Rules of Life… finally!
Now this is an interesting one. Sorry, “interesting”. About 5 years ago, I got brought in to try out for the lead in a comedy pilot called Rules of Life. Obviously I’m amazing so I got it (I don’t think they saw that many people for it) and we filmed a 30 minute pilot over a number of weekends. Those weekends were actually spread over about a year as I recall, and we finally wrapped in late 2011. Once it was edited Steve Whyley, the writer, spent considerable efforts in getting people interested. He got Catherine Bailey (Quick Cuts, Life of Riley) on board who helped him re-write the scripts for the whole series, and pitched it to the BBC and Comedy Central. Sadly it didn’t get picked up, but I always remembered particular bits of that pilot being pretty good, and it was close to my heart as one of the first major roles I’d done in something, as well as having met great people during the filming who I still keep in contact with and have worked with since like Jenny Gayner and Pete Halpin (although he posts so many photos of his baby now I might remove him from FB) so I mentioned to Steve that maybe it could be edited into a web series? Long story short… Martin the editor couldn’t seem to find the original footage so I ended up re-editing it myself in Windows Movie Maker using an MP4 version of the pilot I had. It’s the software I use for my show reel so how hard can it be? Pretty fucking hard as it turns out as it’s not really designed for that, but anyway, I managed to pull together 4 episodes from the pilot of around 3 minutes each by quickening up the edit, cutting anything that we could lose for time, re-recording a bit of VO, adding new theme music and credits to fit in with the original animation (that used a song we didn’t have permission for) and there you go. There was stuff I had no control over due to only having the exported edit but I think it’s OK. I’ve still got a 5th episode to finish but Episodes 1 to 4 are available to view right now using the embedded playlist above! I know, I look young. I just said it was filmed 5 years ago didn’t I. Please check it out anyway! I think we’re looking to film more in the new year, and bring Stan back from the dead.