Rules of Life

admin / Acting / Catherine Bailey Productions, Rules of Life, Steve Whyley /

Rules of Life… finally!

December 13, 2015

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.

admin / Acting / All in the Method, BBC, Connected TV, Panda, Rules of Life /

Pandas, podcasts, and plenty of problems

June 21, 2013

Hello! First of all I’d just like to say thanks to all those who messaged me about seeing me on the telly in the Connected TV ad last night. Proper telly as well – BBC1 eh? If you haven’t seen me hanging out with the Panda (played by a very funny guy called Steve Marsh), you can watch it here. And by the way, I remember now how hard it was not to laugh when he knocked the table over with his massive arse. We did do it about 30 times though so I suppose it gets less funny after a while. He had to take that head off after every take too cos he was so hot. Poor bastard.

Anyway, some people may have noticed that Episode 4 of All in the Method went up a few weeks ago. Then it came down. Then went up again. I can’t even begin to go into detail about how long it took to decide on the final edit, and then we realised after uploading that the sound mix was wrong. Hence the re-upload. Anyway, Episode 5, the conclusion of the The Action Hero saga will be up hopefully in the next couple of days. No problems with that surely? Oh wait, we couldn’t read the hard drive the editor sent back. A slow wait for Dropbox transfer it is then….

So the third ‘P’ in that oh-so-clever title: Luke and I are doing some podcasts. Well, again, it’s taken us bloody ages, partly because I’ve been editing together interviews from the screening for the first release, and partly finding the time to meet up and actually record…. but hopefully we’ll manage that this weekend! Then once that one’s out the way (the “screening special”) we’ll do some hopefully semi-regular releases with some “special guests”.

Also… I played the lead (darling) in a sitcom pilot which seems like ages ago (it was ages ago – 2011?), which has kind of come to life again recently online with some extremely positive comments about the show and my performance – for which I’d like to say thank you so much to everyone! That is actually very kind. You can check out the full episode here, which may or may not turn into a web series….. we don’t know.

Anyway, if you’re actually reading this, I’ll be back soon with Method 5, podcasts… and other purile….. piss. I don’t know. See ya!