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  • Licence to Drive

    I learned to drive.

    This is quite amazing if you account for the fact that I have spent the last twenty years not knowing how to drive at all. Sure, I had some lessons when I was at college, with a man called ‘Fat Stan’, beloved of many learner drivers in Woodley, Berkshire and beyond. But Fat Stan and I did not get along. I would try to make light-hearted jokes which he refused to acknowledge just happened (very uncomfortable) and his instruction technique consisted of getting me to drive him from one fish & chip shop to another so he could feed his face on a constant basis. On one occasion I was tasked with driving Fat Stan to his home, where he disappeared inside for twenty minutes (taking a dump), returning to the car with a piping hot Pot Noodle, which he ate as I was (trying) to learn how to operate a moving vehicle. So that didn’t work out. And after that amount of trauma, I was never compelled to learn for many years – until now.

    I had three lessons and passed first time. Eat it, Fat Stan.

  • Rory Tinysaurus

    Some characters for an idea I’m working on.

  • My Disney Day

    The day before I moved to LA, I got a call out of the blue from Disney Junior asking if I was interested in doing some character design work. Apparently they’d seen my characters on the Lamington Facebook page and thought my style would suit a project they have. Talk about good timing. A meeting was booked and, after a few pushbacks (it’s the Hollywood way), I got to go to Burbank and talk cartoons, which is essentially the best way you can spend your morning. The overwhelming impression I got is that people at Disney are mega nice. It’s brilliant. Do you think people work there because they’re so nice already or do they become nice after working there, through some kind of nice osmosis? WHO KNOWS. Anyway, hopefully I will be doing some designs for a preschool show, which is ace.

    After that, in the evening, we went to see BRAVE at the El Capitan. Man, I was not prepared for the onslaught of WTF I was about to experience. All I knew is that Disney owned the theater and ran it right. The El Capitan is actually a venerable old theater – it’s where they premiered CITIZEN KANE – and it has one of those gorgeous interiors that looks like the Muppet Show should be happening any second. Well, I wasn’t far off – when I saw the guy playing a massive Wurlitzer organ, I knew something was different. He ran through all the Disney classics, even a rendition of The Circle of Life which is always welcome. Then he sank into the ground and about fifteen curtains swiped in from different directions. Only these weren’t ordinary curtains, these were laser-curtains, containing about a million lights each. They proceeded to put on a light show that would make Stanley Kubrick blush, and then they parted for some 3D trailers. Don’t know what 3D system they are running there, but it was snazzy as hell, as was the Dolby Atmos sound which is just ridiculously powerful.

    The trailers ended. So now it’s time to watch BRAVE, right? Wrong. The screen itself lifted, revealing a huge stage with two people who started singing and dancing. Naturally, this was the beginning of a full-scale song and dance spectacular, featuring a cast of dozens, with people dressed up as Mickey, Donald, Goofy, Snow White, Woody, Buzz Lightyear, Daisy, etc. Parents were clapping, kids were screaming at their favorite characters, streamers were falling from the ceiling, general mayhem in the aisles, until the finale bought the house down. The whole thing took like an hour.

    Then we watched BRAVE. It was okay!

  • EXTRASOLAR: The Prequel

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    A little comic that explains the set-up before the events in my script EXTRASOLAR. Think of it as viral content for a movie that doesn’t exist. Like those Alien ones with Mike out of Neighbours.

  • LA So Far

    From rainy old Brooklyn to sunny Los Angeles, life has completely changed in the space of four weeks.

    I won’t lie, some of it was pretty stressful. We had to find a place to live in California, and we only had one week to do it. We looked in Los Feliz and Silver Lake, but stuff was oddly expensive, then we took a chance on a place in Larchmont (never heard of it), right opposite Paramount Pictures. It was nice and luckily we got accepted. Only then did we find out that we were going to live in the house from the Sarah Silverman Program.

    Back in New York, we packed up the contents of our apartment carefully over the course of three days, only to see the movers throw around the boxes with carefree abandon. I could practically hear the crunch of broken glass as they went about their merry way. Unbelievably, nothing we packed got broken (I was imagining opening a box of sand and glass), although the furniture they wrapped was utterly destroyed by the time it arrived. Nice job, guys.

    We spent five days in an empty New York apartment with nothing but a confused cat and an air mattress to call our own. This part wasn’t stressful at all, it was kind of like camping, and as I’m English (we think we’re good in a crisis situation) the Dunkirk spirit kicked in I was ready to sing Run Rabbit Run and exchange my ration coupons for some powdered egg.

    Then, the flight. Pretty much the most stressful thing ever is taking a one year old cat on a plane. Ripley (our cat) is a tough cookie, but my heart broke into a million pieces every time she cried in her carry case, which, incidentally, she’s too fat for. I felt guilty, scared, protective and sad in equal measures. It was unbearable. But we made it! She was running around the new place within half an hour of getting there, and once we got our furniture back, she was happy as a loon.

    In short, as far as I can tell, Los Angeles is mind-numbingly amazing. No superlative can describe the positive effect the weather here has on a person. And the view of the hills in the distance does something to your psyche. You’re no longer closed in like you are in New York; you can relax at last. The two negative things you hear most about LA are that the people are weird and the traffic is bad. That has not been our experience at all, in either case. People have been ridiculously friendly (heck, even the DMV was a pleasant and relaxing experience) and admittedly, while we haven’t been driving much during rush hour, getting around has been super easy. Maybe it’s our location, but nothing is more than 20 minutes away. Heck, I would spend an hour on the subway getting from Brooklyn to Manhattan. This is heaven compared to that.

    Things I’ve daydreamed about for ages like visiting Disneyland, eating Umami Burger and In-N-Out, going to the fancy malls, learning to drive, buying a car, seeing comedy at the The Groundlings, movies at the Arclight, yada, yada, yada, I’ve finally got to do. I’m sure the novelty will wear off, but right now it’s all exciting and new and fun. And not scary. California has welcomed us with open arms and I for one have allowed it to hug me close to its bosom.

  • Return of the Primates

    Bringing these guys back with a new twist. It’s about a pizza parlor run by monkeys, and an epic rivalry to get the attention of a certain special lady. 

  • The Quest

    I entered another contest. This is an interesting one. Scott Myers at Go Into The Story has been teaching screenwriters for years (one look at his blog should be enough to convince anyone of his altruistic tendencies) and with the huge blog presence and an affiliation to the Black list, he’s in a great position to help emerging screenwriters break through. The idea he’s come up to do that is called The Quest. I hope it involves swords and dinosaurs at some point.

    The idea is to take four lucky writers and mentor them for six months, for free. At the end of the year, these four people should each have a completed script, Scott attached as producer, plenty of people willing to read them and a better understanding of the craft. That’s the idea, anyway.

    I like it. Seeing as I arrived in Los Angeles less than two weeks ago (now that’s an overdue post) to do this kind of thing, it comes at a rather nifty time. To enter, you were required to send in your logline(s) and see if Scott picks one he’s excited about. He got something close to 4000. He’s looking for high-concept, very commercial stuff – something that would open on a lot of screens. I spent some time polishing my most extra high-concept loglines to make them short and concise and dutifully sent them off. I guess we’ll see. I’m ready for it.

  • Get your script read by Benderspink

    If you want to get read by BenderSpink and support a good cause at the same time (let’s be honest, getting read is the real reason you’re gonna do this), head over to Done Deal Pro and check this post. $50 donation to the American Heart Association gets you 50 pages read by Daniel Vang.

    I did it and I got an open door to submit new scripts in the future.

  • You can’t have it both ways

    There’s an interview with David Simon on the New York Times website. I have the utmost respect for the guy, but this jumped out at me like a hoodlum in the low-rises:

    The number of people blogging television online — it’s ridiculous. They don’t know what we’re building. And by the way, that’s true for the people who say we’re great. They don’t know. It doesn’t matter whether they love it or they hate it. It doesn’t mean anything until there’s a beginning, middle and an end. If you want television to be a serious storytelling medium, you’re up against a lot of human dynamic that is arrayed against you. Not the least of which are people who arrived to “The Wire” late, planted their feet, and want to explain to everybody why it’s so cool. Glad to hear it. But you weren’t paying attention. You got led there at the end and generally speaking, you’re asserting for the wrong things.

    Am I crazy or is this a huge contradiction? People who critique a show before the end are ridiculous, but people who only watch it after the end aren’t paying attention. I’m so confused. When should I watch a series? From the beginning, middle or end? On cable, blu-ray™ disc, or DVR? When is it OK to talk about it?

    Some guidelines might help. I just want to be in strict compliance here.

  • Script Frenzy

    It’s that time of year again. The blossom hangs from the trees, sunlight dapples across the sidewalk (AKA pavement) and a man’s fancy turns to thoughts of rutting. It’s also Script Frenzy time, when thousands of amateurs bash out a half-baked script in a single month. Sounds bad, right? Not at all.

    Script Frenzy is actually really great for getting stuff done. It solves two problems a lot of writers have – lack of impetus and self-editing. The first one can mean you never start anything and the second can mean you never finish it. Having a deadline of thirty one days gives you something concrete to aim for. Instead of measuring your work in such subjective terms as ‘is this the best I can do?’, you just have to count the pages as the days progress. Write two pages per day for a week, you’ve got fifteen pages. Bingo– you’re a writer. And once you get started with a little routine over the course of the month, you tend to not want to stop.

    What you write may be gibberish, but you know what? I doubt it. If it’s flowing (because of the rapid deadline), you tend to find quick solutions to problems, skip over character names that might hold you up for hours. You get in the zone and it comes to you. You also don’t edit and rehash the same opening page over and over again ad infinitum. This is crucial – you should only edit something (I’m talking about proper, qualitative editing, not typos and vocab) when you’ve finished it. Then you can assess it as a whole.

    Once the pressure to make something perfect is off, you have the freedom to create. It’s a lesson that has helped me in more than just my writing, so I’m a big fan.

  • Licence to Drive

    I learned to drive. This is quite amazing if you account for the fact that I have spent the last twenty years not knowing how to drive at all. Sure, I had some lessons when I was at college, with a man called ‘Fat Stan’, beloved of many learner drivers in Woodley, Berkshire and beyond.…

  • Rory Tinysaurus

    Some characters for an idea I’m working on.

  • My Disney Day

    The day before I moved to LA, I got a call out of the blue from Disney Junior asking if I was interested in doing some character design work. Apparently they’d seen my characters on the Lamington Facebook page and thought my style would suit a project they have. Talk about good timing. A meeting…

  • EXTRASOLAR: The Prequel

    A little comic that explains the set-up before the events in my script EXTRASOLAR. Think of it as viral content for a movie that doesn’t exist. Like those Alien ones with Mike out of Neighbours.

  • LA So Far

    From rainy old Brooklyn to sunny Los Angeles, life has completely changed in the space of four weeks. I won’t lie, some of it was pretty stressful. We had to find a place to live in California, and we only had one week to do it. We looked in Los Feliz and Silver Lake, but…

  • Return of the Primates

    Bringing these guys back with a new twist. It’s about a pizza parlor run by monkeys, and an epic rivalry to get the attention of a certain special lady. 

  • The Quest

    I entered another contest. This is an interesting one. Scott Myers at Go Into The Story has been teaching screenwriters for years (one look at his blog should be enough to convince anyone of his altruistic tendencies) and with the huge blog presence and an affiliation to the Black list, he’s in a great position…

  • Get your script read by Benderspink

    If you want to get read by BenderSpink and support a good cause at the same time (let’s be honest, getting read is the real reason you’re gonna do this), head over to Done Deal Pro and check this post. $50 donation to the American Heart Association gets you 50 pages read by Daniel Vang. I…

  • You can’t have it both ways

    There’s an interview with David Simon on the New York Times website. I have the utmost respect for the guy, but this jumped out at me like a hoodlum in the low-rises: The number of people blogging television online — it’s ridiculous. They don’t know what we’re building. And by the way, that’s true for…

  • Script Frenzy

    It’s that time of year again. The blossom hangs from the trees, sunlight dapples across the sidewalk (AKA pavement) and a man’s fancy turns to thoughts of rutting. It’s also Script Frenzy time, when thousands of amateurs bash out a half-baked script in a single month. Sounds bad, right? Not at all. Script Frenzy is…